If you're an important gallerist who made a mark on New York City's postwar art landscape, now is your time to shine, it seems. Ileana Sonnabend is being celebrated at MoMA with a show of her staggering collection, Holly Sollomon's legacy is getting a tribute at Mixed Greens and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, and now an even bigger—as in really, really big—survey has opened at Hauser & Wirth's 18th Street space (formerly the Roxy) presenting the collection of Reinhard Onnasch.
Who, you ask? Though certainly not a name bandied about much anymore, Onnasch—who, unlike the other two dealers, is alive and well—played a heroic role in the 1970s after opening his gallery on Spring Street with Gerhard Richter's first solo show in the United States, thereafter helping open up lines of communication and exchange between the enormously active New York and Berlin art scenes. He was also a champion of the Abstract Expressionists, reaching an accord with the famously truculent Clyfford Still (Onnasch sold ten of the only 100 paintings the artist allowed to go to market) and acquiring major works by him and Barnett Newman, as well as such luminaries of the following generations as Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, John Wesley, and Larry Rivers.
The history behind the collection was elucidated last week by an ebullient Paul Schimmel, who led a tour of the exhibition as the new marquee name of the planned Hauser, Wirth, & Schimmel gallery in Los Angeles, to which he decamped after a long tenure at MOCA. So we checked that out, as well as a bunch of other shows including Jason Dodge at Casey Kaplan, Joel Shapiro at Paula Cooper, Keith Sonnier at Pace, Ted Gahl at Dodge Gallery, and Carrie Mae Weems at the Guggenheim.
To see pictures from the week's gallery excursions, flip through the slide show above.
