There is a particular kind of gallery that operates somewhere between the museum and the market — one that mounts exhibitions with the scholarly rigour of an institution, the connoisseurship of a great private collection, and the commercial intelligence of a world-class dealership. Skarstedt Gallery is one of the finest examples of this type. Founded in New York in 1994 by the Swedish-born dealer Per Skarstedt, the gallery has spent three decades building one of the most coherent and ambitious programmes in the international art world, representing artists whose work spans the full arc of post-war and contemporary practice — from Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning to KAWS and Cristina BanBan — while consistently staging exhibitions that reframe how we understand the history of the past eighty years.
Today, Skarstedt operates from four locations: two in New York (Upper East Side and Chelsea), one in Paris (2 Avenue Matignon), and one in London (15 Old Bond Street, Mayfair), which opened in autumn 2025 . The gallery’s programme navigates fluidly between the primary and secondary markets, presenting solo exhibitions of new work alongside historically focused surveys that reunite seminal bodies of work for the first time in decades. It is a model that requires not only deep knowledge of art history but an exceptional network of relationships — with artists, estates, collectors, and institutions — built and sustained over a lifetime in the field.
Per Skarstedt: The Dealer as Connoisseur
Per Skarstedt was born in Stockholm and moved to New York in 1992. He opened his first gallery space on the Upper East Side in 1994, at a moment when the New York art world was still absorbing the aftermath of the late-1980s market crash and recalibrating its relationship with the generation of artists — Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Christopher Wool, Mike Kelley — who had defined the previous decade’s most challenging and provocative work. These were artists whose practices were rooted in appropriation, conceptual rigour, and a deep scepticism of the art object’s claims to authenticity and originality. They were also, by the mid-1990s, artists whose market was beginning to recover and whose historical significance was becoming clearer.
Skarstedt’s early programme was built around precisely this generation. Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman were among the first artists he exhibited, and they remain central to the gallery’s identity today . The choice was not merely commercial — it reflected a genuine curatorial conviction that the Pictures Generation represented one of the most significant ruptures in American art since Abstract Expressionism, and that their work deserved the kind of sustained, museum-quality presentation that most commercial galleries were not yet providing.
From the outset, Skarstedt positioned the gallery as a space where historical rigour and contemporary relevance could coexist. “Building the program between the primary and secondary markets,” the gallery has noted, “Skarstedt has always been focused on creating a dialogue between the generations” . This dialogue — between the post-war masters who established the conditions for contemporary practice and the living artists who are extending and transforming those conditions — is the animating principle of everything the gallery does.
The Programme: A Dialogue Across Generations
The breadth of Skarstedt’s artist roster is, in itself, a statement of curatorial intent. The gallery works with artists and estates spanning three generations and two continents, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, KAWS, Mike Kelley, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Martin Kippenberger, Juan Muñoz, Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and a growing number of younger artists including Cristina BanBan, Chantal Joffe, and Yuan Fang .
What unites this roster is not a single style or movement but a set of shared concerns: the relationship between figuration and abstraction, the politics of representation and identity, the tension between high and low culture, and the question of what painting can still do in an era saturated by images. These are the questions that have driven the most significant art of the past eighty years, and Skarstedt’s programme traces their evolution with exceptional consistency.
The gallery’s thematic group exhibitions are among its most distinctive contributions to the field. Faces and Figures (2023), which sprawled across all three locations simultaneously — New York, London, and Paris — brought together works by Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, George Condo, Willem de Kooning, Eric Fischl, Alberto Giacometti, Chantal Joffe, KAWS, Pablo Picasso, Cindy Sherman, and Andy Warhol to examine the enduring centrality of the human figure in post-war art. The exhibition demonstrated how figuration has served as a vehicle for everything from existential inquiry (Bacon) to identity politics (Sherman) to the interrogation of popular culture (KAWS), and how these apparently disparate practices are, in fact, part of a continuous conversation .
Similarly, Black/White (2021) used the chromatic constraint of two colours to explore the formal and conceptual range of works by George Condo, KAWS, Albert Oehlen, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Wool — artists whose practices might seem very different but who share a commitment to using the most reduced means to achieve the most complex effects. These exhibitions are not merely commercial exercises; they are acts of art-historical interpretation, proposing connections and genealogies that enrich our understanding of the works on view.
Key Artists and Landmark Exhibitions
Francis Bacon has been a cornerstone of the Skarstedt programme since the gallery’s earliest years. The estate’s relationship with Skarstedt has enabled a series of focused exhibitions that have reaffirmed Bacon’s position as the defining figurative painter of the twentieth century. Faces and Figures in New York featured Bacon’s Study for Self-Portrait (1979), a late work in which the artist confronted his own mortality with characteristic unflinching intensity — the weathered face rendered in the distorted, visceral manner that made Bacon’s portraits unlike anything else in the history of painting .
Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince represent the Pictures Generation at its most intellectually rigorous. Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and her subsequent series of increasingly elaborate self-transformations have been shown at Skarstedt in contexts that illuminate both their formal sophistication and their ongoing relevance to debates about gender, representation, and the construction of identity. Prince’s appropriation works — his rephotographed cowboys, his joke paintings, his nurse paintings — have similarly been presented with the kind of sustained attention that reveals the depth of conceptual intelligence beneath their apparently provocative surfaces.
Albert Oehlen has been one of the gallery’s most important long-term relationships. Skarstedt’s early commitment to Oehlen — showing his late-1980s “Fn Paintings” at the Upper East Side gallery in 2019, for example, and selling a major work out of the Art Basel booth for $2.5 million the same year — helped establish the German painter as one of the most significant artists of his generation . The gallery’s sustained advocacy for Oehlen’s work, across multiple decades and multiple phases of his practice, is a model of how a gallery can contribute to the long-term development of an artist’s reputation and market.
Martin Kippenberger — whose estate Skarstedt represents in the United States in collaboration with Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne — has been the subject of a series of historically significant exhibitions, including The Late Paintings (2025), which presented Kippenberger’s final works and reaffirmed his status as one of the most inventive and irreverent artists of the post-war period. Kippenberger’s combination of wit, formal intelligence, and radical self-awareness — his ability to make paintings that are simultaneously jokes and masterpieces — has been a recurring touchstone for the gallery’s programme .
More recently, the gallery has expanded its programme to include artists working in the present. Cristina BanBan, the Spanish-born, New York-based painter whose large-scale figurative works have attracted significant critical and commercial attention, joined the gallery and had her inaugural New York exhibition with Skarstedt in 2024. Chantal Joffe, the British painter whose intimate, psychologically acute portraits have made her one of the most important figurative artists working today, presented My Dearest Dust at Skarstedt New York in 2024 — a body of self-portraits that marked a significant shift in her practice, accompanied by an essay by the writer Olivia Laing . Yuan Fang, the Chinese-born, New York-based painter whose densely layered works explore the intersection of Eastern and Western visual traditions, has been among the gallery’s most exciting recent additions, with solo exhibitions in New York in 2024 and 2025.
Expanding the Map: London, Paris, and the Global Programme
Skarstedt’s expansion beyond New York has been carefully managed and strategically significant. The Paris gallery, which opened in October 2021 at 2 Avenue Matignon — a 240-square-metre, two-level space renovated by the celebrated interior designer Jacques Grange — was inaugurated with an exhibition of new paintings by Eric Fischl and has since hosted a programme that complements and extends the New York and London offerings . The Paris location is led by Senior Director Maria Cifuentes, who brings extensive experience from Phillips and Galerie Templon, and whose deep relationships with collectors in France and internationally have enabled the gallery to engage with the Parisian art world on its own terms.
The London gallery’s move to 15 Old Bond Street, Mayfair — one of the most prestigious addresses in the global art market — in autumn 2025 marked a further consolidation of Skarstedt’s international presence. The new space, designed by architect Tom Croft, brings the gallery into the heart of London’s commercial art district, in proximity to other major international galleries and the auction houses. The inaugural programme at Old Bond Street included On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary (February–April 2025), a characteristically ambitious thematic exhibition that placed Skarstedt’s contemporary artists in dialogue with medieval works, exploring the aesthetic category of ugliness across eight centuries .
The multi-city programme has enabled Skarstedt to mount exhibitions that function simultaneously across locations — as Faces and Figures demonstrated — creating a kind of distributed curatorial argument that no single-space gallery could achieve. It also allows the gallery to respond to the different tastes and collecting cultures of New York, London, and Paris, presenting the same artists in different contexts and to different audiences.
Between the Primary and Secondary Markets
One of Skarstedt’s most distinctive characteristics is its fluency in both the primary and secondary art markets — a combination that remains relatively unusual among galleries of its calibre. Most major galleries operate primarily in the primary market, working with living artists to sell new work; most secondary-market dealers focus on reselling existing works by established names. Skarstedt does both, and the interplay between the two enriches the programme considerably.
The secondary-market dimension of the gallery’s work — its ability to reunite seminal bodies of work, to stage historical surveys of pivotal moments in twentieth-century art, and to present major works by artists whose primary market representation lies elsewhere — gives the programme a depth and historical range that few primary-market galleries can match. When Skarstedt mounts an exhibition of Bacon’s late self-portraits or Kippenberger’s final paintings, it is not merely offering works for sale; it is making an argument about the history of art and the significance of particular moments within it.
The primary-market dimension, meanwhile — the gallery’s relationships with living artists including BanBan, Joffe, Fang, and others — ensures that the programme remains connected to the present, that the historical framework it constructs is not merely retrospective but actively engaged with what is happening now. The dialogue between generations that Per Skarstedt has always described as central to the gallery’s identity is made possible by this dual engagement with both markets.
Why Skarstedt Matters
In an art world increasingly dominated by mega-galleries with global footprints and diversified business models, Skarstedt occupies a distinctive and important position. It is not the largest gallery in the world, nor the most commercially aggressive, nor the most institutionally connected. What it is, consistently and with remarkable coherence over three decades, is one of the most intellectually serious.
The gallery’s programme reflects a genuine and sustained engagement with the questions that matter most in post-war and contemporary art: What is the relationship between figuration and abstraction? How do artists negotiate the competing claims of formal innovation and historical responsibility? What does it mean to make painting — or sculpture, or photography — in the aftermath of Modernism? These are not questions with easy answers, and Skarstedt’s programme does not pretend to resolve them. What it does is create the conditions in which they can be asked with maximum clarity and intelligence.
Per Skarstedt has built, over thirty years, something that is rarer than it might appear: a gallery with a genuine point of view. The artists he represents, the exhibitions he mounts, the spaces he inhabits, the collectors he cultivates — all of these reflect a coherent vision of what art can do and why it matters. In a field where commercial pressures can easily overwhelm curatorial conviction, that is no small achievement.
Explore Further
Skarstedt Gallery — View Gallery Profile on Art United
FAQ
When was Skarstedt Gallery founded and by whom?
Skarstedt Gallery was founded in 1994 by Per Skarstedt, a Swedish-born art dealer who moved to New York in 1992. The gallery opened its first space on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, with Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman among its earliest exhibited artists.
Where are Skarstedt Gallery’s locations?
Skarstedt currently operates from four locations: two in New York (20 East 79th Street on the Upper East Side, and 547 West 25th Street in Chelsea), one in Paris (2 Avenue Matignon, 75008), and one in London (15 Old Bond Street, Mayfair, W1S 4PR). The London location moved to Old Bond Street in autumn 2025.
Which artists does Skarstedt Gallery represent?
Skarstedt’s roster spans three generations of post-war and contemporary art, including Francis Bacon, Georg Baselitz, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cristina BanBan, George Condo, Willem de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Chantal Joffe, KAWS, Mike Kelley, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Barbara Kruger, Martin Kippenberger (estate), Albert Oehlen, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, David Salle, Cindy Sherman, Rosemarie Trockel, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, and Yuan Fang, among others.
What distinguishes Skarstedt Gallery from other major galleries?
Skarstedt operates across both the primary and secondary art markets, presenting new work by living artists alongside historically focused surveys that reunite seminal bodies of work. This dual engagement allows the gallery to create a sustained dialogue between post-war masters and contemporary practitioners — a curatorial approach that gives the programme unusual historical depth and contemporary relevance.
What are some of Skarstedt Gallery’s most notable recent exhibitions?
Recent highlights include Faces and Figures (2023), a tri-location exhibition spanning New York, London, and Paris; Martin Kippenberger: The Late Paintings (New York, 2025); Fernand Léger: The Mechanical Paintings, 1918–1923 (New York, 2025–26); Andy Warhol: Oxidation Paintings (New York, 2025); On Ugliness: Medieval and Contemporary (London, 2025); and John Chamberlain: Compressed Forms (Paris, 2026).
