Gladstone Gallery received a coup: 91-year-old painter Peter Saul, whose satirical canvas makes him one of America’s longest provocateurs. Meanwhile, the gallery appointed Anna Christina Furney, who had served as a partner in Manhattan.
Thor’s career spans more than seventy years, which is a refusal to abide by the definition of artistic fashion. Training at the California Academy of Fine Arts in St. Louis and the University of Washington, blending comics into the ridiculous rigor of comics, produced works that happily desecrate popular culture, art history, and political life. Although the institution has been in trouble in recent years, his paintings (violent, weird and funny) put him outside the simple category. The new museum held a retrospective exhibition in 2020, and his work has been exhibited in major museums in Europe and the United States, including Pompidou, Momoa, the Metropolitan and Whitney. Saul remains a hero of the cult and an institutional darling: the rare position of non-graduates still working actively.
Furney’s long-standing relationship with Saul reached Gladstone, who represented him for 14 years at Venus in Manhattan, where she served as director before becoming a formal partner. She has a reputation for her ambitious shows there and has conducted landmark investigations for artists such as Robert Colscott, Jim Nat, Joseph Elmer Jokom and Yuxiro Ukyi. Prior to Venus, she worked with Simon and Michael De Prie of Phillips Auction.
Her actions instantly appeared. Earlier this summer, Adam Lindemann, a collector-transactioner who founded Venus in 2012, announced that he would bring the gallery and retreat to the collectors. The news comes after Tim Blum decides to close the gallery and pursue non-traditional models that have not yet been seen. Soon after, Olivier Babin, who cleaned up the gallery, announced that he had surrendered, too.
Venus was born on the Provocative: the platform of the dealer, which was immediately ridiculed for the conflicting roles of its founder and praised for the quality of its performance. The gallery helped restore interest in artists such as HC Westermann and Jack Goldstein, while also working on high-profile projects with Calder, Cattelan and Saul himself.
For Gladstone, which operates in New York, Brussels and Seoul, the double hires an artist with institutional gravity and a well-curated director of curatorial and market debris and promotes its roster and leadership. It also illustrates the familiar dynamics in the market today: galleries are closed, talent dispersed and larger players consolidate their strength. In this case, the result is a thal under the Gladstone umbrella and the elevation of the furniture.
