A Gallery Like No Other: The Opening Gallery

Chromocommons group exhibition with Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, The Callas and Calassetes, Misha Milovanovich, Leah Singer and Tula Plumi, The Opening Gallery, June, 2023

By GARY RYAN September 10, 2024

The Opening Gallery at 42 Walker Street in Tribeca was founded and is curated by Sozita Goudouna—tall, dashing in her choice of attire, and with a personable, engaging voice the impression one gets is that she is the most unique individual you will meet for a while. 

In 2018 she wrote a scholarly book about Samuel Beckett’s shortest play, Breath, which is only 30 seconds long with no actors, no dialogue, just stage directions. One reviewer of her book said, “surely this is the most that has ever been said about the shortest play in the history of theatre”. It’s a brilliant work discussing Beckett’s interdisciplinary approach to theatre and his long-time engagement with visual art. She does this by juxtaposing Beckett’s anti-theatricality with fifty tacitly breath-related artworks—sculpture, painting, new media, sound art, and performance—with breath being understood as a kind of minimum of human existence. Her work brilliantly at once contextualizes Breath within the discourse of late-Beckett criticism and marries the art of our day to that kind of creative thinking and gesture. 

I mention her book, because it is well-written, philosophical, interdisciplinary, about the ranging possibility of modern visual art, and because The Opening Gallery is very much an embodiment of all those elements. 

Collaborating with the various artists, with curators from MoMA, in partnership with the Sorbonne in Paris, the UN, the Austrian Consulate in New York, the Niarchos Foundation (SNFPH) at Columbia University, and with the publisher ERIS which specializes in original monographs on art, literature, and nonfiction, the gallery is a flux of anticipation and realization. This past season the gallery partnered with former artists from the Watermill Center artist-in-residence program, including the first ever show of Christopher Knowles with Sylvia Netzer, Eileen O’Kane Kornreich, D. Graham Burnett, Brian Block, and The Order Of The Third Bird. 

Relative(s) two person exhibition by Christopher Knowles and Sylvia Netzer, Spring, 2024.

Proceeds from the gallery support neurodiversity, charitable causes, and the non-profit Luv Michael which is committed to enriching the lives of autistic adults. This in no way detracts from it as an art space—the feel of it is one of vitality and meaningful importance. New shows go up every three to four weeks with global and local artists who have works in international and US museums, as well as in important private collections. 

Exhibitions at The Opening Gallery always seem to matter, invariably touching the world in relevant ways. The contributing artists are to the person full to the point of overflowing with purpose and vision. And, the curation is expansive in its scope, advanced in its presentation of subject-matter, and artist-centric—in short, it’s consistently spot on. 

I attended most of The Opening Gallery shows of the past season and a half, and these are the ones that I especially connected with (presented in no particular order) …

New work by Andres Serrano in his Confessions show ventured into sketches, charcoal, and pigments depicting religious themes that have haunted his work for decades. Of course, he is best known for his now infamous religious photograph series from 1987 which included Immersion (Piss Christ), which was never meant to be irreligious, or even irreverent. I asked why he keeps returning to those themes and why we are still haunted by those themes in our culture. His response was, “Because they are real and I believe in them—they mean a lot to me.” Perhaps ironically (?) he was in the past year invited by the Pope (along with 200 other internationally-acclaimed artists)—to the Vatican to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Vatican’s modern art collection. At one point the Holy Father gave him a knowing, wry smile and a double thumbs-up. 

Performance conceived by Yann Toma performed by Anna and Valeriia Lyschenko during the exhibition “Box of Birds” by Estar(ser), May 2024

Warren Neidich (with Sozita) curated a show upon the intriguing theme of Wet Conceptualism in 2022, an interesting way of looking at conceptual art at its fringes, since conceptual art in its heyday was mostly a kind of white male, mostly American enterprise with white males both making the art and also critiquing and championing it. Warren’s show was a far hike away from that exclusive enclave, and featured works by women, non-binary artists, and artists from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The idea for this show grew out of his trying to understand his own artwork better, and out of his affinity for the disparate voices working at the time (in the 1970’s)—artists who were not white, not male, not committed to a monochromatic color palette, and not committed to the ways that conceptual art was most often presented by unspoken agreement. “Conceptualism has become an inadequate placeholder for work from an ever-broadening, increasingly more democratic group of artist-contributors,” Warren told me, “… and that needs to be corrected, even if after the fact.” 

The paintings by Michele Zalopany in her exhibition Talk Story were awry and arresting … with slightly askew vanishing points, slightly off-center perspectives portraying recreations of old photographs of indigenous Hawaiian men, women, and children awkwardly acclimatizing to Western ways. Their clothes, their activities as depicted had an uncomfortable, unnatural manner about them. Reminiscing, grappling with her ambivalence about growing up in Hawaii as a Westerner, the show was fascinating, unsettling, and yes, problematic. 

How could I not mention Kenneth Goldsmith’s exhibition I Declare A Permanent State Of Happiness? Presented in cooperation with ERIS Art, as a project dealing with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, perhaps the most important work of philosophy since Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Poetics. To have an entire show dedicated to this important work was entirely fitting. Goldsmith’s sketches and artistic ruminations in the form of works-on-paper filled the gallery walls. What are the limits of language, asked Wittgenstein, and what are the limits of art (or its possibilities) asked Goldsmith. This show derived from a newly published 2nd edition of his I Declare, etc. Signed copies of the book were available in standard and deluxe versions.

Dakota Jackson, Kenneth Goldsmith and RoseLee Goldberg (Sozita Goudouna was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curator at Performa Biennial) during Kenneth Goldsmith’s exhibition “I Declare A Permanent State Of Happiness?” The Opening Gallery, March, 2023.

Rainer Ganahl’s show If The Price Is Right (truth and justice): Paintings and Happenings had works in it that had been made as recently as two or three days prior to opening. He is one of those rare artists who cannot not make art. From the title one can see that this show might have been all over the place, and it was, but in ways both intriguing and brilliant. While there he gave me an earlier book he wrote about a legendary bike-maker and about bicycle culture in Europe and New York, entitled I Wanna Be Alfred Jarry. It’s now one of my favorite books. 

The most fascinating exhibition of the season in terms of the idea that I saw there this year was ESTAR(SER) A Box Of Birds. This show was a “rare exhibition of artifacts and documentation” associated with the Avis Tertia or The Order Of The Third Bird, which by the way was written about extensively this past Spring in The New Yorker. Federica Soletta was the curator. Two installation pieces not previously seen in New York, they consisted of steamer trunks filled with prosthetic limbs, ephemera, and other historical relics arranged in portmanteaus as a sort of dual memory box, the idea being that the observers would converse with each other about their experiences of seeing these specific things in this specific place in this specific way—leading to a kind of “strange power of activated perceptions”. 

ORLAN Retrospective, The Opening Gallery, September, 2024.

Another season is now upon us, and The Opening Gallery  under the guidance of Sozita and her executive assistant Zoi Revekka Radoglou, is poised to offer another full calendar of interesting, thoughtful provocations. For starters this season The Opening Gallery will bring one of the first retrospectives of the acclaimed French artist ORLAN in partnership with the NYU Maison Francaise in early September. 

Precisely for all these reasons, I find The Opening Gallery to be much more consistently compelling than almost all other smaller galleries in the city, and very much worth following. If you’re looking for one gallery to befriend and follow, I highly recommend this one at 42 Walker Street.  WM