Patience is a Virtue

The five-story Grosvenor Building is a stately monument to old school Manhattan. With a slate grey, cast iron façade, the TriBeCa warehouse was once home to a bygone manufacturing era. Now, the building anchors Marian Goodman Gallery’s shining New York flagship, relocated from West 57th Street. On Saturday, groups traveled up and down three floors of the gallery’s new location at 385 Broadway. The inaugural group show, titled “Your Patience Is Appreciated,” features each of the 50 artists on Marian Goodman’s international roster, including Maurizio Cattelan, Chantal Akerman, Julie Mehretu, and Anri Sala. While the works on view span nearly 60 years and are extremely varied in scale, medium, and theme, together they represent the gallery’s past, present, and future.

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Immediately upon entrance, Cattelan's Ghosts, 2021, greets guests: Stationed alone on a great, white wall, three of the artist’s trademark taxidermied pigeons rest atop a large found canvas. It reads “I love NY” and is signed again and again like a commemorative summer camp T-shirt. Though when inspected closer, these signatures are mostly expressions of condolence for the 9/11 strikes on the World Trade Center. In the next room, a haunting piece from Julie Mehretu entitled Filmstrip - Black Monolith of the Levant, 2013-2024, looms above works including a single diptych by artist Marcel Broodthaers with whom Marian Goodman opened its original location in 1977. James Coleman’s Retake with Evidence, 2021, plays in the next room next door across an enormous screen, in which the actor Harvey Keitel, blinded, recites Oedipal monologues.

While the first floor seems rooted in the past, the second offers a meditative collection of works united in their connection to the natural world and grounded in the present. Among them are two illustrations by Italian artist Giuseppe Penone. Propagazione (“Propagation”), 1995-2019, which took 24 years to complete, is a colossal, pulsating ripple that stems from five fingerprints and resembles the rings of a Sycamore tree. While Unghia e foglie di alloro (“Nail and bay leaves”), 1989, is a lovely yet plaintive piece that recalls burial. In the middle of a pile of bay leaves, a thick piece of tempered glass with eery handprints creates a dome akin to a tomb, enshrining the leaves in the center.

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Up top, on the third floor, artists probe the political moment and consider the future. Annette Messager’s Papier peint Utérus (Wallpaper Uterus), 2017, imagines autonomos IUDs—angry and with their middle fingers up. Tony Cragg’s futuristic, stainless steel sculptures glisten like globular robots. And Edi Rama’s ceramic counterparts are mutated like extra terrestrial creatures.

“Your Patience Is Appreciated” is a triumphant showcase of where Marian Goodman has gone before where it is headed next. The move to Grosvenor comes after the eponymous gallerist appointed five partners to formally lead operations under her as CEO: President and Partner Philipp Kaiser, as well as Emily-Jane Kirwan, Rose Lord, Leslie Nolen, and Junette Teng. Though her namesake is nearing 50, Marian Goodman is midway through her 90s. When she opened her gallery’s first location on West 57th Street in 1977, followed by the gallery’s European outpost in Paris in 1998, the art world looked much different than it does today—its change due in some part to the gallery’s effort to shepherd the European avant-garde in America. Since the leadership shift in 2021, its London gallery space closed in 2022 after 8 years, and a Los Angeles space opened its doors in 2023. Now, this monumental though long-anticipated move downtown marks a new chapter. All the art world can do is wait and watch to see what’s next.

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“Your Patience Is Appreciated” is on view through December 14, 2024 at Marian Goodman Gallery at 385 Broadway, New York, NY 10013.