Chelsea’s new super-sized galleries

From left: 11 West 18th Street, where Hauser & Wirth will open its second New York location, and 456 West 18th, where Friedrich Petzel signed a 10-year lease (buildings credit: PropertyShark)
From left: 11 West 18th Street, where Hauser & Wirth will open its second New York location, and 456 West 18th, where Friedrich Petzel signed a 10-year lease (buildings credit: PropertyShark)

Despite inflated real estate prices (and even though wealthy design firms have supplanted roughly 150 Chelsea art galleries), the art galleries in this district that are doing well are really booming, the New York Observer reported. Examples include Friedrich Petzel, the Pace Gallery, Sean Kelly, David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, which are all slated to open large-scale, multi-thousand-square-foot galleries.

The reason? A spokesperson for Hauser & Wirth told the Observer that some artists need bigger spaces for their installations.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

For example, Pace will move its existing gallery into a 4,000-square-foot building next door. Though the Dia Foundation Manhattan branch will occupy the former Pace gallery, Pace will still be able to combine both spaces, totaling 8,000 square feet, for larger-scale shows. Sean Kelly, on the other hand, is about to triple its size to 22,000 square feet. The new space will accommodate three exhibiton spaces, a black box theater, and a “canyon”–sized library, the Observer wrote. [NYO] — Zachary Kussin