Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles

Gagosian is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by the Armenian-American art dealer, Larry Gagosian, who developed a reputation for staging museum-quality exhibitions of contemporary art. Born in Los Angeles, Gagosian opened his first galleries on Almont Drive and Robertson Boulevard in the early 1980s. Gagosian Beverly Hills, designed by acclaimed American architect Richard Meier, opened its doors for the first time in 1995 with new sculptures by Frank Stella, and later mounted exhibitions by Edward Ruscha, Nan Goldin, Frank Gehry, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince.

One of the leading contemporary galleries, it has showed modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein and Abstract Expressionism group exhibitions, as well as all the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries including Andy Warhol, Gregory Crewdson, Taryn Simon, Tom Sachs and others.

In 2010, the expansion of the Beverly Hills gallery into the next-door building to create a second light-filled space of equal scale — again designed by Meier — enabled even more ambitious programming, with major exhibitions by Urs Fischer, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons, Giuseppe Penone, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Taryn Simon, among others.

At Gagosian’s much-anticipated “Oscar shows,” an annual fixture in the Los Angeles cultural calendar, the art, film, and celebrity communities rub shoulders prior to the Academy Awards ceremony.