Berggruen Gallery Reopens With Buoyant Show In New Space

The eagerly awaited, relocated and reconceived Berggruen Gallery opens this week with an exhibition on a tried and true theme. Galleries are private affairs, and the best such businesses are usually reflections of the owner’s personality. After more than four decades, he remains at the top of a small group of gallerists here with an international profile and a central role in the San Francisco art market. The historic brick structure was gutted and opened up, under the guidance of architect Jennifer Weiss, to take advantage of ample daylight. The Berggruens have expressed some concern that the multiple windows, retained to meet historic preservation guidelines, reduce wall space for hanging art. A roomful of people — an art opening is suggested, though some figures are nude — is described in Condo’s cartoonish signature style, against a loose pattern of what I think of as 1950s color. At the other end of the time frame, the exhibition includes works made since 2012 by Michaël Borremans, a painter of enigmatic, hyperrealist portraits; and San Francisco favorites Chris Johanson and Barry McGee. Virtually all the artists included are well known, but the gallery does take a chance on the young James Crosby, a 2016 UCLA graduate who has hand-fashioned what appear to be hazmat hoods, lined with the Dutch fabrics associated with women in some African countries. An example of one of the greatest of Matisse sculptures, “Large Seated Nude” (1922-29), is currently in the collection of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. (It was en route when I toured the show in advance of the opening, but I have seen it at the Nasher.) It once belonged to John Berggruen’s father, Heinz, a famous art collector who donated a museum-full of modern art to Germany. To the gallery’s credit, however, the exhibition demonstrates the breadth of its interests, secure in the knowledge that its depth is well known. Though cast in bronze, it looks like a carved piece of scrap wood, left over from a safety barrier.