COURTESY 303 GALLERY
Next week, 303 Gallery will head back to 21st Street and into a 12,000-square-foot space that takes up the first two floors of a 19-story luxury condominium designed by Foster + Partners, the firm founded by Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster. It will inaugurate the gallery, now at 555 West 21st Street, with a solo show by Polish-born artist Alicja Kwade that opens May 7.
“The rare opportunity to build a gallery from the ground up made it possible for us to create a dynamic space for the artists,” 303 founder Lisa Spellman said in a press release. “The expansive nature of the gallery allows for highly ambitious presentations, with Alicja Kwade as our opening show, and continues into our fall program with Hans-Peter Feldmann opening in September.”
303 left 547 West 21st in 2013 after selling it to SR Capital for $8 million, at which point it decamped to a temporary space at 507 West 24th, right under the High Line. The new space is nearly double the size of that gallery, and features 21-foot ceilings and three private viewing rooms on the first floor, administrative offices on the second floor, and an outdoor sculpture garden.
The press release also tells us that “an origami-inspired raw steel stair ‘folds’ its way up through a narrow triangle,” which sounds intriguing.