Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce our 55th Anniversary Exhibition, a celebratory group show marking over half a century of championing exceptional contemporary and modern art. Featuring paintings, works on paper, sculpture, film, and archival ephemera from the SFMOMA Library and SFAI archive, this ambitious exhibition showcases museum-quality works by contemporary and historical artists, illustrating Berggruen Gallery's extensive curatorial history as well as its commitment to the development of the arts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many of the works included in the show are on loan from private collections and have rarely been exhibited to the public. The exhibition will be on view from June 26 through August 14, 2025. The gallery will host an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, June 26, from 5–7 PM.

In May of 1970, John Berggruen Gallery opened its doors to the city of San Francisco on Grant Avenue. At 26 years old, after a professional flirtation with campaign politics, John Berggruen embarked on what would become a five-decade-long career as a gallery owner and art dealer. In its first year, John Berggruen Gallery exhibited the prints of modern masters such as Miró, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Magritte, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Jasper Johns, and Robert Indiana, to name a few. Quickly becoming a nationally recognized gallery in San Francisco, Berggruen Gallery played a major role in shaping the West Coast art scene, acting as an essential bridge between New York, international artists and West Coast collectors and art enthusiasts.

“Opening the gallery in 1970 in San Francisco, in an environment far removed from the energy of New York and Europe and against the better judgment of many well-seasoned veterans, I hoped somehow that it would be possible to create a viable gallery in the city where I had grown up. After working in London and New York, it occurred to me that there was no one exhibiting nationally or internationally known artists in San Francisco, so I proceeded to present shows by Miró, Picasso, Matisse, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Thiebaud. By the mid-1970s, the gallery’s program had expanded to include several California artists, such as Nathan Oliveira, Elmer Bischoff, Paul Wonner, and Richard Diebenkorn,” said John Berggruen.

Integral to the vision and evolution of Berggruen Gallery was Gretchen Berggruen, the gallery's co-owner and John Berggruen’s late wife. “Gretchen was the heart and soul of the gallery. Her expertise, drive, kindness, patience, and perseverance drove the gallery to be what it is today,” said John Berggruen. The gallery is perhaps best known for its championing of Californian artists, including David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Nathan Oliveira. The broadening success of Wayne Thiebaud and Mark di Suvero is attributed to Gretchen’s early working relationships with the artists. While at the Oakland Museum of California, Gretchen helped organize an outdoor sculpture show that included di Suvero’s controversial monumental sculpture, Mother Peace, now one of Storm King Art Center’s most iconic works. Mother peace is the last major piece that di Suvero completed before temporarily leaving America for Europe in protest of the U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam War. The vision and legacy of Gretchen Berggruen, the effervescent matriarch of Berggruen Gallery, continue to shape the gallery today.

In addition to playing an instrumental role in building the careers of California artists, the gallery staged ambitious exhibitions of historic significance, featuring works by Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, Henry Moore, and Henri Matisse. Berggruen Gallery was also the first San Francisco gallery to show works by Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella. Committed to collecting and exhibiting museum-quality works by the most prominent twentieth and twenty-first-century artists, Berggruen Gallery has made an indelible mark on the broader context of contemporary and modern art in San Francisco and beyond.

A collection of archival material will be presented alongside Heinz Berggruen's film Art in San Francisco (c. 1942), providing historical context for the city's creative scene and charting Berggruen Gallery's development as a force for art in the city. Only recently digitized, Art in San Francisco surveys the Bay Area art scene during the early years of World War II. Shot on 16mm film, Art in San Francisco includes scenes of the Montgomery Block art studios; artists at work such as Ralph Stackpole, Victor Arnautoff, Robert Boardman Howard, and Dong Kingman, among others; and public art throughout the city. The film takes a close look at classes and social life at the California School of Fine Arts (later known as the San Francisco Art Institute), the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, and community art exhibitions.

The Berggruen family’s history is significantly intertwined with San Francisco's own artistic past and present. A young Heinz emigrated from Germany to the West Coast. A German refugee in San Francisco during the war, he worked as an art critic, eventually becoming a close assistant to Diego Rivera during the artist's second stay in San Francisco, as Rivera produced his powerful mural The marriage of the artistic expression of the north and of the south on this continent (or Pan American Unity, 1940). Although Heinz would later return to Europe to open his own gallery in Paris, his time in San Francisco—encounters with David Park, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera—was significant in shaping his trajectory as a prominent collector and dealer of modern art.

The works presented in 55 years combine both contemporary and modernist traditions, drawing from a wide range of art historical movements such as Bay Area Figuration, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Neo Conceptualism, Photorealism, and Minimalism. The exhibition will also present new works by contemporary artists such as Val Britton, Dean Byington, Heather Day, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Jane Hammond, Clare Kirkconnell, Matt Kleberg, Paul Kremer, Anna Kunz, Barry McGee, Stephanie H. Shih, and Lucy Williams, among others.

Berggruen Gallery—across its various spaces and iterations—has offered San Francisco a place where world– class art can be seen, contemplated, and collected for 55 years and counting. John Berggruen continues to energetically promote fine art through his deep curatorial knowledge, ever-present enthusiasm—and always with humor he might joke, “Fifty-five years—isn’t that long enough?”.