Larry Gagosian

Larry Gagosian graduated from UCLA in 1969 with a degree in English Literature. In 1980 he opened a gallery in Los Angeles for 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 sixteen exhibition spaces in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, designed by world-renowned architects including Caruso St John, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Jean Nouvel, Selldorf Architects, and wHY Architecture. Its 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.

Larry Gagosian is a benefactor of museums and arts organizations worldwide, and has provided instrumental support to many institutional exhibitions and artist projects, including the magnificent Ceiling by Cy Twombly in the Salle des Bronzes at the Musée du Louvre, a permanent commission that was unveiled to the public in 2010.

In 2006, he received the Peabody Award as a producer of American Masters: Andy Warhol, A Documentary Film. In recognition of his longstanding commitment to the arts, in 2010 he was awarded the Rome Prize for Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome. The French government presented him with the insignia of Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, also in 2010, and appointed him to the Ordre national du Mérite in October 2015. Gagosian is a member of the Board of Directors of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.