In 1977, when Marian Goodman opened her gallery in Manhattan with a show by the Belgian poet turned conceptual artist Marcel Broodthaers, the asset managers hadn’t yet taken notice of the art world. There was some money around, of course. There certainly is now, as management of the Goodman Gallery has passed from the nonagenarian dealer to her five designated successors in waiting, and as it moves to an entire building in TriBeCa from its longtime home on West 57th Street.
The inaugural show of works by 50 artists over nearly 50 years, too, which opens Saturday, includes every one of the boldface names still on her art-history-heavy roster. But for Goodman, the money’s never been the point.
Since the 1960s, when she first entered the art world as a dealer of prints, Goodman has been attracted to — and has adeptly husbanded and promoted — austere, often conceptually motivated Europeans like Gerhard Richter, Broodthaers and Joseph Beuys.
It’s often grouped with the megas because of Goodman’s longevity, her importance and those boldface names, but the institution she built remains, as the lead partner, Philipp Kaiser, puts it, “one of the biggest small galleries” because it has resisted the kind of relentless global expansion that even many of its midsize competitors have found to be a business imperative in the last few years. Goodman now has locations in London and Paris, but it took a while, and even this move within Manhattan was years in the making. (It never branched out to Chelsea and SoHo.) Rose Lord, a partner with the Goodman Gallery for 22 years, says that during her first decade on 57th Street they discussed moving somewhere with higher foot traffic potential every week.
That comparatively unworldly attitude, which feels like a throwback to the old days of ratty artists’ lofts and potluck dinners, makes the new exhibition, “Your Patience Is Appreciated,” as elegiac as it is celebratory. There’s minimal sculpture from the 1960s by the likes of Giovanni Anselmo (1934-2023), but now it’s rubbing shoulders with more obviously market-friendly conceptual work like a shiny abstract painting by Bernard Frize. The curation, a team effort under Kaiser’s direction, is thorough but spare, with art works given plenty of space. It’s at once a fingers-crossed birthday party for the gallery’s next phase and a death knell for the scene that gave it its start. But that’s OK, because that’s exactly the sort of dissonance that artists like Anselmo and Frize have in common.
Anselmo was one of only a few Goodman artists who technically belonged to Arte Povera, the radical Italian movement that, starting in the 1960s, used whimsical incongruity — like a fresh head of lettuce lashed between two blocks of granite, or a pair of old shoes on a wooden pedestal — to wade into heavy topics like mortality, time and libido. But it’s his mordant kind of humor that provides the throughline for the new show as it unfolds over three floors, across several temporary rooms built to accommodate video pieces, and in the stairwell.
For Anselmo, the contrast or dissonance is always between his minimal gestures and his cosmic themes. An untitled steel rod (1966), on the second floor, 8½ feet tall but listing slightly from the little wooden cube in which it stands, is like a scientific dowsing rod, moving but not moving as it reveals the invisible, ever-present force of gravity. It’s a little bit silly but definitely not kidding. Gathered around it are similarly linear works both by a younger generation — a curtain of tiny brass rods by Leonor Antunes, hanging bundles of string coated in soil and waxy red acrylic by Delcy Morelos — and by contemporaries like Giuseppe Penone.
From Penone comes a wall drawing of wavering concentric rings (1995-2019) and two other pieces that attempt to record the passage of a human body through time.
The drawing is a beautiful complement to one of the show’s standouts, “Timekeeper Drill Core (MGG 57th Street)” by the French artist Pierre Huyghe. To make it, Huyghe simply sanded down a section of wall at the gallery’s just-vacated 57th Street space, revealing, in concentric circles, every different blue, brown or white the place had been painted for show after show over more than 40 years.
It’s a strikingly efficient way to highlight the strange action of time, always at hand but impossible to grasp. The overtones are archaeological but also a little seedy, and the look evokes a jawbreaker candy. But to underscore the fact that you find a different time whenever you stop to measure it, Huyghe actually made two of these pieces, and they’re not identical.
In the exhibition’s first room, a huge Tacita Dean photograph of a flowering cherry tree (2024) faces Gabriel Orozco’s “Four Bicycles (There Is Always One Direction),” from the 1990s, an agglomeration of bike parts, which stands against the windows.
In Japan, cherry blossoms are symbols of the evanescence of life; to see them pictured here at such grand scale, in such a permanent medium, brings on a kind of vertigo that Orozco’s upside-down wheels only amplifies.
In a room where James Coleman’s 35-minute film “Retake With Evidence” plays — first seen in 2007, it’s a shredded one-man Oedipus performed by Harvey Keitel — the mood is melancholy, as it is in the smaller room nearby devoted to the only lightbox that the director Steve McQueen has ever made, “Lynching Tree” (2013).
As with Arte Povera proper, the work in “Your Patience Is Appreciated” can sometimes veer too rich or too clever. You probably wouldn’t notice without being told that Tavares Strachan’s “Endless Love, Simone I” and “Endless Love, Simone II,” two milled marble forms like three-foot chess pieces, trace the contours of Nina Simone’s profile. But the pieces do offer a whole series of interesting conversations about intention and identity, curves versus corners, even the exact dividing line between matte and gloss — especially when considered alongside a nearby metal ziggurat by the land artist Robert Smithson.
The works on the third floor, which will ultimately be dedicated to storage and private viewing rooms, demonstrate the most important thing a gallery does for its artists: help viewers understand them by putting them in context with like-minded peers.
Sabine Moritz’s “Underground V,” whose colors and overall energy call to mind the background of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” looks like a painting of an abstract painting. Edi Rama’s gaudy, botanical, sexual ceramics are painted in a bright clashing palette, and Tony Cragg’s ripply, mirror-bright steel sculptures are fun-house reflections of figure and geometry. The broad strokes of Frize’s 2002 acrylic and resin painting “Otona” have the slick iridescent beauty of a puddle of gasoline. Any of them, in a different setting, might look insubstantial; together here they’re as effortlessly compelling as a natural landscape.
What really makes you feel the strange force of passing time is less any one piece in the exhibition than the overall sense you get of the gallery’s imposing history. Nearly a quarter of Goodman’s artists or artist estates have been showing with her since the 1980s, and historically tinged entries like a vitrine of doodled little plans for sculptures by Dan Graham (1942-2022), a conceptual provocateur known for his two-way mirror pavilions, keep the gallery’s continuity on your mind. No one can forget that Gerhard Richter left Goodman, along with William Kentridge and Nan Goldin. But as others, like Andrea Fraser, the performance artist, and Morelos or Strachan have come in, the roster has gotten a little more diverse, and a path forward has come into view, one that keeps Goodman’s focus on conceptually motivated work while opening up the ways it can actually look.
A crisp Thomas Struth photograph of nearby Leonard Street, taken one year after Goodman opened on 57th Street, recalls the old TriBeCa of half-empty streets, light industry and scattered homesteading artists. Now the neighborhood is one of the city’s richest residential districts and hosts its most vibrant cluster of commercial art galleries — a status that the arrival of Marian Goodman cements. Though it’s a five-story, 19th-century warehouse tower of classic downtown Manhattan cast iron, its multimillion-dollar renovation is restrained. Walls are white, ceiling beams are black, and unlike some of its Chelsea peers, this is a gallery building that never feels like a spa or corporate headquarters. What it does feel like is the end of an era — and, with any luck, the beginning of a new one.
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