Sperone Westwater celebrates its 50th anniversary

Sperone Westwater: 50 Years

Sperone Westwater, New York

5 September – 25 October 2025

Sperone Westwater celebrates its 50th anniversary. The gallery’s early years established a lasting tradition of presenting challenging, provocative and engaging work to new audiences. Founded as a three-way partnership between Angela Westwater, Gian Enzo Sperone and Konrad Fischer, the initial program brought together the European avant-garde with a core group of American artists to whom the founders were deeply committed. Over five decades, the program has continually evolved and expanded, particularly through long-term relationships with artists such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Wolfgang Laib and Susan Rothenberg.

The gallery began and continues with Angela Westwater as resident managing partner, while Fischer and Sperone continued operating their respective galleries in Düsseldorf and Turin.Westwater worked briefly for John Weber at his gallery at 420 West Broadway, the first gallery building in SoHo, before becoming the Managing Editor at Artforum from 1972 to 1975. Bruce Nauman, who first exhibited with the gallery in 1976 (and held his fifteenth solo show there in 2024), said of Westwater: “The first time I met her, the gallery had just opened. She was so nervous. She had the art background but not the sales experience, so she learned it. She had to learn it. She was like Leo Castelli in the sense that the work was the work, and she is deeply invested in her artists' work.”

Opening at 142 Greene Street as the SoHo gallery scene emerged, Sperone Westwater later expanded to a second location at 121 Greene Street. In 2002, the gallery moved ahead of the curve to the Meatpacking District at 415 West 13th Street. Artists Alexis Rockman, Kim Dingle and Bertozzi & Casoni were among the artists joining the gallery’s dynamic program around this time. In 2010, Sperone Westwater inaugurated its award-winning building at 257 Bowery, designed by Norman Foster, with a solo exhibition by Guillermo Kuitca. The building—known for its distinctive “moving room”—was among the first purpose-built galleries in New York commissioned from a major architect. In 2011, the Municipal Art Society of New York presented Foster + Partners their MASterworks Award of Best New Building for Sperone Westwater at 257 Bowery. Over the past decade, a new generation of artists has joined the program, including Joana Choumali, Shaunté Gates, Jim Gaylord, Jitish Kallat, Amy Lincoln, Katy Moran, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Kyungmi Shin and Kevin Umaña, contributing to the gallery’s innovative and evolving identity.

Artists featured in Sperone Westwater: 50 Years are Carl Andre, Bertozzi & Casoni, Alighiero e Boetti, Joana Choumali, Francesco Clemente, Hanne Darboven, Kim Dingle, Shaunté Gates, Jim Gaylord, Peter Halley, Jitish Kallat, On Kawara, Guillermo Kuitca, Wolfgang Laib, Helmut Lang, Charles LeDray, Sol LeWitt, Amy Lincoln, Richard Long, Emil Lukas, David Lynch, Heinz Mack, Brice Marden, Mario Merz, Katy Moran, Malcolm Morley, Bruce Nauman, Mimmo Paladino, Otto Piene, Alexis Rockman, Gamalíel Rodriguez, Susan Rothenberg, Robert Ryman, Peter Sacks, Peter Schlesinger, Julian Schnabel, Kyungmi Shin, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Kevin Umaña, Andy Warhol, William Wegman.

SPERONE WESTWATER

257 Bowery New York, NY 10002

www.speronewestwater.com

The Shape of What You Lived @ Sperone Westwater, New York - Francesco Clemente, Todd Gray, Hayv Kahraman, Jitish Kallat, Byron Kim, Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Long, David Lynch, Christopher Myers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Sacks, Kyungmi Shin, Kevin Umaña, William Wegman

The Shape of What You Lived

Francesco Clemente, Todd Gray, Hayv Kahraman, Jitish Kallat, Byron Kim, Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Long, David Lynch, Christopher Myers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Sacks, Kyungmi Shin, Kevin Umaña, William Wegman

Sperone Westwater, New York

26 June – 1 August 2025

Sperone Westwater presents The Shape of What You Lived. Borrowing its title from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem Remembrance, the exhibition brings together artists who transform diaristic practice and personal record into visual form through text, texture, material and mark.  Artists included are Francesco Clemente, Todd Gray, Hayv Kahraman, Jitish Kallat, Byron Kim, Guillermo Kuitca, Richard Long, David Lynch, Christopher Myers, Bruce Nauman, Peter Sacks, Kyungmi Shin, Kevin Umaña and William Wegman.

In the main gallery, the works examine memory and reflect the artists’ interior worlds.  Through fragmented imagery in the composition, Guillermo Kuitca’s monumental Untitled (2008) creates an indecipherable map evoking absence, disorientation and drift.  In Flower (2020), David Lynch assembles a wounded face and scattered text that conjures a dreamlike state. Hayv Kahraman’s HyperInvisible 3 (2019) presents a contorted, abstracted female figure – an avatar for consciousness shaped by colonial violence. In Spirit Marker (2023), Peter Sacks constructs a sculptural relief from fragments of clothing, electronics and jewelry.  These layered materials evoke a psychological terrain shaped by loss and survival, where the detritus of daily life become vessels for remembrance.  

In the east gallery, works by Todd Gray and Kyungmi Shin consider how individual narratives are shaped by historical forces. Kyungmi Shin’s to be appetite of your own appetite (2024) layers archival family photographs with painting to explore myth, ornament and the legacy of empires, reflecting her experience as an Asian diasporic artist in the U.S. In Other tellings (Sedabuda, Florence, Paris) (2024), Todd Gray assembles photographs of a sculpture in Le Jardin des Tuileries flanked by self-portraits of the artist covered in shaving cream, questioning whiteness and notions of self. He continually collects and mines his own image library—a process he describes as “appropriating his own archive”—to create sculptural constructions that fuse personal and institutional memory.  On the second floor, Christopher Myers’s textile work reinterprets the myth of Telemachus, offering a parable about the search for origins and identity. As Myers writes: “History is the story of where you have come from, mythology is the story of why and where you are going.”  

Also on the second floor, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman capture everyday rituals as metaphors for artistic practice. In Setting a Good Corner (Allegory & Metaphor) (1999), Bruce Nauman documents the building of a fence on his New Mexico ranch, transforming a practical chore into a meditation on the art of living: patience, preparation, laying a foundation, taking advice, thinking in stages and doing what’s necessary.  William Wegman’s Three to Four (1971-72) presents 81 permutations of three men engaged in mundane actions – listening to the radio, drinking a Coke, reading the newspaper – transforming routine gestures into a study of variation, sequence and habit.  

On the third floor, the exhibition shifts focus to the self in relation to landscape and the passage of time.  Richard Long’s Houston Circle, originally created for a 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from local materials, reflects a core tenet of his practice: “every work in the landscape is absolutely a meeting place of who I am and the topography.” Installed nearby are three panels from Byron Kim’s Sunday Paintings series; since 2001, Kim has painted a square of the sky each week paired with handwritten notes—brief reflections that form an ongoing record of time, weather and mood. In Wind Study (Hilbert Curve) (2017), Jitish Kallat overlays graphite drawings with flammable liquid and ignites the surface, allowing wind and smoke to mark the page. The resulting images, shaped by invisible forces, echo his interest in patterns that repeat across nature and history.  

SPERONE WESTWATER

257 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

www.speronewestwater.com

Charles LeDray, Sperone Westwater, NYC

Charles LeDray 
Sperone Westwater, New York
30 January – 1 March 2003

Sperone Westwater presents an exhibition of new sculpture by Charles LeDray. For his first exhibition in New York since 1996, the artist exhibits eight new works. Among these, Charles LeDray presents thousands of glazed ceramic vessel forms in two steel and glass vitrines; a sculpture of a cricket cage fashioned out of human bone; and “Charly Chas” a sculpture that appears to be a portrait of its maker. Also on view is a sculpture in denim that was ripped, distressed, pieced and appliqued with embroidered patches, metal and leather attachments.

The artist is currently the subject of a traveling survey exhibition, “Charles LeDray, Sculpture 1989 – 2002,” organized by the ICA Philadelphia (11 May – 14 July 2002), with subsequent venues at The Arts Club of Chicago (20 September – 21 December, 2002), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (25 January – 6 April 2003), Seattle Art Museum (26 April – 27 July 2003). In reviewing the show for The New York Times (31 May 2002), Holland Cotter writes, “Mr. LeDray’s art is on its own formal track and occupies its own psychic universe. In it, fear, loss and anger lie close to the bone; humor is dark but pervasive; and art, in the form of self-tutored virtuosity, makes past and present alike manageable, sometimes transcendently so.”

Charles LeDray’s work can be found in the following public collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Seattle Art Museum; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1993 he received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and in 1997 he received the Prix de Rome from the American Academy in Rome.

A full-color catalogue was produced on the occasion of his current retrospective by the ICA and includes an introduction by the director, Claudia Gould, as well as a conversation between her and the artist and an essay by Russell Ferguson, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Programs and Chief Curator, UCLA Hammer Museum.

SPERONE WESTWATER - NEW YORK
www.speronewestwater.com

Updated 04.07.2019

Alighiero e Boetti, Sperone Westwater, NYC - Simmetria Asimmetria

Alighiero e Boetti: Simmetria Asimmetria 
Sperone Westwater, New York
10 January – 2 March 2002

Sperone Westwater announces an exhibition of “Biro” works by Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994). Consisting of ball-point pen ink on paper mounted on canvas, these works are from a series which began in Rome in 1972 and continued through the late 1980s.

Collaborating with assistants, Alighiero e Boetti used four standard ink colors (blue, black, red and green) to mark small repetitive strokes, often covering the entire sheet. The artist would leave letters and symbols (often commas) as exposed white ground or negative space. This exhibition includes works representing each type of iconography that Alighiero e Boetti used in his design of these visual structures.

Many of the works contain puzzles, puns and linguistic codes, wherein letters of the alphabet run horizontally or vertically along the margin of the sheet. This line of letters creates a composition that becomes graph-like, and the title of the work is often revealed as the viewer connects commas with corresponding letters horizontally and vertically. In some works like I sei sensi, 1973 and Dimenticare il tempo perduto, 1982 the charting of commas extends across two, even five panels. This unlocking of the artist’s created system simulates the very basic way in which the human mind apprehends and functions, unfolding worlds and bringing new meaning up through the medium and into the light.

His classic Aerei, or “Airplanes” series is also featured. Here, the artist leaves as negative space line drawings of modern and historical airplanes. Originally culled from popular magazine sources, these images construct an illusionary space of action and movement.

A publication will be available with reproductions of every work in the exhibition.

Alighiero e Boetti: Simmetria Asimetria

Published by Sperone Westwater, New York, 2002

Text by Annemarie Sauzeau Boetti 

Forty-two pages with fifteen full color plates 

including four foldout images

Hardbound with wrappers, 9 x 11 1/2 inches.

A small survey exhibition “Alighiero e Boetti” at The Arts Club of Chicago will run concurrently, 24 January – 6 April 2002, for which there will also be a publication. The exhibition is curated by Kathy Cottong.

SPERONE WESTWATER - NEW YORK
www.speronewestwater.com

Updated 04.07.2019

Wolfgang Laib, Sperone Westwater, NYC

Wolfgang Laib: Nowhere-Everywhere 
Sperone Westwater, New York
2 May - 13 June 1998

Sperone Westwater announces an exhibition by WOLFGANG LAIB.

The artist presents a new installation of ziggurat-like forms in beeswax, which will fill the gallery from floor to ceiling concealing various architectural details of the gallery space. The exhibition also features Rice House, 1996, a five-foot long marble floor sculpture in the shape of a house surrounded by mounds of white rice. The ziggurat and the house are primary structures, reflecting the artist's interest in pre-modern and non-western dwellings and spiritual places.

Born in 1950 in Metzingen, Germany, WOLFGANG LAIB originally studied medicine at the University of Tübingen. Disillusioned with Western medicine and science, he came to view the natural sciences as limited in their dependency on logic and the material world. His search for something else led him to Eastern spiritualism, philosophy, and pre-Renaissance thought. Since 1975, Wolfgang Laib has worked exclusively as an artist and has built an international reputation. A one-person exhibition was recently held at The Arts Club of Chicago. Wolfang Laib has held solo shows at the Capc/Musee d'art contemporain de Bordeaux (1986 and 1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1989), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1990), the Centre George Pompidou, Paris (1992), The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn (1993). In the past year he participated in the Venice Biennale. His work was also included in Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, which was organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York and traveled to the Hayward Gallery, London. His work can be found in museum collections worldwide.

SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK
www.speronewestwater.com

Updated 04.07.2019