Altman Siegel, one of the key galleries in the San Francisco art scene, will close this November after 16 years in business.
In a statement released on Wednesday, founder Claudia Altman-Siegal explicitly attributed the decision to the current market, which she said is particularly challenging for mid-sized galleries like her own.
“It is difficult for a gallery of this size to expand in this environment, so I have made the extremely difficult decision to close rather than reduce space or show a commitment to conceptually uncompromising work,” she wrote.
The gallery’s roster includes artists such as Simon Denny, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen, Zarouhie Abdalian, Koak, Didier William and Kiyan Williams. Its final exhibition will be a solo show by the Japanese painter Shinpei Kusanagi, who has been exhibiting with the gallery since its inauguration year. The show will end on November 22nd.
Altman Siegel is just the latest in a string of galleries last year to announce plans to close or drastically reduce their operations. The galleries include several Los Angeles-based galleries, including Blum and LA Louvre, which had been open to the public for 50 years before saying in September it would move to private transactions. New York’s Clearing and Venus OverManhattan galleries also closed over the summer.
Although San Francisco has announced fewer closures, the Cadister Arts Foundation said earlier this year it would end its operations in the city.
In 2009, after ten years at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York, Altman-Siegel opened his own gallery in downtown San Francisco. “San Francisco is a smaller market, so there are fewer local sales and foot traffic is slower than New York, but there’s a lot of creative freedom; I don’t have peer pressure and there’s not a lot of competition,” she told me american art 2011.
The lack of pressure and competition gave her the opportunity to take jobs that were not in line with the prevailing tastes of the market. One of the gallery’s first exhibitions featured the work of Paglen, a photographer who at the time rarely exhibited outside institutions. He is now represented by Pace Gallery, one of the largest galleries in the world.
Many other well-known artists have exhibited at the gallery, from Sanya Kantarovsky to Shannon Ebner, from Sara VanDerBeek to Richard Mosse, from Grant Mooney to Chris Johanson.
The gallery has gradually expanded, first moving to a new space in Dogpatch in 2016 and then again to Presidio Heights last year. “Each chapter has allowed the gallery to take risks, experiment, and keep pace with the evolving practices of our artists. Now, after 213 exhibitions and art fairs, the project is coming to an end,” Altman-Siegel wrote.
While she greets the impending closure with “proud and sad” feelings, she also writes of the connections made and artists nurtured, saying, “This underscores that while the art market can be unforgiving, the true heart of this project has always been about ideas, community, and joy. I hope the gallery inspires you as much as it did me.”
