Gladstone Gallery has secured a coup: the United States representation of Peter Saul, the 91-year-old painter whose garish satirical canvases have made him one of America’s longest-running provocateurs. At the same time, the gallery has appointed Anna Christina Furney, formerly a partner at Venus Over Manhattan, as director.
Saul’s career spans more than seven decades, defined by a refusal to conform to artistic fashion. Trained at the California School of Fine Arts and Washington University in St. Louis, he fused comic absurdity with painterly rigor, producing works that gleefully desecrate pop culture, art history, and political life. His paintings—violent, grotesque, and funny—have placed him outside easy categories, though institutions have caught up in recent years. The New Museum mounted a retrospective in 2020, and his work has been shown at major museums across Europe and the US, including the Pompidou, MoMA, the Met, and the Whitney. Saul remains both cult hero and institutional darling: a rare position for a nonagenarian still actively working.
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Furney arrives at Gladstone with long-standing ties to Saul, having represented him for 14 years at Venus Over Manhattan, where she served as a director before becoming a full partner. She developed a reputation for ambitious programming there, staging landmark surveys for artists such as Robert Colescott, Jim Nutt, Joseph Elmer Yoakum, and Yuichiro Ukai. Before Venus, she worked with Simon and Michaela de Pury at Phillips auction house.
Her move comes at a moment of flux. Earlier this summer, Adam Lindemann, the collector-turned-dealer who founded Venus in 2012, announced he would shutter the gallery and retreat to the collector’s side. The announcement came after Tim Blum’s snap decision to close his gallery and pursue a yet-to-be-seen nontraditional model. Shortly after, Clearing Gallery’s Olivier Babin announced that he too was bowing out of the game.
Venus was born as a provocation: a dealer’s platform that was at once mocked for its founder’s conflicted role and praised for the quality of its shows. The gallery helped resuscitate interest in artists such as H.C. Westermann and Jack Goldstein, while also staging high-profile projects with Calder, Cattelan, and Saul himself.
For Gladstone, which operates in New York, Brussels, and Seoul, the double hire—an artist with institutional gravitas and a director with proven curatorial and market chops—strengthens both its roster and its leadership. It also illustrates a familiar dynamic in today’s market: galleries closing, talent dispersing, and bigger players consolidating power. In this instance, the result is the elevation of Saul and Furney under the Gladstone umbrella.