The wave of gallery closures that has roiled the art world in recent months continues this week with the back-to-back announcements of the shuttering of Kasmin and Clearing galleries.
Manhattan’s Kasmin Gallery, which represented and exhibited artists including Joel Shapiro, Diana Al-Hadid, Judith Bernstein, and the estates of William N. Copley and Jackson Pollock, will close its doors after 35 years. President Nicholas Olney and Head of Sales Eric Gleason will transition the business into their own gallery, Olney Gleason, to be founded this fall. In a press release shared with Hyperallergic, the two former dealers announced the creation of their new gallery, Olney Gleason, which will absorb some of Kasmin’s high-profile roster.
A representative of Kasmin declined to share which gallery artists would be transferred to the nascent venture or whether its staff would retain their positions.
Paul Kasmin, the British art dealer who founded the namesake gallery in 1989, died in 2020 at the age of 60 after a battle with cancer. Over the course of its decades-long run, Kasmin Gallery presented 350 exhibitions, including a solo show of photographs by Peter Hujar in 2016, black and white works by Henri Matisse in 2020, and Joel Shapiro’s bronzes in 2024. The gallery’s last show, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by Danny Sobor, wrapped up on July 25.
After more than a decade in business, Clearing Gallery is ceasing operations and vacating its spaces in New York City and Los Angeles spaces, founder Olivier Babin announced in an Instagram post this afternoon, August 7, citing “no viable path forward” for the business.
“We are closing today because we can no longer operate at the standards we’ve always held ourselves to — for our artists, our teams, and our entire community,” Babin wrote.
Founded in 2011 in Brooklyn, Clearing built a roster of emerging and mid-career artists that included Marguerite Humeau, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Harold Ancart, and Calvin Marcus. One year later, the gallery expanded its footprint to Brussels, where it presented work by artists including Sebastian Black, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, and Daisy Sheff.
Clearing made its way out west when it opened a new location in 2020 in Beverly Hills, a neighborhood that it quickly left for East Hollywood. In 2023, the gallery’s New York outpost also relocated, trading Bushwick for the Bowery, where it settled in a three-floor venue just up the street from the New Museum. The gallery’s final shows spotlit painters Henry Curchod and Coco Young at its Los Angeles and New York locations, respectively.
The news of the two gallery closures comes after Blum Gallery in Los Angeles and Venus Over Manhattan in New York also announced their shuttering this summer, leaving dozens of workers unemployed and artists without representation amid reports of a slower and more volatile market.