Standing just outside the shadows of Zaha Hadid’s futuristic condo building, 520 West 28th Street, and the High Line is the latest addition to New York’s Chelsea district – a newly built fourth gallery space for the art dealer Paul Kasmin. Designed by Markus Dochantschi of studioMDA, a longtime collaborator of Kasmin’s, the new gallery features a column-free exhibition space punctuated by 28 skylights. It's topped by a rooftop sculpture garden armed with a rotating exhibition programme that is also visible to the High Line’s six million visitors around the year.
As one of the neighbourhood’s few purpose-built gallery spaces, the newest Kasmin Gallery cuts a memorable figure. Cast out of concrete, the building makes a strong first impression with a white concrete façade that has been given the texture of brushed oak, and frames the expansive glass storefront. Inside, the 280 sq m space is capped off by a ceiling composed of 28 trapezoidal coffers, each individually installed with a skylight to ensure a flood of natural daylight into the gallery.
Not only does this waffle structure bring an innate rhythm to the space, it also provides flexibility for the exhibition area to be divided and partitioned as each show sees fit. Almost 7m-high walls also ensure that the gallery’s large-scale works are given the room that they need, which the opening exhibition of Walton Ford paintings make full use of.
The opening show focuses on new painting work by Walton Ford. Photography: Diego Flores
The gallery’s rooftop fulfills a similar goal – to provide the best backdrop for Kasmin’s growing sculpture collection. The garden brings an additional 465 sq m of outdoor exhibition space to the table, with the embedded skylights providing illumination in the evening.
Located what seems to be just an arms’ length from the High Line, the gallery’s sculpture garden is an unexpected feature that continues the natural visual plane when viewed from the public space. It boasts a gently undulating topography, designed by Future Green, and has been filled with trees and foliage that will change with the seasons. Individual platforms have also been installed to optimise the sculptures’ stability and visibility. Three bronze sculptures by Joel Shapiro inaugurate the new garden.
‘The new gallery is the result of many years of discussion,’ says Kasmin. ‘Nearly all galleries in Chelsea are adapted industrial spaces so the real ambition has been to create a purpose-built exhibition space with the sole intention of showing art at its very best and taking shows outside [into the garden] off the gallery walls.’
The new gallery features a column-free exhibition space punctuated by 28 skylights. Photography: Roland Halbe
A series of pieces by Joel Shapiro are installed on the gallery's rooftop sculpture garden. Photography: Christopher Stach, courtesy of Kasmin Gallery, © 2018 Joel Shapiro / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
INFORMATION
For more information visit the website of StudioMda
-
Lind Canvas is a new electric surfboard extending surf beyond the waveSwedish minimalism meets California cool with Lind’s new electric surfboard, promising the feeling of a never-ending wave. Wallpaper* heads to the Swedish archipelago to try it out
-
A guide to modernism’s most influential architectsFrom Bauhaus and brutalism to California and midcentury, these are the architects who shaped modernist architecture in the 20th century
-
‘Changing Fashion’: a new exhibition explores how photographer David Bailey reshaped style‘David Bailey’s Changing Fashion’ at the Marta Ortega Pérez (MOP) Foundation in A Coruña, Spain is a wide-ranging retrospective of the British photographer’s fashion oeuvre. Here, his son Fenton Bailey tells Wallpaper* more
-
‘Her pictures looked like pictures everybody knew were the truth’: Diane Arbus at the ArmoryMatthieu Humery curates more than 400 of Arbus’ photographs at New York’s Park Avenue Armory – every picture she was known to have printed
-
Mystic, feminine and erotic: the power of Penny Slinger’s bodies as landscapeArtist Penny Slinger continues her exploration of the sacred, surreal feminine in a Santa Monica exhibition, ‘Meeting at the Horizon’
-
Out of office: the Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekIt was a jam-packed week for the Wallpaper* staff, entailing furniture, tech and music launches and lots of good food – from afternoon tea to omakase
-
Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors have been up to this weekThis week saw the Wallpaper* team jet-setting to Jordan and New York; those of us left in London had to make do with being transported via the power of music at rooftop bars, live sets and hologram performances
-
Photographer Geordie Wood takes a leap of faith with first film, DiversGeordie Wood delved into the world of professional diving in Fort Lauderdale for his first film
-
New book celebrates 100 years of New York City landmarks where LGBTQ+ history took placeMarc Zinaman’s ‘Queer Happened Here: 100 Years of NYC’s Landmark LGBTQ+ Places’ is a vital tribute to queer culture
-
A major Takashi Murakami exhibition sees the world in kaleidoscopic colourThe Cleveland Art Museum presents 'Takashi Murakami 'Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow', exploring outrage and escapist fantasy
-
Ai Weiwei’s new public installation is coming soon to Four Freedoms State Park‘Camouflage’ by Ai Weiwei will launch the inaugural Art X Freedom project in September 2025, a new programme to investigate social justice and freedom
