When Germany-based art gallery Sprüth Magers first opened its store in Los Angeles in March 2016, its timing was perfect. They located directly across the street 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 Los Angeles was on its way to becoming one of the country’s leading art destinations — just five years after the landmark show “Pacific Time: Art in Los Angeles, 1945-1980” brought the city’s modern art history to the attention of the art world, highlighting Los Angeles-centric movements like Light, Space, and Final Fetish across some 60 institutions throughout the region.
But Sprüth Magers’ success here didn’t happen overnight. Its founders Monica Spruth and Philomene Magers have spent decades building relationships with artists whose work will go on to define the Los Angeles scene, such as John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Ed Ruscha, Sterling Robbie and others. Today, Sprüth Magers has spaces in Berlin, London, New York City, and Los Angeles, which was the gallery’s first location in the United States. Celebrating its anniversary is “10 Years in Los Angeles!”, a collective showcase of distinguished artists from around the world.
“I’m very happy that the exhibition is here,” Barbara Kruger tells Observer. It has three pieces on offer including Untitled (Our people are better than your people) From 1994/2024, Untitled (hello)a sound installation from 2021, and Pledge, woe, vowa three-channel video installation from 1988/2020 that was shown at the 1988 Venice Biennale. “The space is beautiful and wonderful. And the location is great. They have an important program, with many artists that I admire.”
The show includes the names mentioned above as well as Kenneth Anger, Gilbert & George, Robert Irwin, Craig Kaufman, Gala Boras Kim, David Salle, John Waters and many more. Kruger first began showing with Monica Spruth in Cologne about 30 years ago, when women did not have a significant presence in the German art world. “There was a kind of white men ruling, you know, and white men were drinking, ruling, whatever,” Kruger says of her beginnings with the gallery. “But thanks to Monica, a group of women started showing their work in Germany, in Cologne. That was very important to me.” “Together they put together an amazing roster of artists, American and European men and women, and issues of gender, but also race. Their program really reflects how the art world has changed over the last 20 years. A much more inclusive place. When I was coming up, it seemed like the so-called art world was five white guys in lower Manhattan.”
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“10 years in Los Angeles!“ |
One of the white men from lower Manhattan on the show is George Condo, who contributed a recent article titled War of the Worlds. “It was named after the H.G. Wells novel, and it turns out to be representative of the world we live in today,” Kondo says of his abstract painting. “It represents fear, disorder, despair and madness. It is also, among other things, a diagonal abstraction in a form reminiscent of a kind of landslide of humanity.”
Kondo’s first solo show was at the gallery in 1984, and is one of many, including the 2016 exhibition Entrance to the voidInspired by his cancer, two years later, What’s the point?named after a monochromatic work depicting a patchwork of television sets. “I thought: ‘What’s the point of following the news or thinking that everything you had yesterday will be relevant tomorrow?’ I internalized the idea that it was about making art.
In the early 1980s, Kondo spent time with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat in Los Angeles, where the latter held his first show at a club called The Rhythm Lounge. The accompanying music was provided by a new band making their live debut, the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “My first days in Los Angeles were hysterical. I had to get a job selling pens at some crazy pen shop on Hollywood Boulevard to make enough money to get back to New York. And while I was doing that, Basquiat painted that painting.” Hollywood Africans That’s when Rammellzee and Toxic and all those graffiti guys came. He was preparing for his first show at Larry’s [Gagosian],” Kondo recalls.
“He is an artist with a broad cultural knowledge and extensive knowledge of European art history,” Spruth said of Kondo at the time. Entrance to the void. “With his knowledge and thought, he is able to transform it into a new form.”
Another white man on the show is Sterling Roby, who… SP is a new work that revisits his spray paintings from 2008 to 2011, which are atmospheric abstracts reminiscent of the color field works of Mark Rothko. Encountering the previous paintings every day in his studio, Robbie was inspired by the ongoing war in Iran to revisit them. “I kept looking at these things, and thinking about this flat, barren land, and these two kinds of eyes, and these conflicting areas and tears, like falling rain, and I wanted to hint at this spiritual side of it, not really heavenly, but maybe environmental.”
He was first inspired to use spray paint instead of oil by street art and graffiti in Los Angeles. Growing up in New Freedom, Pennsylvania, he longed for a place like California, where he was drawn to the gold rush of the 1860s, the rise of the entertainment business in the first part of the century, the hippie movement of the 1960s, and the punk scene of the 1970s and 1980s.
“As an artist, I came here because the art that was being made here seemed more psychological and pathological,” he says, pointing to movements like Light and Space, and figures like Barbara Kruger, Chris Burden, and Nancy Robbins. “Philomena and Monica, they championed a lot of this special art from this particular area. And I don’t think it’s always been easy. To be part of that list that shows and supports artists like Rosemary Trockle, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Robert Morris, I think it’s historic, and what they built, which is very unique.”
Sprout expressed similar sentiments in a recent email, noting that those names are part of the reason they first decided to open a space in Los Angeles, while the Magers celebrated new developments in their downtown Wilshire neighborhood, including the newly opened David Geffen gallery at LACMA. “New museums, new museum buildings, new subway line,” she wrote. “You can really feel a different energy just walking down the street from the gallery.”
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