Gagosian Relocates to Ground Floor at Historic 980 Madison Avenue
Designed by frequent collaborator Jonathan Caplan the new space problem-solves organically to draw art lovers in from the storefront level
The brand-new street-level Gagosian gallery space opened on Saturday, April 25, downstairs from their old headquarters at 980 Madison Avenue, a storied location in the evolution of contemporary art. The airy, Portland Taupe stone-floored space engages the public directly from the entry, rather than breaking up the journey with an elevator ride. It features 12,000 feet of reconfigurable space, as well as a restaurant, Kappo Masa, on the lower level directly beneath the storefront at 976 Madison Avenue. “The shift to the ground floor changes the entire condition of the gallery,” architect Jonathan Caplan of Caplan Colaku Architects (CCA) told Galerie. “The upstairs spaces were more removed—there was a sense of ascent and separation. Here, the encounter is immediate. The immediate proximity of the street—and of the city more broadly—is a powerful context for an art gallery. That adjacency allows the gallery to partake in the rush, bustle, and velocity of urban life.”
The overall sense of the new space is one of a calibration so expertly and minutely executed as to make something intensely difficult feel effortless. Caplan, addressing what he termed a question of scale, says, “We set very exact dimensions and held them very tightly. The differences can be marginal—an inch or two—but they accumulate, and they’re felt.” Every attention has been paid to getting the perfect shade and texture.
The lighting feels surprisingly gentle—bright enough to illuminate the work, but not harsh. This, too, is a matter of balance that conceals its own calculating nature in the illuminated shadows of expertise. “Although light is not a material in itself, I tend to think of it as one—and to treat it that way through calibration,” said Caplan. “It’s not the material, it’s the calibration. Light is approached as a system, not an effect. The aim is to create a field that allows the work to register clearly, while maintaining a certain softness at the level of the body. That balance comes from layering sources and controlling temperature and intensity very precisely, so the light supports the work without becoming an object of attention itself.” Indeed, the lighting does exactly that.
Marcel Duchamp is the subject of one of the two inaugural exhibits in the new space, which dovetails nicely with his current MoMA retrospective. It’s neat to view the valise from 1948 without a glass case around it. Seeing the cracked leather out in the open—and the subversive feeling that you could touch it—is rare.
The Duchamp exhibit focuses heavily on 1960s-era readymades that the artist produced in collaboration with Italian collector and art dealer Arturo Schwarz. In a moment of art world kismet, the Gagosian’s new galleries just happen to be where the items made their debut back 1965, when the legendary space was occupied by Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery.
Continue, and there’s a small but well-chosen batch of important early Rauschenbergs from the Cy Twombly Foundation in a side room that has the feeling, in the current arrangement, of a quietly enclosed ambulatory chapel adjacent to the church of the larger main space. The six works include a rare assemblage sculpture from 1950, a large blue-and-white photogram from the same year, and 1952’s radical Black Painting in oil and newspaper on canvas.
Caplan answered a few more questions for Galerie:
Once artwork enters a client’s home, its purpose is at least partially to add luster to the space that the client designates it for, but the purpose of a gallery is to add luster to the art. How do you balance those considerations when creating gallery space?
A gallery operates almost inversely to a home. In a domestic setting, architecture and art are in dialogue; in a gallery, architecture has to withdraw so the work can fully occupy the space. That doesn’t mean neutrality in a generic sense—it means being highly controlled. Proportions, materials, and alignments are all tuned so the space has a presence, but one that sits just below the threshold of attention. Ideally, the architecture disappears as image, but remains as structure.
This is the latest of your Gagosian collaborations. What have you learned working with them?
What I’ve learned over time is the value of precision and restraint. There’s a shared understanding that the work comes first, and that the architecture should not compete with it. In this case, my role was to give form to Larry’s vision of the gallery as both space and community. At the same time, there’s a high level of attention to how the space actually functions—how the art is installed and how it is experienced over time, as duration rather than display, closer to Duchamp’s idea of art as encounter, not just image.
I noted that the space can be reconfigured for different exhibits. How do you plan a space that changes form?
Flexibility isn’t about making a neutral container, but about establishing a clear underlying order that can accommodate change. The space is organized around a set of fixed relationships—proportions, alignments, circulation—that remain constant. Because that framework is stable, the space can be reconfigured—modified and divided—without losing its identity.”