Angela Westwater’s ‘Trumpian Expression of Ambition’ on Lower East Side
By Zeke Turner December 2, 2010 5:23 pm
reprints
The new Sperone Westwater gallery at 257 Bowery, just a block away from the New Museum, is Lord Norman Foster’s second building to be completed in New York after the Hearst Tower. The Lower East Side is getting real arty! Lord Foster finished his first sketches for the gallery at a holiday party in St. Moritz, Switzerland in 2007, when the gallerists Angela Westwater and Gian Enzo Sperone showed him photos of the L.E.S. lot they purchased for $8.5 million to expand from their space on West 13th Street.
The gallerists hammered out the details over pizza with the architect on the Swiss mountaintop, according to The New York Times‘ Alex Williams, who described the eight-story tower in today’s edition as a “Trumpian expression of ambition.”
Ealier The Times’ Linda Yablonsky described Lord Foster’s building as an “eight-story shaft thrusting its metallic black, milky-glass way up.” But Angela Westwater, in her third interview with the newspaper about the space, was pretty reserved — not Trumpian, not thrusting shaft–like. “It’s the burgeoning spirit that we’re more interested in, rather than creating any kind of mausoleum,” said Ms. Westwater, a former managing editor of Artforum in the 1970s. “There are enough museums out there to do that.”
zturner@observer.com
