Gagosian Gives Up London and Basel Spaces as Mega-Galleries Rethink Their Footprints

Gagosian has closed its small space in London’s Burlington Arcade and will soon close up its space in Basel, Switzerland, the Art Newspaper reports.

Both spaces started as pop-ups, and as long as the rents were good, it made sense for founder Larry Gagosian to keep up those spaces, a source familiar with the gallery’s thinking told ARTnews. “Larry’s thinking is, ‘If there’s opportunity there, great. If not, that’s okay too,’” the source said.

Among the gallery’s London spaces, the Burlington Arcade location, which opened in 2023, was the smallest, with the downstairs featuring a store that sold books, editions, and other Gagosian merchandise. Upstairs was a tiny exhibition space that was closer to a private viewing room. Still, Gagosian managed to put on 16 shows there before closing up shop. But Gagosian isn’t abandoning London by any stretch. The gallery will continue to maintain its two Mayfair galleries, at Grosvenor Hill and Davies Street.

Basel followed much the same pattern as the Burlington Arcade space. Gagosian first took the space at Rheinsprung 1 as a pop-up around Art Basel in 2019. It wound up staying open for seven years and putting on 17 exhibitions. The gallery has said it is looking at other possibilities in the city, so another outpost in the city hasn’t been entirely rule out. 

The closure of these two spaces also doesn’t mean Gagosian is contracting. In New York, even as other mega-galleries trim their footprints, Gagosian recently opening a new flagship in New York. The new two-floor, 12,000-square-foot space combines the gallery’s operations from a former temporary space at 976 Madison and its two-level spaces upstairs in 980 Madison that it vacated earlier this year back to street level. Gagosian had maintained offices and galleries upstairs for decades before Bloomberg Philanthropies bought most of the building, forcing much of the operation elsewhere. 

Gagosian seems perfectly willing to admit when a location simply isn’t worth keeping, too. From 2016 to 2020, he had a space in San Francisco, but, as he told Elle Decor earlier this year, “It just failed. I mean, nobody showed up. It was so depressing.” He remembered flying in for openings only to find an empty gallery and wondering, in somewhat more boisterously colorful language, what he was doing there. 

The closures of two of Gagosian’s European locations come during a broader rethink of mega-gallery real estate. David Zwirner recently closed its townhouse gallery at 34 East 69th Street after nearly a decade on New York’s Upper East Side. The gallery said the move had long been planned and followed the completion of its expanded Chelsea campus, where Zwirner has increasingly concentrated its New York operations. It still has galleries on West 19th and 20th streets and at 52 Walker in Tribeca. 

Pace is making a more conspicuous cut. After layoffs and a substantial reduction to its artist roster, the gallery put its 8,600-square-foot Hanover Square location in London back on the market and is looking for something smaller.