Unauthorized Larry Gagosian Documentary Goes Inside His Art Empire
Former employees and artists of the mega-dealer spill in a new documentary by Barry Avrich.
Summary
- Cameras roll on Shadow Man: Inside The Secret World of Larry Gagosian, an unauthorized documentary on the New York mega-dealer
- Directed Barry Avrich, little is known about the project so far save from interviews with former employees and artists
- Gagosian’s team was allegedly unaware of the project when Page Six broke the news
Larry Gagosian, the New York titan art dealer, is the unbeknownst star of an upcoming documentary by director Barry Avrich.
From what we know about Shadow Man: Inside The Secret World of Larry Gagosian so far, “former employees and artists are lining up to tell their juicy Larry stories and scoop on the inner workings of the Gagosian empire,” wrote Page Six, who first broke the story after rumors about the film made their rounds. The project was later confirmed by Avrich’s team in an email to ARTnews.
Gagosian launched his first gallery in LA in 1980, and has opened 17 more since. A global force in contemporary art, its 112-name artist roster is of the most star-studded, including everyone from Ed Ruscha, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Tyler Mitchell and Takashi Murakami, with outposts spanning, New York, Paris, Hong Kong, London, Basel, Athens and beyond.
“The dealer has been so successful selling art to masters of the universe that he has become one of them,” reads The New Yorker‘s 17,000-word, profile on the art heavyweight from 2023. “Gagosian is not a household name for most Americans, but among the famous and the wealthy — and particularly among the very wealthy — he is a figure of colossal repute.”
The Gagosian documentary will be Avrich’s third investigation into the art world following his 2020 film Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art and Blurred Lines: Inside the Art World in 2017. The latter featured plenty of blue-chip names, like Marina Abramović, Damien Hirst and Rashid Johnson in an exposé of “the provocative contemporary art world, a glamorous and cutthroat game of genius versus commerce,” per its description.
Stay tuned for more details on Shadow Man.
