Sperone Westwater, a New York gallery that helped launch Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Francesco Clemente, and countless others to international fame, will shutter after 50 years in business. Its final show will be its current one for Long, a British sculptor who has had more than a dozen shows with the gallery since its founding.
“After 50 successful years, Sperone Westwater Gallery will be closing on December 31, as co-founders Angela Westwater and Gian Enzo Sperone have decided to pursue separate endeavors,” the gallery said in a statement. “They appreciate everyone who contributed to the Gallery’s success and accomplishments.”
The gallery will still participate in Art Basel Miami Beach next month. Artnet News’s Katya Kazakina first reported rumors of the gallery’s impending closure on Friday before confirming the news on Monday.
Sperone Westwater was founded in 1975 in SoHo as Sperone Westwater Fischer. (Konrad Fischer, the gallery’s third namesake dealer, split off in 1982 and died in 1996. The Düsseldorf-based gallery that he founded is still in operation.) The gallery’s first show was for Carl Andre, with ones staged for Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, Brice Marden, and other key artists of the era in the year that followed.
During the ’80s, Sperone Westwater became a destination for a kind of painting that was termed Neo-Expressionism for the way it revived gestural brushwork. Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Sandro Chia, and Enzo Cucchi—three painters who were considered protagonists of Italian subset of the movement known as transavanguardia—showed here alongside the American painter Susan Rothenberg.
A range of less easily classified artists also showed with the gallery, including Wim Delvoye, Not Vital, Guillermo Kuitca, Mario Merz, Alexis Rockman, Wolfgang Laib, and more.
The gallery’s offerings tended to be closely watched, if not sometimes polarizing. David Lynch, who is best known as a filmmaker, first showed his paintings with Sperone Westwater in shows that did not receive positive reviews. His estate is now represented by Pace, one of the biggest galleries in the world.
Where the gallery’s roster tended toward white males from Europe for many years, Sperone Westwater recently diversified its offerings. Ivorian painter Joana Choumali and the Puerto Rican artist Gamaliel Rodriguez are among those to have shown with the gallery in the past two years.
Since 2010, Sperone Westwater has been located on the Bowery, in close proximity to the New Museum. It wasn’t immediately clear what would happen to its eight-story building, which was designed by Norman Foster and occupies some 20,000 square feet of space.
The gallery is the most high-profile ones to close in New York in the past year. Other shuttered blue-chip spaces with a New York presence include Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, Clearing, and Tilton.
