Her gallery, Gladstone Gallery, currently has locations in New York, Brussels, Seoul, and Rome. It has amassed a roster studded with celebrated artists, among them Matthew Barney, Alex Katz, Joan Jonas, Wangechi Mutu, Keith Haring, Robert Rauschenberg, Carrie Mae Weems, Arthur Jafa, and many more.

She opened her gallery in New York in 1980, and rose to become one of the city’s most notable dealers.

Steady, carefully thought-out growth characterized the gallery, but even in a market climate where bigger is thought to be better, Gladstone kept her business modest. In 2020, for example, dealer Gavin Brown merged his space with Gladstone’s, a move that many observers saw as a gigantic step forward for two gallerists who are so closely watched. But Gladstone generally did not make much of it.

“The goal of our gallery does not involve having a global presence, which seems to me a core idea of a mega-gallery,” she told ARTnews around that time. “We do not need an outpost in every city, like a retail shop. Rather, my gallery remains attuned to the granular movements and energies that best serve artists and the spirit of their intentions in a localized and nuanced way. I still think of it as a small operation built solely on relationships and the hard work of getting better at what we do.”

In 1980, when Gladstone opened her gallery, she was twice divorced and a mother of three sons. She was an art history professor at Hofstra University at the time, and she had been collecting prints because they were obtainable for lower prices than artworks in other mediums. Subscribing to a newsletter dedicated to prints spurred her to getting into the business of selling the ones in her holdings.

“I bought a print, I listed it, someone bought it, I rolled it up, I put it in a tube, I sent it, I bought another. Very boring,” she told journalist Charlotte Burns. “And at a certain moment, I thought, ‘There have to be other artists, there just have to be.’”

She began seeking out artists who were showing at alternative spaces but lacked commercial representation. Then she would cultivate relationships with those artists and sell their works on paper through her gallery.

When she started her gallery, Gladstone was paying $700 for a space on 57th Street that she described as being “the size of a shoebox.” Her ambitions quickly exceeded her means, and she later moved to a bigger space in SoHo, where she began to show cutting-edge art by artists who were not so established.

One was Matthew Barney, who, in 1991, did an exhibition that featured one performance in which the artist donned a harness, inserted an ice screw in his anus, and ascended the gallery’s walls. He was just 23 years old at the time. Today, that show, which also featured sculptures formed from petroleum, is considered iconic.

“It takes some wisdom to steer a path through what everyone else wants you to do and what serves you best,” Gladstone told critic Linda Yablonsky in 2011. “Each situation is different. There’s no formula. I trust my instincts.”

Further signs of Gladstone’s business savvy arrived in 1996, when, with the galleries Matthew Marks and Metro Pictures, her enterprise bought a 29,000-square-foot space in Chelsea. The neighborhood was not yet a budding art district, though it would in the coming decades become one. “Because I’ve started showing big sculptures, I needed a different kind of space, one with concrete floors and big garage doors,” she told the New York Times.

Then, in 2002, she doubled down on Chelsea, bringing on the dealer Curt Marcus to help man her operations there. She had officially moved her gallery out of SoHo less than a year beforehand. The Times reported that Marcus’s hiring was the result of six months of negotiations—yet another example of the slow, deliberate quality that imbued Gladstone’s dealings.

Her legacy is abundantly evident in the art world. Many artists who passed through her gallery have gone on to ascend to the art world’s highest ranks: Jenny Holzer, the subject of a current Guggenheim Museum survey, had some of her earliest shows with Gladstone, and Richard Prince was represented by the dealer before he joined the mega-gallery Gagosian.

There have recently been signs of discord among staff at Gladstone Gallery. A former gallery manager sued the enterprise and Gladstone in 2022, claiming that workers there experienced verbal abuse and racial discrimination. A gallery spokesperson said at the time that those claims “lack merit.” (As of June 12, the lawsuit was still pending in the New York court system.)

In the past few years, Gladstone said she had taken a step back from certain tasks at the gallery. She described a healthy relationship between some of the high-ranking figures at her gallery. Max Falkenstein, who joined the gallery in 2002, currently serves as senior partner; Gavin Brown serves as partner alongside Caroline Luce and Paula Tsai.

“Barbara valued her relationships with artists above all else and remained their advocate up until the end,” Falkenstein, Brown, Luce, and Tsai said in a statement. “She championed artists who are breaking new ground with their work and stood with them as they developed their practices, noting that ‘you have to sense in someone’s work the possibility of longevity.'”

Gladstone is survived by her two sons, David and Richard Regen. Her third son, Stuart Regen, who cofounded the Los Angeles gallery Regen Projects, died at age 39 in 1998 of cancer.

Asked about the future earlier this year, she told journalist Charlotte Burns, “I think it will be fine because I think that these people are all working together now very well. I don’t go to art fairs anymore. They do perfectly beautifully without me. Everybody has developed their own relationships with artists, their own relationships with collectors. These things are bigger than one person. Way bigger.”

In the complaint, Laura Higgins, who served as a gallery manager for Gladstone in New York from 2016 to 2021, claims she suffered both verbal and physical abuse while working at the gallery and was eventually forced to leave her job.

Higgins claims she was “yelled at [and] disparaged,” and that Gladstone once allegedly threw a handbook at her. In a statement first published by Artnet News, a representative for Gladstone said, “The evidence will show that Ms. Higgins’ claims lack merit, which we intend to defend against forcefully.” When reached by ARTnews, the gallery declined to provide further comment.

After Higgins left her position last July, the filing also claims that Gladstone retaliated against her by providing “a false review of her performance” to a prospective new employer, artist George Condo, whose work Gladstone had shown in the 1980s. After Higgins signed an employment contract and participated in staff on-boarding with Condo’s studio, her employment offer was rescinded. Condo told Artnet that his studio “ultimately decided upon another applicant.”

The complaint contends that “Gladstone acted with malice” and created “an environment that was toxic, hostile, and discriminatory,” adding that the situation caused Higgins “severe emotional distress” and “loss of past and future income.”

Gladstone Gallery—which has a trio of spaces in New York, one in Brussels, and an office in Los Angeles—has secured a location in the tony Gangnam district. An opening date has not yet been set.

“We are very happy to share the news that Gladstone will officially begin to expand its physical footprint to Asia,” the gallery’s founder, Barbara Gladstone, said in a statement. “We have a long history of artists showing at some of Korea’s most prestigious institutions, including a significant exhibition for Matthew Barney at the Leeum in 2005, and many more.”

The venture will be helmed by HeeJin Park, an alum of Seoul’s heavyweight Kukje Gallery who has worked for Gladstone out of South Korea for more than a year. “This is an exciting moment for the gallery and the greater Seoul art world,” Park said. “The Gangnam area of the city is a vibrant location with its own burgeoning art scene, so we are happy to embed ourselves into the fabric of this neighborhood at this significant moment of growth.”

The news comes as top-tier dealers from abroad have been racing to open and expand in the capital city. Next month, Thaddaeus Ropac is due to open in Hannam-dong, the same neighborhood where Pace just inaugurated a two-floor exhibition venue. König Galerie alighted earlier this year in an MCM store in Gangnam, which is also home to luxe art spaces operated by Louis Vuitton and Hermès. Other foreign outfits with Seoul locations include Perrotin, Lehmann Maupin, and Various Small Fires.

And then there is Frieze, the London art fair giant, which has said it will collaborate with the Galleries Association of Korea to start its first Asian fair next September at the COEX convention center, which is also in Gangnam.

Gladstone Gallery, which marked its 40th anniversary last year, has been in an expansionist mode of late. It christened its L.A office this summer, and took on the influential dealer Gavin Brown as a partner last year, bringing aboard a dozen of his artists. Its roster includes Ian Cheng, Carroll Dunham, Cyprien Gaillard, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Anicka Yi.

By the time Gladstone gave that 2011 interview, a new model had started to emerge among a handful of international art dealers—the mega-gallery. Pace, Gagosian, David Zwirner, and Hauser & Wirth had branches around the world with staff numbering more than a hundred. Gladstone had made gestures toward expansion: She opened a second space in the Chelsea art district in New York, where she was based, and an elegant town house gallery in Brussels. She added an equally elegant town house gallery on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. More important, she cultivated three partners in her business, chief among them Max Falkenstein, a dealer 40 years her junior who joined her in 2002 and now holds the position of senior partner.

This past July, Gladstone expanded her business in a manner that may become more common as the art world adjusts to the post-coronavirus reality: she acquired a fourth partner in art dealer Gavin Brown, along with 11 artists and one estate from the roster of his own company, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a 25-year-old gallery he had decided to close as a result of financial difficulties aggravated by the pandemic. In taking on Brown and the talent that he, in his own way, had nurtured, Gladstone, now in her mid-80s, is annexing an artistic vision, and ensuring that Falkenstein, by all accounts her successor, has a creative counterpart. In so doing, she may just prove that you don’t have to be a mega-gallery to thrive alongside them.

Arthur Jafa’s video work Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death became a worldwide phenomenon after Gavin Brown showed it in Harlem in 2016.

The pandemic and its economic fallout has further shaken an art world that was already experiencing seismic shifts. A survey conducted in April by the Art Newspaper predicted that galleries worldwide could face a 70 percent income loss due to the pandemic and that, on average, businesses of the sort had a financial buffer of just over two months. Mid-tier galleries like Brown’s had become dependent on a yearly spate of international art fairs even as the cost of participating threatened to drain them. Every art fair had become a gamble, engendering tens of thousands of dollars in booth rental and shipping fees in the hope that sales would cover that, and then some. Meanwhile, the mega-galleries had whole departments devoted to fairs, plenty of staff to send there, and ever-expanding artist rosters—talent they were poaching from the mid-tiers—producing works to sell there.

Brown was in a more vulnerable position than most when the pandemic hit. He had overextended himself on an enormous building in Harlem that failed to deliver the crowds he had drawn at the series of locations he’d occupied downtown since he first opened in 1994. He’d built his reputation as an impresario, a former artist who had chosen the gallery as his palette, known less for his business acumen than for his ability to produce spectacles and put on events that drew the best and brightest of New York’s avant-garde. Unlike Gladstone or the megas, he’d never made any of his directors partners, and one after another they had departed along with their institutional knowledge, as did many of his artists, headed for the bigger competition. He was living fair to fair—and then the fairs, potential super-spreader events heavily dependent on global travel, disappeared.

Urs Fischer turned Gavin Brown’s gallery into a huge crater for his artwork You in 2007.

It didn’t help that, over the years, Brown had been losing to larger galleries artists whose work had grown valuable on the market. He lost to Gagosian sculptor Urs Fischer, whom he’d once allowed to reduce his gallery to a 38-by-30-foot crater 8 feet deep for the artwork You, in 2007. And more important in financial terms, he lost painters who make the kind of work that sells more easily, and that makes it possible to do the more out-there, less saleable projects: Chris Ofili went to David Zwirner, Peter Doig to Michael Werner. After a short-lived relationship with Brown, Joe Bradley joined Gagosian, in fall of 2015, the same year his auction record hit $3.1 million. The young talent Avery Singer joined Brown not long before her work appeared in the 2019 Venice Biennale—not long after it opened, she left for Hauser & Wirth.

This past April, as Brown’s situation worsened, an offer came out of the blue. He’d reached out to Marc Glimcher, CEO of mega-gallery Pace, to “congratulate” him on his recovery from Covid-19. He and Glimcher got to talking, and Glimcher made an offer to bring him onboard. Back-of-the-envelope plans for the transition were sketched, but ultimately Brown decided against it. “He’s building a machine,” Brown recalled in September, speaking of Pace’s significant expansion plans over a glass of Montepulciano at the New York art world hot spot Bar Pitti. “You can’t have a spare part in that machine that’s shaking around each time you start the engine.”

To hear him tell it, Brown had been trying to close his gallery for as long as it had been open. “I’ve been trying to close since day one,” he said. “It took me 26 years to do it.” In 2007 he made what he calls his “ill-fated attempt” to open a gallery in Los Angeles with L&M, the since-split New York gallery then run by collector and former banker Robert Mnuchin and former auction house specialist Dominique Lévy. It didn’t work out, he said, because the cultures of the two galleries were “so far apart.” Brown was hoping to “sit at [Mnuchin’s] feet and learn.” But mostly, he wanted to be able to be freer from the transactional aspects of the art market—to get what he called “some autonomy from the dollar.”

One of the people with whom he’d been speaking about this over the years was Barbara Gladstone. They’d done business together: In 2005, auction prices for one of Brown’s longtime artists, painter Elizabeth Peyton, had reached a threshold, close to a million dollars, calling for someone to step in and manage Peyton’s secondary market. Brown called on Gladstone. “I knew I needed to do it,” he said. “And I knew she’d be better at it than I would.” Brown is described by those closest to him as someone who has problems trusting people. But he trusted Gladstone and Falkenstein. Even Peyton’s leaving for Gladstone a few years later didn’t dent his relationship with them.

This past April, Brown began visiting Gladstone at her home on Long Island’s North Fork, discussing details of what joining her might look like. The month of June put the final nail in his gallery’s coffin: a virtual version of Art Basel that brought in less than 5 percent of his usual take at the live fair in Switzerland. By July, plans were in place for Brown to become a partner at Gladstone, bringing with him his satellite gallery location in Rome and 12 artists from his roster of 25: Ed Atkins, Thomas Bayrle, Kerstin Brätsch, Alex Katz, Arthur Jafa, Joan Jonas, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Mark Leckey, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Rachel Rose, and Frances Stark, plus the estate of Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis.

Harlem would not be part of the equation.

Veteran gallerist Barbara Gladstone, left, and enterprising gallerist Gavin Brown have joined forces.

Gallery mergers are rare. Acquisitions are only slightly less rare. In 2015, Berlin dealer Jörg Johnen announced that he was closing his 35-year-old gallery and that his inventory and a number of his artists, including Anri Sala, Rodney Graham, and Tino Sehgal, were going to the gallery of his Berlin peer Esther Schipper. He didn’t go with them. He wanted out of the business. Schipper started by taking a controlling stake in Johnen’s gallery, then took over both galleries’ business sides, and the Johnen location eventually closed.

The difference between Johnen/Schipper and Brown/Gladstone is that Brown himself is at the center of the deal, entering Gladstone’s employ. Gladstone said there are artists in Brown’s stable—now in hers—that she had admired for a long time. “I think we are both very interested in the 21st century,” she said, “and in artists who work with the technology of this century.” As Brown recalled of his conversations with Gladstone, “as I said to them and as they said to me, I can’t imagine doing this with anyone else.”

The most valuable artist coming with the Brown package is Alex Katz, the 93-year-old painter whose work recently hit an auction high of $3 million, and who was the rare artist to leave a mega-gallery—Pace, in 2011—and reject the advances of another (Gagosian) in favor of Brown.

Gladstone herself is one of several closely watched dealers in their 80s or 90s whose succession plans stand to affect the fate of some of the world’s most valuable and influential artists. Speculation runs deep in the art world as to how various succession plans might play out in time—and, now, how Brown might figure in Gladstone’s. Gladstone declined to go into financial details, but sources close to the gallery point to Falkenstein, the senior partner, as her successor, and someone with a significant stake in the gallery.

By her own account, Gladstone isn’t competing with the mega-galleries, and doesn’t intend for her gallery to become one itself. “The goal of our gallery does not involve having a global presence, which seems to me a core idea of a mega-gallery,” she said. “We do not need an outpost in every city, like a retail shop. Rather, my gallery remains attuned to the granular movements and energies that best serve artists and the spirit of their intentions in a localized and nuanced way. I still think of it as a small operation built solely on relationships and the hard work of getting better at what we do.”

While Brown has worked in the margins, Gladstone has always been at the center of the New York art world, first in SoHo and then in Chelsea. And if part of Brown’s troubles in Harlem owed to pouring money into renovating a building he was merely renting, Gladstone ensured her longevity by buying—teaming up back in 1996 with two other powerful galleries, Metro Pictures and Matthew Marks—to acquire and divvy up a 29,000-square-foot warehouse on West 24th Street.

Gladstone has a reputation for being nothing if not deliberate. When she brought former SoHo gallerist Curt Marcus on as partner in 2002 (the relationship fizzled after a couple years), the deal was reportedly the result of six months of negotiations. And her comment to the New York Times when the news was announced seems telling in light of her latest move: “Fresh blood is a good thing. It’s a way of being more effective and efficient.”

Carroll Dunham, whose painting Big Men Up Close/one, 2019–20, is shown here, has been represented by Gladstone for almost 20 years.

According to people who have worked with her, Brown is one of the few art dealers whom Gladstone has ever openly praised, saying things like “he’s the real deal.” To me, she wrote over email that Brown is “truly original and has an incredible eye. He has started the careers of more artists who have proven to fulfill their early promise than anyone else I can think of. I have long admired Gavin for his unwavering vision, and I look forward to seeing firsthand just how he looks at art.”

Brown and Gladstone are very different. While Brown kept his gallery’s fire going with kindling, Gladstone has maintained hers with big, sturdy logs, burning slow and strong. The artists who form the core of her program—Matthew Barney, Anish Kapoor, Carroll Dunham, Shirin Neshat—have been with her for at least 20 years. And even the now independent Richard Prince, who left her after two decades to go to Gagosian in 2008, is once again presenting shows with Gladstone, among other galleries.

As an unnamed art critic told Michael Shnayerson for his 2019 book, Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, Gladstone “doesn’t get that bounce that Larry [Gagosian] does, but she has picked important artists who have stuck with her. That’s a gold mine.”

“She doesn’t try to overexpose her artists to the point where you are just churning things out,” said Jill Kraus, a longtime collector who is on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. “She’s very discriminating in what she shows. She’s very good at getting her artists not to go for the market.”

Michael Ovitz, a leading collector and another MoMA trustee, is also a fan. “If there was a Barbara Gladstone fan club, I would want to be the president,” he said. “She knows her art and has amazing taste. She tells it exactly as she sees it. You are never not in the driver’s seat with her—about the art, about the deal. She’s very direct. She gives you her total attention.”

Brown, for his part, has a different reputation. “He’s a little less direct and a lot less tactful,” Ovitz said—while also adding, “if I were an artist, he’d be on my short list of who I’d want to represent me. Barbara could use Gavin’s network, his loyalty factor. If you put them together, they are right up there at the top.”

Brown himself acknowledges some of his shortcomings, at least in the managerial department. Asked how he would characterize himself as a manager, he said, “I wouldn’t.”

View of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise when it was located at 620 Greenwich Street.

If Brown’s forte is his ability to act as a kind of creative coconspirator with artists, Max Falkenstein’s is in working with them productively, and being a rainmaker when it comes to placing their work in collections. Falkenstein came to New York to work for Gladstone in 2002, after a stint learning dealmaking at the London gallery of Gérard Faggionato, a former auction house specialist whose strength is the secondary market. (Faggionato has since closed that gallery and gone to work for mega-gallerist David Zwirner.) For Falkenstein, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise “was the epicenter for a youthful energy of experimentation and collaboration”—and Brown’s “maverick spirit is still there and it still inspires.”

It remains to be seen how Brown will adjust to life under Gladstone’s roof, where the trains run on time and each day starts with a strict morning meeting for all sales directors. Brown insists that despite what would appear to be his freewheeling style, he actually ran an organized operation and would have no trouble making what I had been told was the 9:30 meeting. “It’s 10:00, actually,” he clarified. “And I know how to get up in the morning.”

“I’m as obsessional as Barbara,” Brown said. “My obsessions are just different. There are details that matter to me.” Asked to name one, he thought for a while before declaring “I hate when we run out of food. It makes me fucking bananas. You invited people to a place and then you run out of food? It’s shameful!” He paused again, with a wry look in his eye, before insisting he was only harping on food “to reinforce people’s preconceptions about me.”

Indeed, food, and the community that sharing it generates, has always been an important part of Brown’s worldview. In Harlem, he had a kitchen in his exhibition space. (Gladstone, by contrast, is said to be very particular about lunchtime and to have an aversion to the consumption of smelly food in the gallery.) And food was part of what landed Brown in Harlem in the first place. He had lived in the neighborhood since 2010, but he hadn’t yet presented exhibitions there when he went looking for a space for a cooking project with Rirkrit Tiravanija, his longtime artist and one of his best friends, who specializes in performances that involve cooking for large groups of gallerygoers.

After seeing the 30,000-square-foot space encompassing four floors in a former brewery that he ultimately took over, Brown decided to move his gallery because, as he told ARTnews in 2016, he’d come to think downtown was “full of zombies”—an art world compromised by its obsession with money. He was disillusioned with all the market’s machinations. Harlem was a reach, considering its distance from so many other galleries, but one he felt was worth it. “I was always punching above my weight, which was a strain,” Brown recalled. “I was cocky, I guess. But it was clear unless you actually reach like that, you don’t really believe in what you’re doing.”

“It has been a strange year,” he continued that day in 2016, on the eve of his Harlem opening. “I’ve been at home mostly, and so have observed from a distance the continued expansion of this industry. And I didn’t really feel part of it.”

Up until he moved to Harlem, Brown had been the pied piper of downtown. But in Harlem, his build-it-and-they-will-come strategy didn’t quite pan out. “He could go wherever he wanted and always people came,” said art adviser Lisa Schiff. “Then he just went a little too far—and no one came.”

The lack of traffic was a drain on staff morale, a former employee told me, and going a year without a headquarters—despite a small space Brown had opened on the Lower East Side—broke the momentum the gallery had built downtown. Thinking back on the experiment, Brown turned reflective. “People aren’t coming to galleries as much as they were anyway,” he said. “It certainly was a challenge to get them up to Harlem.”

There were other complications too. When one of his most valuable artists, painter Laura Owens, opened her first career retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2017, she and Brown were booed by anti-gentrification protesters who objected to her gallery/bookstore space in South Los Angeles, in which Brown was an investor. (Owens closed the L.A. space in 2018.)

The Harlem location and all the work that went into it proved also to be a financial drain. “I wasn’t dealing with it,” Brown said of problems that had been mounting. “I could have dealt with it a long time ago. I stuck my neck out a long way. I left a lot of money in that building. As my wife says, it was my Fitzcarraldo project.”

In 2015, Brown fulfilled his longtime dream of re-creating Jannis Kounellis’s Untitled (12 horses) from 1969.

Gladstone and Brown were planning to announce their merger in the fall, but Artnet News got the scoop in July, and some longtime artist-friends and staff members in Brown’s famously familial fold were hastily informed. Artists who would not be going to Gladstone were suddenly without representation, and left whirling. (One of them, Rob Pruitt, got picked up not long after by 303 Gallery, which had shown him early in his career and which—the art world being a small one—had once employed Brown.)

Brown conceded that he could have done better in how he dealt with his decision, and he admitted that he lost friendships over how he handled the situation. “I’d taken it as far as I could,” he said. “I have regrets about relationships being disrupted, feelings being hurt—which is a mild way of putting it.”

“In Covid,” he added, “people were really looking to me to lead, and I didn’t do a good job. I was too distracted. It was a perfect storm. But I like that life can be different. Rirkrit said to me, ‘No one thought you’d take it as far as you did.’”

LaToya Ruby Frazier made a dramatic New York gallery debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise space in Harlem in 2017.

The artists who went to Gladstone with Brown feel assured that the special relationship they have entered into with him will continue. One of those artists is 38-year-old LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose 2018 exhibition in Harlem showcased her series of photographs documenting the water crisis in the African-American community of Flint, Michigan. Frazier had been the subject of museum shows in the United States since 2009, and she won a MacArthur fellowship in 2015, and shown with a gallery in Europe. But she didn’t feel comfortable signing with an American gallery until she was approached by Brown, who pursued her with great patience; they spent a year in conversation before she joined his roster.

“I respect him as a fellow artist,” she said of Brown. “He [marches] to the beat of his own drum. He created a subculture that runs parallel to the mainstream art world.” From her teens, she’d always respected Gladstone gallery as well, and so she eagerly joined a Zoom call with the two dealers this past summer. “I revere Barbara Gladstone for what she represents and her history,” Frazier said. “I’m an artist who is benefiting greatly from this merger.”

Others looking in from the outside wonder if the Gladstone-Brown partnership may be a sign of the times. “It’s the first consolidation,” said Kraus, the MoMA trustee. “I don’t think it will be the last.”

In New York magazine, Jerry Saltz wrote wistfully about the end of a gallery he had followed from its beginning: “[T]his isn’t the closing of a gallery that everyone imagined was on shaking foundation—it’s the closing of a gallery that was, in a profound way, the very self-image of the contemporary art world. People might wonder, If Gavin can’t survive then who can? What can? In which form? At what cost? Why?”

But the operators of some other galleries of similar mid-tier size took umbrage with the death-knell tone. Casey Kaplan, who opened his New York gallery in 1995, a year after Brown, said, “When I saw these doomsday articles on the demise of the gallery system because of Gavin’s closing I was offended and insulted. I have respect for Gavin, but his situation is his situation. That he is seen as such an icon that, if he couldn’t make it then the rest of us can’t, is ridiculous.”

For what it’s worth, Brown himself agrees. “I didn’t like that either,” he said. “Most galleries didn’t have my overhead. They didn’t hang themselves out there. A lot of galleries will survive.” Working with Gladstone, Brown said, gives him new horizons. It also, he said, “gives me an opportunity to get my life back.”

Schiff, the art adviser, sees Gladstone and Brown as a bulwark against the financialization of the art world. “Gladstone is one of a handful of galleries sticking to what matters,” she said. “It’s important to fight hard for the old way of value-making, a marriage between pricing results and criticality. Both Barbara and Gavin care about what what really drives a passion for art.”

Reminiscing over the past few years, Brown told me, a bit fatalistically, “I guess the possibility that Harlem wouldn’t work was in the front of my head.” That having been said, “I’m really quite happy,” he added. “I have love in my life. And I got to do a lot of dreamy things. And I’m sure I will keep doing them. I’m lucky. I’m very, very lucky.”

Gladstone is lucky too. Her roster is now at mega-gallery scale—with 72 artists and estates—but she is determined to remain in the model of a traditional gallery.

A version of this article appears in the Winter 2021 issue of ARTnews, under the title “The Biggest Little Gallery.”

Ian Cheng, BOB, 2018, artificial lifeform.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

Over the past few years, artist Ian Cheng has been creating what he’s called “live simulations,” or digital moving-image works that change over time and address ideas about evolution, artificial intelligence, and our fear of the unknown. In 2017, some of these works were included in a solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, where they received rave reviews. For his first show with Gladstone Gallery in New York, Cheng is showing a new work, BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an “artificial lifeform,” as the artist calls it, centered around an AI creature who’s part snake, part branching tree. Users can interact with BOB, the piece’s titular protagonist, through an iOS app called Bob Shrine, which allows users to give BOB various objects, including a shiny fruit, a rock, and a shrub. BOB will then interact with each object and learn what he wants to do with it, and in the process determine whether he trusts the person that offered it to him or not. To learn more about the work, ARTnews chatted with Cheng ahead of the show’s opening. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

ARTnews: This piece premiered at the Serpentine Galleries in London in March of last year. Since then, you’ve completely redone the work’s AI, right?

Ian Cheng: Yeah, that’s right. I pretty much restructured the architecture of its mind, which was a significant undertaking. So that’s probably the main difference between the Gladstone version and the Serpentine one, but it’s resulted in a lot of other implications, because the heart of the project is BOB’s AI. I realized that I needed to give BOB the other half of its brain, which I call the “Congress of Demons.” Primarily, it gives BOB motivations. [Humans] don’t just recognize an apple, we’re motivated to recognize that apple and do something with it because we’re hungry. We’re constantly motivated by something—we’re never just in a neutral observational state. Even when we’re neutrally observing, we’re hungry, maybe for information, or we’re staving off boredom.

I’m really curious about the language you’ve used to describe BOB. What is demonic about the demons?

There’s psychological literature about how several different sub-personalities compose a person. We built the work around the idea [of demons] because it motivated me and everyone that I work with to understand that level of sub-personalities. They’re impulsive and possessive, like demons possessing you. Your whole body is forced toward that one goal. I chose the metaphor of a “congress,” meaning that the demons meet every few seconds in BOB’s mind to decide who gets to be in charge, and they’re all competing.

Aside from the programming of BOB, the aesthetic of the project is really interesting to me, too. What went into how BOB’s look?

I was sitting in my studio thinking about what BOB looks like, and the natural combination manifested almost like a daydream. It was a snake that, as it grew and learned, fractalized like the branches of a tree. I don’t know why I chose that. Personally, I have a deep fear of snakes because as a kid, I went to the pet store and a baby snake latched on to my finger, and they had to pry it off, but they couldn’t kill it because it was merchandise. [Laughs.] Snakes also recur in imagery across cultures, and I think that’s because there’s an inherent neurobiological instinct to be alert to snakes. So snakes somehow became synonymous to alertness or awareness. A snake is not a purely evil being, but it’s a being that makes a human more aware.

You’ve continually returned to working with AI. What interests you about it?

I think it goes back to my own interest in cognitive science as an undergrad. I’ve just been very interested in behavior and how people learn. Specifically, I’m obsessed with this idea of how a person deals with change. And I’m obsessed with this duality, this relationship between known and unknown and between order and chaos. It’s manifested in the world, and it’s manifested in our own neurobiology. I think it’s so crazy that the two hemispheres dividing the brain are literally a mirror dividing the world into known and unknown. I think that’s so beautiful and under-appreciated.

People are generally scared of AI. Everyone’s so paranoid about its potential, it seems. Do you think that’s warranted?

It’s an interesting question, and I’m of two minds about it. On the one hand, the general fear of AI is coming from an insecure place. If human beings believe that the most threatening thing is oppressive power, then AI seems like a threat because it’s unknown—our projection is that its first move would be to use its power against us. However, that’s not entirely true, because in making BOB and working with AI, there’s a huge possibility of AI being an extension of a human being, integrated into human culture. I think there’s great opportunity to see it as an augmentation rather than a separate entity that’s potentially threatening.

However, in making BOB, the other side of me realized where a threat might lie. People are interested in AI that feels sentient and lifelike, whether at the level of a pet or a digital human companion. . . . In making BOB, I had to start from the most basic, animalistic, limbic core of the brain—the most basic drives and desires like threat, fight/flight, territory, status. There’s an instinctual layer [to sentient beings], which I would say is that demonic layer. There’s something maniacal about basic desires. Then there’s the [more] social layer where you learn to cooperate with other people, but you also learn to cooperate with your future self. To get BOB to the social level, I had to first program a foundational motivational structure for this brutal chimpanzee level. My fear about AI and making this is that whoever does this at an industrial scale, if they want life-like AI, they have to go through this chimpanzee level. But chimpanzees can rip each other apart over a banana. I recognize that that evolutionary stage is necessary to get anything remotely resembling the complexity and intelligence of our own culture and human behavior. But they better get through it fast.

Barbara Gladstone.

COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY

As Artists Space continues renovations on its new location at 80 White Street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood, ahead of an expected spring 2019 opening, the 45-year-old downtown nonprofit gallery has seen two new developments. Veteran gallerist Barbara Gladstone recently joined the board, and Heather Harmon has been appointed as development director.

Gladstone has operated her eponymous New York gallery for nearly 40 years. Harmon previously worked as a longtime director of Regen Projects gallery in Los Angeles. (As it so happens, Gladstone Gallery and Regen Projects have a connection—the latter’s proprietor, Shaun Caley Regen, is Gladstone’s daughter-in-law; Stuart Regen passed away in 1998.) Harmon went on to become a director for the art adviser Kimberly Chang Mathieu, who helped oversee Guy Laliberté’s collection in Ibiza, Spain.

Artists Space executive director and chief curator Jay Sanders said of Gladstone joining the board, “2018 will be a big year building up to [moving into] the new building. Barbara comes at the perfect time. Her skill set and expertise in building careers and working with artists is so apropos to some of the things we are doing right now. She has immediately been incredibly helpful.”

Sanders, who joined Artists Space last year, said that Harmon will help the organization innovate in its approach to fundraising. “It’s a bit like a reset—a shoring up of the organization in a different way,” he said. “We are both new enough that we feel committed to that together.”

Harmon said, “We are both thinking about different models for the future of how we can approach more adventurous thinking in terms of fundraising.” She said she is interested in, among other approaches, “activating strong bonds with artists’ foundations.” She is looking forward to a series of programming in the summer that will be centered around art spaces in Tribeca, from La Monte Young’s Dream House to commercial galleries like Bortolami.

Last May, a month after Sanders joined as executive director and chief curator, Artists Space announced that its new location will be an 8,000-square-foot, two-level space at 80 White Street. That new space is currently under renovation, and Sanders said the gallery plans to open in spring 2019. Artists Space moved out of its longtime home on Greene Street in SoHo in 2016 and is currently operating out of a second space—a bookstore and events venue—that it opened in 2012 at 55 Walker Street.

Installation view of “Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawing,” 2018, at Gladstone 64, New York.

©AMY SILLMAN/DAVID REGEN/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

Amy Sillman has always treated the act of drawing as an equal to her sister arts, painting and sculpture. For starters, Sillman’s drawings are not preparatory studies. She is not designing diagrams for future projects nor is she working out technical issues. You also can’t say this is what she does in her down time while the paint on her canvases dries. For this 63-year-old artist from the Midwest, drawing is a complicated, time-consuming, independent endeavor.

The 25 works on paper in “Amy Sillman: Mostly Drawings,” on view at Barbara Gladstone’s uptown outpost on East 64th Street in New York through March 3, are a case in point. Displayed in a line that rings five walls, they offer a thrilling, rollercoaster-like experience to visitors to the former townhouse designed by starchitect Edward Durrell Stone. As Bette Davis character once put it, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Amy Sillman, SK30, 2017, acrylic, ink, and silkscreen on paper.

©AMY SILLMAN/JOHN BERENS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

Each drawing is a unique banquet of colors, lines, and shapes. Because she’s mixed her palette’s pigments, her yellows, greens, and blues are unexpected blends, not as familiar as they would have been straight from the tube. And her shapes are neither organic nor geometric. They’re open-ended and elusive. Her work has more in common with an ugly duckling than a graceful white swan.

Sillman herself has written perceptively about the awkward character of her effusive art. As she sees it, “It’s no accident that people use awkward after a faux pas, a moment of tension between the ideal and the real, where what’s supposed to happen goes awry.” For Sillman, “That tension is what abstraction is partly about: the subject no longer entirely in control of the plot, representation peeled away from realness.”

Sillman’s latest drawings are multi-media affairs, executed with acrylic paint, ink, and silkscreens. But she doesn’t begin by applying yellow, green, or black to blank sheets of paper with a brush, a pen, or a squeegee. At the outset, there’s the matter of scale. Sillman recently told me, “Drawing has to start with your writing hand. You build out.” With few exceptions—the artist cited Richard Serra, in this regard—“you can’t get way from this unit.” According to Sillman, drawing relates to the scale of the hand while painting responds to any scale of production.

Drawings aren’t precious for Sillman. While making them, this artist remains open to all sorts of possibilities. She’s discovered that you “can do something, step back, and then, go, ‘It’s done.’ ” She also doesn’t hesitate to rip up clunkers.

Amy Sillman, SK39, 2017, acrylic, ink, and silkscreen on paper.

©AMY SILLMAN/JOHN BERENS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

To make a drawing, she said, “you can immediately charge in with a pencil line. You can build up as you go along.” Things are different with a painting. Working with acrylic colors and canvas is comparable, Sillman has suggested, to the way a beaver constructs a thatched roof. With a painting, you need to consider the whole picture. Unlike drawings, you make pictorial decisions with a goal in mind.

As she proceeds, Sillman can be very thorough. In her last solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., she had, by the entrance to the gallery, dozens of black-and-white drawings installed in tiers five sheets high, stretching from wall-to-wall. Each measured 22 by 30 inches. All but one of the works at Gladstone measures 25 by 40 inches, the next size up in standard drawing paper. The artist likes the ease with which she can purchase reams of it. Using 40-by-60-inch sheets offers the same convenience. That’s the size of an unframed work displayed over the fireplace on East 64th and others she next expects to make. “It’s always nice to have a beginning,” Sillman said, as I questioned her about her latest show.

Like a number of other artists who were featured in “The Forever Now,” Laura Hoptman’s 2013 show of contemporary painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Sillman makes work that is not quite entirely abstract. When referring to the recognizable elements in her work, she prefers the word figuration to representation. In the drawings at Gladstone, there are body fragments—heads, hips, a belly—here and there. A painting at MoMA had a large teapot-like shape. In Sillman’s art, these objective elements provide internal scale.

The combination of unabashedly non-figurative elements with overtly recognizable components in Sillman’s work is one of the many signs that she is at the forefront of a cohort of artists ushering in a new phase in the roughly 100-year history of abstraction. Pure abstraction has receded, replaced by something more diffuse and nuanced. It’s more thoughtful, too. MoMA curator William S. Rubin could never suggest that the discourse of this new, well-educated generation of painters is on the level of night school metaphysics, as he used to say about the Abstract Expressionists. These days, what might be called Artisanal Abstraction is practiced by a generation who were told in art school that painting is dead.

Amy Sillman, SK28, 2017, acrylic, ink, and silkscreen on paper.

©AMY SILLMAN/JOHN BERENS/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK AND BRUSSELS

With drawing at the core of her practice, Sillman makes zines, iPhone animations, cartoons, and amusing dinner party seating charts. And like many of her compatriots, she works in varying dimensions depending on the genre. Her art—and those of her colleagues—tends to be layered (literally and figuratively). You won’t find colors sitting next to one another, à la Color Field stripes or Unfurleds. Then too, different techniques are used on the same surfaces. Moreover, variations no longer register as the same idea developed multiple times. Dissimilarities abound. Lately, it’s become harder to know when a work of art is finished. Sillman, for one, doesn’t think paintings have endings. For her, that’s part of the freedom a painting expresses.

Then, there’s the nature of time. Ten years ago, Sillman provocatively wrote that “time has replaced space as the primary consideration in the visual arts.” Take her own multilayered paintings and drawings and how deceptive they can be. A lot of tinkering is involved in their creation. Sillman scrapes away colors and shapes that she’s applied previously, and she ends up with images that could never have been preplanned. She once wrote, “That’s the new emotion: simultaneity of experience, contradiction—we cannot see things one way any more.” At a certain point, even she can’t remember the order in which she laid down the marks on her sheets of paper. Eventually, she herself wonders what’s in front, and what’s in back. For the artist, “That’s my greatest joy with them: wondering how did that happen?”

In a recent talk on her brilliant Michelangelo exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Carmen Bambach mentioned that the Italian word disegno expresses broader meanings than the English noun drawing. While referring to marks made on a surface, it also alludes to the inventiveness of the artist. Perhaps the current show at Gladstone should be called, “Amy Sillman: Disegno.”

Alan Vega, “Welcome to Wyoming.”

COURTESY INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

Alan Vega–the singer for the influential punk duo Suicide who passed away last week at age 78–was also an important visual artist, albeit with a slightly quieter persona. Vega was in fact an artist first and a frontman second. He studied with Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College, and he showed work at the OK Harris Gallery in New York in 1974, three years before Suicide released their first record. Suicide were aggressive Minimalists, pioneers in both punk and electronic dance music. Vega’s art was similarly intense and understated. When the dealer Barbara Gladstone, who currently represents artists including Matthew Barney and Thomas Hirschhorn, moved her gallery from 57th Street to SoHo in 1983, it was Vega who inaugurated the space.

“You know, I was going from uptown to downtown,” Gladstone said in a phone interview. “And I thought he was a perfect way to express that.”

Install shot of Alan Vega’s work at Invisible Exports.

COURTESY INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

Vega showed neon crucifix assemblages, made of pieces of found metal that were “kind of put together in a sort of arte povera manner,” Gladstone said. The gallery had no overhead lighting, so the only light source for the exhibition was the sculptures themselves. “It was very moody,” Gladstone said. “It was beautiful. It was very much like him.” She said working with Vega was a “wonderful” experience. “The only problem for me is that I’m a daytime person and he wasn’t awake in the daytime.”

Vega was, to use Gladstone’s word, an “elusive” artist. She never saw his studio, and wasn’t totally sure if he had one. (At the time, “he lived in a hotel,” she said.) That show in 1983 was for many years his only major outing in New York.

Jeffrey Deitch attempted to revive Vega’s artistic career with a show at his gallery in SoHo in 2002. (Suicide performed at the show, as well.) Deitch had seen Vega’s OK Harris show in 1974 and, “I thought it was some of the most radical work I’d ever seen,” he said. “I thought it was extraordinary. Assemblages of all kinds of electronic parts, discarded TVs, radios, fluorescent tubes—he just plugged it in and whatever lit up, that was the piece.”

Not long after encountering Vega’s art, Deitch saw Suicide perform for the first time, which he viewed as the musical equivalent of Vega’s sculpture. Suicide’s sound was so new, they endured catcalls and rioting audiences in their early years. The response to Vega’s art was slightly more muted. (“The collector response was kind of nonexistent,” Gladstone said of the ’83 show. “But the artist and kind of general hip response was great.”) Decades later, when Deitch reached out to Vega about doing an exhibition, he recalled the artist had to be talked into the idea. “The art world and all the politics of the art world—that was not something that was relevant to him.”

This has certainly not helped the public knowledge of his art. Deitch’s show introduced Vega’s art to a new generation–he remembered how Dan Colen and Dash Snow, two Deitch artists, asked Vega to perform inside their so-called hamster’s nest installation at the gallery in 2007–but Vega mostly kept quiet. An extensive exhibition in Lyon, France, in 2009 led to a solo show in 2015 at Invisible-Exports, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Vega’s first show in New York since Deitch’s.

“The funny thing about Alan is I think he was always making stuff, but he never really cared whether it was seen or not,” said Benjamin Tischer, a co-owner of Invisible-Exports. “It was just something he did.” A major component of the show was a series of portraits of the same face at the same angle with slight variations throughout. Tischer said he started doing these merely to build up his dexterity after a stroke. (Tischer did see Vega’s studio, though. It was a small, blocked-off section of the Financial District apartment he shared with his wife and son.)

Deitch is hoping that a Vega exhibition like the one in Lyon will eventually come to the States. Whether Deitch himself will lead this charge is unclear, but his fall show at his gallery on Wooster Street (which has been closed since 2009 and is reopening this September) will feature Walter Robinson, an artist who also worked on a video for Suicide’s song “Frankie Teardrop.” (The video is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.)

Deitch called Vega “one of the great, radical cultural figures.” He’s had a wide-ranging impact on music, but in the art world, Deitch said, “It’s not fully understood yet how important and radical his work is, and how essential it is in the contemporary artistic dialogue. I think it will become more and more important.”

Jack Smith, circa 1958 and reprinted in 2011.

COURTESY JACK SMITH ARCHIVE/GLADSTONE GALLERY/THE NEW YORKER

In this week’s Talk of the Town, The New Yorker’s Emma Allen speaks with New York and Brussels gallerist Barbara Gladstone regarding her purchase of the late Jack Smith’s entire archive. The “only true underground filmmaker,” according to John Waters, died at the age of 56 from AIDS-related pneumonia before creating an official will, which legally left his possessions to an estranged sister in Texas. Concerned about her intentions, Smith’s friends secretly removed most of his belongings from his apartment and locked them in a storage unit.

The sister finally hired a lawyer, and legal proceedings ensued until 2008, when Gladstone swooped in and bought the entire archive after learning about it from documentarian Mary Jordan, who made the documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis in 2007.

Gladstone remarks on the fascinating discrepancy between Smith’s anti-ownership philosophy—an objection to a system he termed “Landlordism”—and the fact that he held on to so much of his work:

To me, the biggest amazement when I looked at everything was that for someone as iconoclastic as that, who didn’t care for the system, he saved every scrap. He cared about posterity, or else throw it away! Every little napkin…

Though Gladstone has acquired all of Smith’s sellable work, N.Y.U.’s Fales Library will be receiving everything else—miscellany like flyers advertising “A BOILED LOBSTER RAINBOWRAMA COLOR LIGHT BATH WITH ORCHID LAGOON MUSIC,” informational brochures on living with AIDS, or a script for a film called Secrets of the Cocktail World.

In the opening paragraph, Allen cites Waters, Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Robert Wilson, Matthew Barney, Cindy Sherman, and Ryan Trecartin as people who had either worked with Smith or been influenced by him, or both—“to name a few.” While his most famous work to date is 1963’s Flaming Creatures (seized by police during its premiere on charges of obscenity), one wonders how Smith is not a more well-known figure of underground cinema and experimental performance, when his introduction to Secrets, for example, so brilliantly reads:

This is the story of Viola Vayne, one of the world’s richest women. She was possessed of eternal youth and was secretly a transvestite. She existed in the cocktail world and lived solely to be rude to social climbers. The Cocktail World! Where affected rapture greets the suggestion of cocktails with all the ecstasy usually reserved for announcing the brand names of new products to one’s friends.

Along the way, auction records were set for Wade Guyton ($5.98 million), Rosemarie Trockel ($4.98 million) and Keith Haring ($4.87 million), as well as Matthew Barney, Dan Flavin, Sarah Lucas, Adam McEwen, James Rosenquist and Julian Schnabel.

With 79 lots, the two-hour sale had been estimated to total between $337 million and $474 million (calculated without the fees that are included in the total). Last year’s sale tallied $294 million. Of 79 works offered, 12 failed to find buyers. Half the sold lots exceeded their high estimates.

The sale could hardly help but feel anticlimactic, following a record-setting contemporary art sale at Christie’s New York last night, which racked up $745 million, the highest total achieved at any auction.

Leading off Sotheby’s sale was a group of 19 works from New York collector Adam Sender, who this year closed his hedge fund, Exis Capital Management. All sold, for a total of $44.6 million against an estimate of up to $29.9 million. The group included Barney, Urs Fischer, Flavin, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Lucien Smith. Highest among these sales was a Kippenberger canvas for $5.5 million, above its $4-million high estimate. (All 19 works were guaranteed by the house to sell at an undisclosed price.) Sender is selling more of his collection via Sotheby’s over the coming 18 months. The total Sender haul is expected to bring as much as $80 million.

“The Sender material is fantastic, and the market reflected that,” New York dealer Barbara Gladstone said on her way out, partway through the sale. Some of the Sender lots on offer tonight came from Gladstone’s gallery. “I was happy all along. All my children did very well.”

“It was a strong sale,” Schwartzman told A.i.A. “It’s all about estimating. Things that were properly estimated did as they should.”

“A bit disappointing,” pronounced dealer Irving Blum. “It went well enough. They kept hitting their low estimates pretty consistently. The art world is intact.”

Sounding a rather surreal note, the evening began with a short modern dance performance by four members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, on a small dance floor installed for the occasion next to the auctioneer’s rostrum, in front of the hundreds of bidders waiting to wave their paddles. The three men wore leotards; a female dancer wore a green dress. Two Robert Rauschenberg works were being sold to benefit the company. Gasps were heard as two of the dancers came close to an Yves Klein relief sculpture hanging near the rostrum, but the work was untouched.

Just over half of the works on offer were guaranteed to sell, by the auction house or by irrevocable bids from third parties. “Auctions are behaving more and more like private sales on a public scale,” Schwartzman told A.i.A. before the sale. “Sellers want to see money up front. The auction houses have had to pay up. That’s the reality of today.”

Top priced lots came from the predictable trio of Warhol, Richter and Koons.

Fetching $30 million from an anonymous phone bidder to become the night’s top sale was Andy Warhol’s painting Six Self-Portraits (1986). Sotheby’s department co-heads Alex Rotter and Cheyenne Westphal battled it out for clients bidding by phone, with Westphal winning the contest. Off the market since it was bought from London’s Anthony d’Offay Gallery the year it was made, it had been estimated at up to $35 million. The half-dozen canvases, each about 2 feet square, set Warhol’s face in various hues, topped by a fright wig, against a black ground.

The evening’s number-two sale at $29 million was Blue, a squeegee painting by Gerhard Richter from 1988 that went to an anonymous phone bidder via Sotheby’s Alex Branczik, besting real estate developer Aby Rosen, who bid from the sales floor. It was offered at $25 to $35 million; the same canvas brought $2.2 million at Sotheby’s New York in November 2002. Dominated by a swoosh of aqua blue, the 10-foot-square canvas also features a variety of yellows, oranges, greens and red.

Casino and hotel magnate Steve Wynn scored the night’s third-highest lot at $28 million, Jeff Koons’s 6½-foot-high stainless steel Jeff Koons Popeye (2009-11). Just three years old, the work was tagged at $25 million and depicts the cartoon mariner with the pumped-up arms and a can of spinach. Wynn will display the work at his luxury hotel in Las Vegas, Sotheby’s announced.

Topping its $20 million estimate to go for $24 million was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta (1983), a 15-foot-wide canvas from an unnamed seller. The work sold for $294,000 at Sotheby’s New York in November 1994. Over a gestural ground of orange, sherbet, black and blue appear the title words as well as the repeated text “Mark Twain,” “Mississippi” and “Negroes,” along with set of cow’s udders.

“He always said ‘the art world is milking me,'” noted Rotter in a phone call before the sale.

There were some notable failures.

An untitled Willem de Kooning abstract canvas from 1975-77, dominated by pinks, yellows, red and white, was expected to fetch as much as $25 million but failed to sell.

A Koons sculpture featuring three basketballs in an aquarium, estimated for just $4 million to $6 million, also went unsold.

Spring auction season ends with Thursday’s sale of contemporary art at Phillips New York, which is estimated to bring up to $185 million.