Profile

Barbara Gladstone is the obvious gallery owner for art investors or gossip columnists to follow: over 25 years of practice have tuned her professional instincts to perfect pitch. Artists represented by Gladstone are among the most dependably popular—and profitable—in recent contemporary art. Among the most successful are Iranian photographer and filmmaker Shirin Neshat, young British photographer and installation artist Sarah Lucas, and sculptor and filmmaker Matthew Barney whose series of Cremaster films was co-produced by Gladstone herself. The shows, naturally, are must-see events, and Gladstone's spectacularly cavernous gallery space is one of the largest and most imposing in Chelsea's high-rent district. The lofty rooms exemplify the local industrial aesthetic: cracked cement floors surrounded by blindingly white walls, large loft-like rooms subdivided into smaller but still ample spaces, and so on. It's all strategically designed for optimum display of installations that are physically—or at the very least, conceptually—larger than life. — Steffani Jemison