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Chelsea’s Newest Mega-Gallery Embraces Its Gritty, Industrial Past

Yesterday afternoon, Hauser & Wirth opened the doors to its new space in Chelsea for a preview. The gallery’s only home until now in New York has been a townhouse on the Upper East Side, which, like all buildings of its sort, makes for a narrow, multilevel (and sometimes fragmented) art-viewing experience; the new gallery, the site of the former Roxy nightclub and roller rink on West 18th Street, is pretty much the opposite — a cavernous warehouse that, although it’s technically only one floor, seems to expand and spread in every direction.

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Waste Not, Want Not: Phyllida Barlow’s New Work

As my colleague Thomas Micchelli pointed out in his review of siege, Phyllida Barlow’s exhibition of sculpture at the New Museum earlier this year, she has something in common with Hans Hoffman. Both were teachers who have an impressive roster of distinguished students. In Hoffmann’s case, it included Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Alfred Jensen and Red Grooms. Barlow’s students include Douglas Gordon, Steve Pippin, Tacita Dean and Rachel Whiteread. However, whereas Hoffman’s students eclipsed their teacher, this is hardly the case with Barlow.

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Are Artists the Best Curators?

The most galvanizing room, hands down, in the current Whitney Biennial is the Forrest Bess micro-retrospective put together by sculptor Robert Gober. And on Tuesday, in what could be a trend, another museum-quality exhibition opened, organized by another sculptor — Matthew Day Jackson’s “Science on the back end” at Hauser & Wirth.