Barbara Gladstone, an art dealer with one of New York’s most influential galleries, died on Sunday at the age of 89. Her eponymous gallery confirmed her death in an email and Instagram post “after a brief illness” in Paris.
“Barbara was a visionary leader who had an indelible impact on the artists she worked with, her gallery colleagues, her many friends, and the art world at large,” her partners Max Falkenstein, Carolyn Loos, Paula Tsai, and Gavin Brown wrote on Instagram. “Barbara valued her relationships with artists above all else and always supported them. She championed artists who were breaking new ground in their work and stood with them as they developed their practice, noting ‘You have to feel the possibility of longevity in someone’s work.’”
In 1980, Gladstone retired from her position as professor of art history at Hofstra University and opened the Gladstone Gallery in a small space on 57th Street in New York City. There, she exhibited emerging stars such as Keith Haring and Robert Mapplethorpe.
In the early 1990s, she moved to larger SoHo spaces, where she hosted a few shows, such as Matthew Barney’s first New York solo exhibition in 1991. Then, in 1996, she became one of the first gallerists to move to Chelsea, taking a space in a 29,000-square-foot building next to Matthew Marks Gallery and Metro Pictures.
Unlike her contemporaries, Gladstone has taken a more measured approach to growing her gallery. The gallerist opened her second Chelsea space in 2008, while also opening her first international space in Brussels. The gallery also has spaces in New York’s Upper East Side, Rome, and Seoul, which opened in 2022. Today, it represents more than 70 artists and estates, including Thomas Hirschhorn, Sarah Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, and Robert Rauschenberg.
In recent years, Gladstone Gallery has focused on several early career artists, including Rachel Ross and Ed Atkins. The gallery will continue to run Gladstone’s nearly fifty-year legacy with its four partners, with Falkenstein at the helm.
