COURTESY ANTON KERN GALLERY
After 15 years in Chelsea, Anton Kern Gallery is leaving its space at 532 West 20th Street and relocating to midtown Manhattan, on 55th Street between Madison Avenue and 5th Avenue, sources told ARTnews. The news comes over a year after the gallery’s building on 20th Street was sold to condominium developer DDG in 2014 for $24.25 million.
Kern, who represents artists such as Nicole Eisenman and Jonas Wood, founded the gallery in 1996, and it was located at 558 Broadway in SoHo until the move to Chelsea in 2001.
It will now be in a neighborhood that was once New York’s primary gallery district, with spaces dotting 57th Street, all spitting distance from the Museum of Modern Art. Though the area has ceded prominence to Chelsea and the Lower East Side, its current gallery list includes Marian Goodman Gallery’s only New York space, and outposts of Mary Boone and Pace Gallery.
The new gallery will be designed by architect Markus Dochantschi and his firm, studioMDA, which also helmed the spaces for 303 Gallery, David Nolan Gallery, and, most recently, Lisson Gallery’s space underneath the High Line. During a phone conversation, a representative from studioMDA confirmed the project, but said the staff members responsible for that project were in a meeting.
A press liaison for DDG did not respond to an email query. When reached on the phone, Kern’s senior director, Christoph Gerozissis, declined to comment.