When the art gallery based in Germany Sprüth Magers first set up shop in LA in March 2016, their timing was impeccable. They set up a location directly across from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and opened their doors a few weeks before Hauser & Wirth cut the ribbon on their Arts District location. Both arrived at a time when LA was on its way to becoming one of the country’s premier art destinations—just five years after the landmark show Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980 brought the city’s modern art history to the art world’s attention, highlighting LA-centric movements like Light and Space and Finish Fetish throughout the600 area.
But Sprüth Magers’ success here didn’t happen overnight. Hers founders Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers spent decades building relationships with artists whose work would go on to define the LA scene—John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, The tested ruby and more. Today, Sprüth Magers has spaces in Berlin, London, New York City and Los Angeles, which marked the gallery’s first location in the United States. Their anniversary celebration is “10 Years in LA!”, a group show of blue-chip artists from around the world.
“I’m very happy that the gallery is here,” Barbara Kruger tells the Observer. She has three parts in the show including Untitled (Our People Are Better Than Your People) from 1994/2024, Untitled (Hello)a 2021 sound installation, and Oath, will, pledgea three-channel video installation from 1988/2020 that was shown at the Venice Biennale 1988. “The space is beautiful and wonderful. And the location is wonderful. They have such an important program, with so many artists that I admire.”
The show includes the aforementioned names as well Kenneth AngerGilbert & George, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Gala Porras-Kim, David Hall, John Waters and many others. Kruger first began showing with Monika Sprüth in Cologne approximately 30 years ago, when women did not have a significant presence in the German art world. “White guys kind of ruled, you know, white guys all drink booze, ruled, whatever. But thanks to Monica, a group of women started showing their work in Germany, in Cologne. And that was hugely important to me,” Kruger says of her beginnings with the gallery. “Together they formed this list of incredible artists, American and European men, women, and engaged issues of gender but also race. Their program really reflects how the art world has changed within the last twenty years. A much more inclusive place. When I was coming out, the so-called art world seemed to be five white guys in lower Manhattan.”
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“10 years in LA!“ |
A white guy from lower Manhattan in the show is George Condowho contributed a recent piece entitled War of the Worlds. “With the name of HG Wells novel, it turned out to be the world we live in today, – says Condo about his abstract painting. “It represents fear and turmoil, despair and madness. It is also, among other things, a diagonal abstraction in a format reminiscent of a kind of slippage of humanity.”
Condo’s first solo show at the gallery was in 1984, one of many, including the one in 2016 Entering the Voidinspired by his bout with cancer and, two years later, What is Point?named for a monochrome work depicting a stack of televisions. “I thought, ‘What’s the point of following the news or thinking that everything you had yesterday is going to be important tomorrow?’ I internalized the idea that it’s about making art.”
In the early 1980s, Condo spent time with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat in Los Angeles, where the latter had his first show at a club called The Rhythm Lounge. Background music was provided by a new band making their live debut, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “The first few days I spent in Los Angeles were hysterical, as I had to get a job selling pens at a crazy pen office on Hollywood Boulevard to earn enough money to get back to New York. And while I was doing that, Basquiat made that painting Hollywood Africans there when Rammellzee and Toxic and all these graffiti guys came. He was getting ready for his first show at Larry’s (Gagosian),” Condo recalled.
“He’s an artist with broad cultural knowledge and broad knowledge of European art history,” Sprüth said of Condo at the time of Entering the Void. “He manages, with his knowledge and intellect, to bring it into a new form.”
Another white guy on the show is The tested rubywhose SP is a new work that revisits his spray paint canvases of 2008-11, atmospheric abstracts reminiscent of the Color Field works of Mark Rothko. Confronted daily in his studio with earlier paintings, Ruby was inspired by the ongoing war in Iran to revisit them. “I kept looking at these, thinking about this flat wasteland, these two types of eyes, these opposite areas and tears, like rain falling, and I want to allude to this spiritual aspect of it, not really heavenly, but perhaps environmental.
What originally inspired him to use spray paint instead of oil was the street art and graffiti of LA. Raised in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, he yearned for a place like California, drawn by the Gold Rush of the 1860s, the rise of the entertainment business at the turn of the century, the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the punk scene of the 1960s and 1997s.
“As an artist, I came here because the art that was being made here seemed much more psychological and pathological,” he says, noting movements like Light and Space and figures like Barbara Kruger, Chris Burden AND Nancy Rubins. “Philomena and Monica, they’ve championed a lot of this particular art from this particular region. And I don’t think that’s always been easy. To be part of that listing that showcases and champions artists like Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Robert MorrisI think it’s historic, what they’ve built and it’s very unique.”
Sprüth expressed a similar sentiment in a recent email, noting that such names are part of the reason they initially decided to open a space in LA, while Magers celebrated new developments in their mid-Wilshire neighborhood, including The newly opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. “New museums, new museum buildings, a new metro line,” she wrote. “You can really feel a different energy just walking down the street from the gallery.”
More in the Gallery
