When German-based art gallery Sprüth Magers first set up shop in LA in March 2016, their timing was right. They located directly across the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and opened their doors just weeks before Hauser & Wirth cut the ribbon on their Art District location. Both arrived at a time when LA was on its way to becoming one of the leading art destinations in the country—only five years after the landmark exhibition “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945-1980” brought the city's modern art history to the art world, highlighting LA-centric movements like Light and Space and Finish Fetish in nearly 60 institutions across the region.
But Sprüth Magers' success here did not happen overnight. Its 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, Sterling Ruby and others. Today, Sprüth Magers has spaces in Berlin, London, New York City and Los Angeles, marking the gallery's first location in the United States. Celebrating their first year is “10 Years in LA!,” a group showcase of blue-chip artists from around the world.
“I'm very happy that the gallery is here,” Barbara Kruger told the Observer. He has three pieces in this show incl Untitled (Our people are better than your people) from 1994/2024, Untitled (Hello)audio installation from 2021, and Promise, Will, Oatha three-channel video installation from 1988/2020 shown at the 1988 Venice Biennale. “The space is beautiful and amazing. And the location is great. They have such a great program, with so many artists that I love.”
The program includes the names listed above as well as Kenneth Anger, Gilbert & George, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Gala Porras-Kim, David Salle, John Waters and many others. Kruger first appeared with Monika Sprüth in Cologne almost 30 years ago, when women did not have a significant presence in the German art world. “The white genre was ruling, you know, white guys all drinking alcohol, ruling, whatever. But because of Monica, a group of women started showing their work in Germany, in Cologne. And that was very important to me,” said Kruger about her start with the gallery. “Together they created this list of amazing artists, men, women, American and European, and issues of gender, but also race. Their show really shows how the art world has changed over the last twenty years. It's a very inclusive place. When I came up, the so-called artworld seemed to be five white guys in lower Manhattan.”
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“10 years in LA!” |
Another white man from lower Manhattan in the show is George Condo, who contributed a recent clip titled War of the Worlds. “It was based on an HG Wells novel, it was the world we live in today,” Condo said of his abstract painting. “It represents fear and chaos, despair and madness. And, among other things, diagonal abstraction in a way reminiscent of a kind of human collapse.”
Condo's first solo exhibition at the gallery was in 1984, one of many, including 2016. The entrance to the Voidinspired by his bout with cancer and, two years later, What's the Point?named after the monochrome work that shows a lot of TVs. “I thought, 'What's the use of following the news or thinking that whatever you had yesterday will be useful 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. The accompanying music was provided by a new live band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “The first days I spent in Los Angeles were bitter, I had to get a job selling pens at a pen office on Hollywood Boulevard to make enough money to go back to New York. And while I was doing that, Basquiat made that painting. African Hollywood out there when Rammellzee and Toxic and all these graffiti guys came. He was preparing for his first show at Larry's [Gagosian],” Condo recalled.
“He's an artist with a broad cultural knowledge, and a broad knowledge of European art history,” Sprüth said of Condo at the time The entrance to the Void. “He is able, with his knowledge and his wisdom, to bring you to a new situation.”
The other white man in the show is Sterling Ruby, his own SP is a new work that revisits his spray paint canvases from 2008-11, atmospheric abstractions reminiscent of Mark Rothko's Color Field works. Faced every day in his studio with old canvases, Ruby was inspired by the ongoing war in Iran to revisit them. “I kept looking at these, thinking about this flat desert area, these two types of eyes, these places and tears that are opposite, like rain, and I want to refer to this spiritual aspect of it, not really in heaven, but maybe the environment.”
What first inspired him to use spray paint instead of oil was the street art and graffiti of LA Growing up in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, he longed for a place like California, attracted by the Gold Rush of the 1860s, the boom of the entertainment business at the turn of the century, the hippie movement of the 1960s and the punk scene of the 1800s.
“As an artist, I came out here because the art that was made here seemed psychological and affected life,” he said, noting movements such as light and space, as well as figures such as Barbara Kruger, Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins. “Philomena and Monica, they conquered so much art in this particular region. And I don't think that was always easy. To be part of that list that shows and champions artists like Rosemarie Trockel, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Robert Morris, I think it's historic, what they've built, and it's very different.”
Sprüth echoed similar sentiments in a recent email, noting that names like that are part of the reason they decided to open a location in LA in the first place, while the Magers are celebrating new developments at their downtown Wilshire location, including the newly opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. “New museums, new museum buildings, a new subway line,” he wrote. “You can feel a different energy just walking down the street from the gallery.”
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