Category: Gallerist
Nationality: American
Last Year: 1

Since the last Power 100, in which Larry Gagosian occupied the top spot, the impresario’s empire of galleries has staged a staggering 58 exhibitions across its 11 international outlets. Any dealer (or indeed gallery director of any sort) who can casually pencil in shows by Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, Richard Serra and Mike Kelley over the course of a year will never be far down this list. Especially when those big names are interspersed with the kind of tangential programming promised in the signing of outsider painter Neil Jenney and evidenced in exhibitions of Franz West’s furniture (in Athens), Bob Dylan’s drawings (on Madison Avenue) and a collaboration between James Franco and Gus Van Sant (in Beverly Hills). In addition to these, however, Gagosian’s most critically significant venture this year was Malevich and the American Legacy, a show featuring a crowd of greats and spanning more than half a century of production, ranging from Barnett Newman (a work from 1949) to Mark Grotjahn (a work from 2011). The works between these two poles – by Cy Twombly, Ellsworth Kelly, Ed Ruscha, Agnes Martin, Donald Judd, Ad Reinhardt, Dan Flavin and Serra, to name but a few – came close to constituting a history of postwar American art. Half the works weren’t even for sale, but rather borrowed from major museums – another reminder that if Gagosian wants to put on a museum-type show, he can. The man himself nonetheless remains somewhat of an enigma; Vogue may lavish a spread on what it rather horribly terms the ‘Gagosiennes’ – the gallery’s plethora of female directors (who outnumber their male counterparts) – but the dealer hardly ever gives interviews, excusing himself as being ‘just like the next guy’. In terms of this list, the next guy is the director of MoMA.