With the art market having contracted significantly over the past year, it feels more likely to hear about a gallery closure than an expansion. But when Michael Werner gallery opens its first exhibition with Sanya Kantarovsky later this week, it will be in not one Upper East Side venue but two.
The new space came about through a bit of a fluke. Werner has occupied a jewel box on the second floor of 4 East 77th Street since 2000. (It’s a jewel box with a history, as the original New York gallery of legendary dealer Leo Castelli, who opened it in 1957 in what was then Castelli’s living room.) When the building was recently put up for sale, Werner gallery partner Gordon VeneKlasen, who runs the operation, worried that a new owner might not want them and started to look for a new space.
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He briefly considered Tribeca, but the Germany-based Michael Werner—who is in his mid-80s and is still active in the gallery—was insistent on maintaining a presence on the Upper East Side. And VeneKlasen had his own concerns about a big space downtown.
“At this moment, the grandeur of everything is so disproportionate to the reality of the situation, and this is a very unusual moment in so many different ways,” he said, referring not just to the art world and market, but also the wider cultural and political environment. Just as important, big quarters in Tribeca just didn’t fit the gallery’s identity, he explained. (The gallery also operates spaces in London, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Athens, Greece.) “Our identity is very much part of why the artists come to us,” he said, “and the spaces are part of that identity.”
When Werner originally opened on the Upper East side, in 1990, the neighborhood was dominated by Old Masters dealers, so it was not the obvious choice for a contemporary dealer—many of the galleries’ colleagues were in SoHo. As those galleries decamped to Chelsea, and then to Tribeca, Werner has stayed put.
Luckily, Veneklasen found a space available right around the corner, at 1018 Madison Avenue, which also houses galleries Gray and Alexander Berggruen, and pounced on it. When the new owners of 4 East 77th allayed his original concerns by saying they’d love for the gallery to stay, he realized that having two spaces a three-minute walk from one another wasn’t a bad idea, and Kantarovsky jumped at the chance to inaugurate it (and his representation by the gallery) with a two-part exhibition.
For the build-out, the gallery reunited with Annabelle Selldorf, who recently oversaw the Frick Collection’s renovation and expansion. Now the pick of galleries all over the world, Selldorf did her first gallery project with Werner in 1989, when she’d just left Richard Gluckman’s firm to go out on her own.
The Kantarovsky show, entitled “Scarecrow” and encompassing paintings, drawings, ceramics, and a brand-new group of monotypes, opens on May 7.