Altman Siegel, one of the key galleries of San Francisco’s art scene, will close this November after 16 years in operation.
In a statement issued on Wednesday, founder Claudia Altman-Siegel explicitly attributed the decision to the current market, which she described as being particularly challenging for mid-size galleries like her own.
“As it has become too difficult for a gallery this size to scale in this climate, I have made the incredibly tough decision to close rather than diminish either the space or the commitment to exhibit conceptually uncompromising work,” she wrote.
The gallery’s roster includes artists such as Simon Denny, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Trevor Paglen, Zarouhie Abdalian, Koak, Didier William, and Kiyan Williams. Its final show will be its current solo exhibition by Shinpei Kusanagi, a Japanese painter who has shown with the gallery since the year it was inaugurated. That show ends on November 22.
Altman Siegel is merely the latest gallery in a string of others that have announced plans to close or significantly pare back their operations in the past year. Those galleries include several based in Los Angeles, including Blum and LA Louver, the latter of which had been open to the public for 50 years before it said it would pivot to private dealing in September. New York’s Clearing and Venus Over Manhattan galleries also closed over the summer.
Though there have been fewer closures announced for San Francisco’s scene, the Kadist art foundation said earlier this year that it wind up operations in the city.
In 2009, after having spent 10 years at New York’s Luhring Augustine gallery, Altman-Siegel opened her own operation in downtown San Francisco. “San Francisco is a smaller market, so local sales are fewer and foot traffic is slower than in New York, but there is a lot of creative freedom; I have no peer pressure, and there’s not much competition,” she told Art in America in 2011.
That lack of pressure and competition allowed her to take a chance on work that did not conform to the dominant tastes of the market. One of the gallery’s first shows was by Paglen, a photographer who had had few exhibitions outside institutions at the time. He is now represented by Pace, one of the world’s biggest galleries.
A range of other well-known artists have also had shows with the gallery, from Sanya Kantarovsky to Shannon Ebner, from Sara VanDerBeek to Richard Mosse, from Grant Mooney to Chris Johanson.
The gallery has gradually expanded in size, relocating first to a new space in Dogpatch in 2016 before moving again to Presidio Heights last year. “Each chapter allowed the gallery to take risks, experiment, and keep pace with the evolving practices of our artists. Now, 213 exhibitions and art fairs later, the project is coming to a close,” Altman-Siegel wrote.
Although she described greeting the impending closure with “pride and sadness,” she also wrote of connections made and artists fostered, which she said “underscores that while the art market can be relentless, the true heart of this project has always been ideas, community, and joy. My hope is that the gallery has brought you as much inspiration as it has brought me.”
