Larry Gagosian opened his first gallery in Los Angeles in 1980, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Five years later, he expanded his activities to New York, inaugurating his first Chelsea gallery with an exhibition of works from the Pop art collection of Emily and Burton Tremaine. From 1989–1996 he owned a gallery at 65 Thompson Street in Soho with the renowned dealer Leo Castelli, where they showed Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, and other leading artists of the post-war generation.
In thirty years Gagosian has evolved into a global network with seventeen exhibition spaces in New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Rome, Athens, Geneva, and Hong Kong, designed by world-renowned architects including Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Selldorf Architects, and wHY Architecture.
Gagosian’s vibrant contemporary program features the work of leading international artists including Georg Baselitz, Ellen Gallagher, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Taryn Simon, Rachel Whiteread, and many others. Additionally, unparalleled historical exhibitions are prepared and presented on the work of legendary artists such as Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Lucio Fontana, Helen Frankenthaler, Alberto Giacometti, Roy Lichtenstein, Piero Manzoni, Claude Monet, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others. A series of groundbreaking Picasso surveys curated by John Richardson has been attended by hundreds of thousands of visitors in New York and London.
The gallery publishes scholarly exhibition catalogues and artist monographs, as well as catalogues raisonnés. Since 2012, an innovative and engaging magazine on the gallery’s art and artists has been published four times per year.