Industrial Sublime: Zwirner’s New Chelsea Flagship

Renowned Architect Annabelle Selldorf's design for Zwirner's new Chelsea gallery nods to the neighborhood's industrial path. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

By J. SCOTT ORR May 12, 2025

In the liminal space where Chelsea's industrial past collides with its art-saturated present, David Zwirner Gallery's new 30,000-square-foot flagship is an apt metaphor. The building, which includes sweeping gallery spaces and offices, joins New York's ever-evolving art ecosystem, while honoring the neighborhood's manufacturing heritage.

Zwirner’s new digs were unveiled May 8 with a press tour that coincided with the opening of  Crucible, a solo exhibition by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage. The show’s themes of migration, identity, and cultural displacement mesh nicely with the new gallery’s dualist aesthetic, providing a worthy first example of the space’s ability to ground artwork, while at the same time elevating it.

“I feel this great exhibition shows off this space beautifully,” said super-gallerist David Zwirner, during an afternoon press tour of the new space with Armitage.

David Zwirner, left, talks about his newly opened gallery with artist Michael Armitage. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

Designed by long-time Zwirner associate Annabelle Selldorf, an architect celebrated for her nuanced blend of functional rigor and aesthetic grace, the building is at once a gallery and an architectural manifesto—a bold statement that embodies Chelsea's dynamic, secades-long transformation from industrial hub to global art destination. Selldorf, by the way, is just off the monumental $220 million remake of the Frick Collection’s 1914 Fifth Avenue mansion and a similarly costly reno of London’s venerable National Gallery.

“I have, believe it or not, opened 17 galleries over the course of 30 something years and every single one of them was designed in conjunction with a great friend and a fellow German citizen, Annabelle Selldorf,” Zwirner said.

Selldorf, who was in London tending to her just completed renovation at the National Gallery, met Zwirner at a New York party in the 1980s and her architectural vision has been helping to shape Zwirner's global expansion ever since. The new Zwirner headquarters, located on 19th Street in the heart of Chelsea, is an exercise in duality, at once rough and refined. 

The interior of the building unfolds with a grand flourish: a column-free 5,000-square-foot main exhibition space that rivals the scale and sophistication of major museums. Four north-facing sawtooth skylights diffuse natural light across concrete floors, maintaining an industrial sensibility that resists the pitfalls of preciousness and pretension. 

Zwirner said the design was all about the quest for natural light.

“We want to get the maximum amount of natural light into these spaces, but, of course, in a city like New York, light is very hard to come by. So that is the driving force behind the design,” he said.

Also setting the building apart from Chelsea’s many other galleries is its revolutionary environmental performance. As the first LEED-certified commercial gallery in the United States, Zwirner's new space achieves Gold status, integrating five green roof spaces alongside premium efficiency mechanical systems, maximized daylighting and locally sourced materials. In an art world increasingly conscious of its environmental footprint, Zwirner's commitment to sustainability sets a precedent for institutional responsibility.

Artisit Michael Armitage with one of his works from Crucible at Zwirner's in one of the vast exhibition spaces in Zwiirner's new gallery. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

The space excels in showcasing Armitage’s work, and vice versa. This latest body of work continues his exploration of complex socio-political narratives filtered through a deeply personal lens. The carved teak panels introduce a sculptural dimension to his practice, expanding his investigation of migration beyond the painted surface. This material shift, which acknowledges wood carving's significance in East African artistic traditions, clashed meaningfully with the gallery’s severe geometry.

Armitage, whose international profile skyrocketed after designing the new £1 coin for the United Kingdom, led the assembled press through the new exhibition space at the opening.

A lone viewer is made small by the vastness of one of the rooms in Zwiirner's new gallery. Photo by Jamie Lubetkin

“My thinking about it really began maybe 10 years or so ago,” he said, standing in a dimly lit room off the main gallery where four teak wood carvings were displayed. In the next two much larger rooms, his works were bathed in that precious natural light Zwirner alluded to just moments earlier.

“Underlying all of the paintings and the panels that you see in this room have been reflections of migration. And in particular migration that runs through the Sahara and into the Mediterranean towards Europe,” Armitage said.

One painting, Don't Worry There Will Be More (2024), exemplifies how Armitage's dreamlike figurative compositions activate Selldorf's spaces through chromatic intensity and emotional resonance. Three figures emerge from a nocturnal landscape bathed in otherworldly blues and punctuated by fiery reds, their bodies simultaneously vulnerable and powerful.

The exhibition is Armitage's first solo presentation in New York since his 2019 "Projects 110" at The Museum of Modern Art, organized by The Studio Museum in Harlem. It runs at the new space at 533 West 19th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan through June 27.

A woman considers Armitage's piece "Don't Worry There Will Be More." Photo by Jamie Lubetkin