West Gallery: Inaugural Exhibition

Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl is pleased to announce the gallery’s expansion to include the entire third floor of our Chelsea location. Now in our thirty-third year of exhibiting and representing the fine art editioned publications of the Los Angeles-based artists’ workshop, Gemini G.E.L., the gallery is adding an exhibition space devoted to long-term rotating presentations of large-scale works. Gemini G.E.L. has a long history of redefining the possibilities of medium, size and scale in contemporary prints and editioned sculptures, and the additional 1,000 square-footage of exhibition space will allow us to highlight the richness of that history and accommodate the creative needs of our artists’ future endeavors.

From the founding in 1984 of a modest, by-appointment business in a Crosby Street loft, with its miniscule antique elevator, to a decade of glory-days on West Broadway in the 1990s, over the years the gallery has expanded and contracted, moved uptown and back downtown, all responding to the demands of the real estate market. And now we’ve taken a momentous step with the gallery’s expansion: we can finally show the remarkable range of what prints and multiples can be, and to be able to do it simultaneously with three distinctive spaces is thrilling. The intimate Project Space allows us to present bodies of work that are small both in scale and in scope. The main gallery introduces new publications. And the newly-added West Gallery gives us the pleasure of presenting rarely-seen large-scale works that are visible proof that over its fifty-year history the Gemini workshop has offered artists the opportunity to create some of the most iconic and important editioned works imaginable.

The prestigious architectural firm Stamberg Aferiat + Associates, who designed our gallery five years ago, was hired to create the expanded West Gallery. Daring to rebel against the typical white cube aesthetic, the firm consistently incorporates a brazenly innovative use of color. Two of the gallery walls are painted in shades of chartreuse, indicative of their belief that art stands out on colored walls.

The inaugural exhibition includes Jonathan Borofsky’s white metal silhouette Man with a Briefcase, Julie Mehretu’s quartet of etchings, Myriads, Only by Dark, and Isamu Noguchi’s galvanized steel sculpture, Mountains Forming. Also presented is Robert Rauschenberg’s hand-painted brass sculpture, Borealis Shares II, Allen Ruppersberg’s 20-foot long screenprint, Great Speckled Bird, and Richard Serra’s monumental and highly textured Paintstik edition, Double Rift V. Future installations will feature works by John Baldessari, John Chamberlain, Sophie Calle, Ellsworth Kelly, Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman and others, continuing the gallery’s commitment to presenting the Gemini G.E.L. workshop’s remarkable range in the making of fine art editions.