Larry Gagosian

Lawrence Gilbert "Larry" Gagosian (born April 19, 1945) is an Armenian American art dealer who owns the Gagosian Gallery chain of art galleries. Working in concert with collectors including Douglas S. Cramer, Eli Broad and Keith Barish he developed a reputation for staging museum quality exhibitions.

Life and career

Gagosian was born in Los Angeles, California, the elder of two siblings, to Armenian parents. His grandparents immigrated from Armenia; he and his parents were born in California. Between 1963 and 1969, he pursued a major in English literature at UCLA. He worked briefly in a record store, a bookstore, a supermarket, and in an entry-level job as Michael Ovitz’s secretary at the William Morris Agency, but got his start in the art business by selling posters near the campus of UCLA in Los Angeles. He closed his poster shop around 1976, when a former restaurant facility became available in the same complex on Westwood's Broxton Avenue, and upgraded to prints by artists like Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander. His gallery Prints on Broxton was renamed the Broxton Gallery when he began to show a wider array of contemporary art. The gallery worked with up-and-coming artists such as Vija Celmins, Alexis Smith, and Elyn Zimmerman, and staged exhibitions such as "Broxton Sequences: Sequential Imagery in Photography", which included the work of John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman.