Since striking out on his own at the start of this year, the art dealer Gordon VeneKlasen, Michael Werner’s longtime gallery partner, has kept up a steady pace. The new gallery made its art fair debut at the inaugural Art Basel Qatar in Doha last month. He also took over Werner’s New York and London spaces, which will open under the new VeneKlasen Gallery identity on March 3 and 12, respectively. (Michael Werner’s former Los Angeles location has closed.) 

The two locations will debut with twin shows of the late German artist Sigmar Polke, an experimental trickster who VeneKlasen worked with for decades. Over a more than 30-year career as a gallerist, VeneKlasen has developed a reputation as something of an artist whisperer. As he embarks on this new chapter, we caught up with the dealer about his lucky break, how he has learned to build successful relationships with artists—a number of whom are following him into his new venture, including Florian Krewer, Issy Wood, and Sanya Kantarovsky—and how a little magic keeps things interesting.

You’ve shifted into and out of the arts during your career. What first drew you to art?

I joke that I learned about art from Bewitched. There was one particular episode where Endora [the main character’s overbearing mother, also a witch], says something about a Ming vase and a Renoir. I must have been five or six years old, and I thought, First of all, what’s that pronunciation of that word—vahz? And second of all, what’s a Renoir and what’s a Ming vase?

My parents were not unsophisticated, but art was not part of my childhood. We were driving across Texas, and I remember stopping at the Kimbell Art Museum where I saw a Renoir. I ended up going to college to study art history, and I went to Madrid my junior year. It was the first city I’d ever lived in and I went to the Prado every day. 

I went from there to London, and I ended up meeting [the art critic] John Berger, who said, “I can get you a position at the Ashmolean Museum.” So I went [to Oxford] two days a week, in the midst of all my other studies, and I worked there doing a research fellowship. They’d give me 100 Turner watercolors to look through.

And at one point you also worked for the Census Bureau?

My sister had gotten a grant from the Ford Foundation to open a women’s organization in Zimbabwe. I went for a month, and I stayed for almost a year. When I came back to New York after that, I needed a job, so I ended up going door to door doing the Census, especially complicated cases. I ended up in Stuyvesant Town with the people that wouldn’t answer a knock on the door. I was very much living in a Paul Auster novel and thinking I wanted to be a writer. And weirdly enough, Michael Werner started calling me. At that point, I had decided there was absolutely no way I was going back into the art business. 

Finally, I thought, as part of my novel that I’m working on, why not go meet Michael Werner and see what that would be like? That might be fascinating. I had a suit balled up in the corner of my closet, I shook it out with a certain sort of disdain, and went up to meet him. He was talking about how he was going to change the New York art world, and it was going to more or less come under his spell. And he said to me, “Would you come back tomorrow?” I thought, Oh, shit, if I go back tomorrow, then I might take a job. And if I take a job, then what am I going to do? So I figured I’ll make it as difficult as possible.

I went back and he said to me, “Can I see your resume?” And I told him, “I made a decision a long time ago, I was never going to take a job that required a resume. You can ask me any question you want, but I’m not giving you a resume.” And he said, “What would your salary be?” And the salary [I gave him] was twice what I should be paid. I thought he’d say, “Thank you, goodbye.” But he said, “Okay. Come back tomorrow.” I came back the next day, and he said, “There’s the checkbook. You have one more show. I’m going back to Germany.” And that was the beginning of our relationship. I learned on the job, basically.

And I made these relationships, very early on, with some artists in the program—Sigmar Polke in particular, James Lee Byars, Per Kirkeby. Along the way, he said, “Don’t you think you’d probably want to take on a few artists?”

Building relationships with artists seems to be a defining part of your experience as a gallerist.

It’s been the whole reason for my career. Michael had built his gallery with an ethos that there was a hierarchy, with [Georg] Baselitz at the top, and Sigmar didn’t like that. And I chased him all over the world because I just loved his work. He gave me my first real power in the art world. And I was a kid. I started working at Michael’s gallery at 28 years old.

Polke didn’t like technology, he didn’t answer his phone ever, he had a fax machine with no paper that would ring all day, and in order to speak with him, you had to visit him. So three to four days a month, for almost 20 years, I was in his studio. And then as I started to organize shows for him—at the Tate in London and at the Ueno Museum in Japan—we traveled together, I went everywhere with him.  

I’m opening my New York and London galleries with Polke shows because I’m acutely aware that I’ve been working with a gallery that has been all about history. And my own history is with Polke. The first show [in New York] has this one inside joke. There’s a small painting called Strange Adventure, which he made for my birthday in 2004. And he photographed it all over, he took the painting and stuck it in a downspout and took pictures with him carrying it and gave me the painting with all the photos. So, aside from this masterpiece four-part painting series called The Dream of Menelaus from 1982, which we’ll show in the first room, in the second room will be this little painting that just says Strange Adventure, with a little inside story about my own history with this man who was so important to me. I’d like to think I was important to him too.

How do you forge those kinds of connections with artists?

It was work. I followed Sigmar to every single show. No matter where it was. I went to Barcelona, I went to Washington, DC. His first big exhibition in the United States was at the Brooklyn Museum, and that went to the Hirshhorn and to San Francisco—that’s when I first started to work with him. And then I got to the point where I was indispensable. I could drive and he couldn’t; we went to LA and I drove him around. I drove him to Goslar in Germany to get a prize. We spent time together, and it was magical. And it was a hell of a lot of work. 

Artists are special. That moment between the fingertips or a brush and the canvas is so incredibly magical to me. I have this younger artist, Florian Krewer—I go to his studio every couple of weeks, and I say, “I can’t tell you how to make a painting, but I can tell you when it works and when it doesn’t.” 

With most, it’s a long-term commitment. I want to continue that. It’s still exciting for me to go to a studio and see some breakthrough.

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“To young artists, I always say, ‘Do not give up,’” Howardena Pindell told the audience at the American Federation of Arts’s 2025 Gala in November, where she was honored with a Cultural Leadership Award. The lesson is one Pindell learned the hard way, working as a Black woman in a largely white and historically male-dominated art world, facing hostility and racism throughout her career.

The dots that are so prevalent in her work today are based on a memory from her childhood, when she stopped with her father at a root beer stand in Kentucky and the bottoms of their mugs were stamped with a red circle, to distinguish them from those used by white customers. She was the only Black student in her BFA program at Boston University (1961-65), where she trained as a figurative artist, and among just a few Black students in her MFA program at Yale (1965-67). 

When she moved to New York after her studies, she had trouble finding teaching work due to discrimination, but she was able to get a job as an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art, where she worked for more than a decade. Again, she was the only Black woman in the role, and left the museum in 1979 to focus on her art practice and teach at Stony Brook University.

Her landmark video, Free, White and 21, 1980, encapsulates her experience of everyday racism in the art world and throughout her life, from the kindergarten teacher who tied her down with bedsheets to prevent her from using the bathroom, to the well-coiffed white women who called her “paranoid” and “ungrateful” and discounted her work. None of that made Pindell give up, and today, at the age of 82, she is widely recognized as both an incisive artist who takes on challenging subjects, as well as a master of color and form. Her oeuvre navigates fluidly between more figurative and narrative work and pure abstraction, raising questions about why the art world insists on siloing these approaches. 

White Cube currently has a show dedicated to her decades-long career, “Off the Grid,” on view in its Bermondsey, London flagship through Jan, 18, with earlier work hanging alongside new abstract pieces. She has also been commissioned by the University of Texas at Austin to create a 50-foot-tall stained-glass mural for its College of Education’s new George I. Sánchez building, opening next spring. Dia Beacon acquired a suite of her works that will go on long-term display at the end of 2026, and Pindell is also the only living artist in the AFA’s nationally touring exhibition Abstract Expressionists: The Women. 

We caught up with the artist from her home in the Bronx about the podcast that keeps her up to date on the news, a formative studio visit with Helen Frankenthaler, and why she would be terrified to win a Nobel Prize right now. 

How did your show in London go?

The show seemed to have gone well, there were some pieces I wish they had, but then they showed some of them at Art Basel [Miami Beach] down in Florida.

Which were those works?

Well, the one work that I really, really wanted, I call it a Tesseract [#29, 2024]—geometric shapes floating in the cosmos. It has pinks and yellow, it’s very pastel, and it’s so unlike the other pieces. Otherwise, the show covered a lot of stuff. It was amazing to have it all spread out like that, that was great.

They also showed three of my films—and there’s some tough ones. Rope/Fire/Water, which is about lynching, and Doubling [which is about war atrocities]. Especially if you think of what happened to those people on the boat [destroyed in the Caribbean Sea during a U.S. military strike on Sept. 2].

I think under Trump, it’ll be hard to find a venue willing to risk [displaying work like Rope/Fire/Water], because it’s about lynching, and he doesn’t want to think about lynching. It’s so funny, this is going to sound so strange—because I have gotten a fair number of awards, but I thought to myself, “Oh, my God, suppose they gave me the Nobel Prize, he’d have me killed.” I mean, I’m not going to get a Nobel Prize. But anybody actually, especially someone Black, if they got a Nobel Prize, and he doesn’t get it, I can imagine just all the horrible things that will happen to them.

It’s difficult to have somebody in power with such a fragile ego.

Do you ever listen to MeidasTouch [the progressive podcast and news program started by lawyer Ben Meiselas]? It’s very good. He gives daily reports about whatever he feels like talking about, and then sometimes he’ll interview people. But mainly it’s him touching stuff that most people would be afraid to. 

You clearly stay very connected to what’s going on, politically and socially.

I am not someone who can turn away. MeidasTouch keeps me in contact with some of the more current things. But I also watch Trump’s cousin [Mary Trump], who’s a psychologist who analyzes him. And then there’s Robert Reich.

How do you process what’s going on in the world as an artist?

I haven’t done an issue-related piece since Rope/Fire/Water, I’ve mainly concentrated on the abstract pieces. I just do not want to draw attention to my work from the MAGA people. I think the best way I can handle it is to just keep track of my ideas, and then, if ever the black curtain lifts, I can get back to some of the issue pieces.

You faced so much resistance as a young artist, and you’ve persevered for so long. What’s it like getting recognition at this stage in your life?

 I don’t feel it. I know that sounds strange. I’m puzzled. When I got up to go on the stage [at the AFA gala], there was a standing ovation. I hadn’t said a word yet. And then when I finished, I said: “Don’t give up. And I think that applies to people who aren’t artists in our current political climate, let us not give up.” And everybody very demurely applauded. I think I frightened them.

You also mentioned at the gala wanting to support a residency for artists with disabilities. You use a wheelchair and a walker after knee surgery. How has your experience with mobility issues affected your view of how accessible the art world is?

I’ve been thinking through it, because I think it’s better that we be in the same facility, like the MacDowell [residency in Peterborough, New Hampshire], rather than be separated. MacDowell was very good. When I was there [in 2008 and 2013], I was using a cane, and I didn’t want to be on the first floor, because they’ll talk to you about bears. I had to go up a long flight of stairs to get to the second-floor bedroom. But I can’t do that anymore. 

My dealer [Garth Greenan] wants to buy me a wheelchair-accessible car. Saturdays I normally go to the Met. I take my health aide, and I also take a friend with me, it’s just easier because I have the wheelchair and the walker. And there’s sort of a lunchroom on the second floor. So I feed all of them. We go off for three or four hours.

You have talked about the impact of visiting museums in Philadelphia as a child, when you saw a portrait on an Egyptian mummy that resembled you.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Oser, said to my parents, “You need to take your daughter to the museum. She’s very talented. She should meet artists. She should go to the museum and galleries.” My parents introduced me to white and Black artists, male and female artists, and I was sent to Saturday art classes when I was eight. And without that earlier beginning, I don’t know [if I would have become an artist]. I’d love to have been an attorney for the ACLU, but my brain isn’t that bright.

I disagree. You also were really drawn to the work of Marcel Duchamp.

The Philadelphia Museum had a section for him. My favorite, Why Not Sneeze, Rose Sélavy? [a 1921 readymade sculpture of a birdcage holding small blocks of white marble resembling a pile of sugar cubes]—I love that work, and the fact that he would dress up as a woman and also take a woman’s name. I liked the Renaissance paintings there. And I kept trying to paint like a Renaissance artist, which, of course, I failed miserably at. Ironically, when I was at Yale as a student in the art department, Helen Frankenthaler was a visiting critic, and she came by my studio, and as she left she said [somewhat dismissively], “That was done in the Renaissance.” I realized later I should have said, “That’s pretty good.”

But years later—it’s even funnier—when I was working for MoMA, I was sent as a liaison to meet her, because we were thinking of doing a joint show of her work. And I thought she’d faint when she opened the door and [was so surprised to see] me representing the museum. 

What other projects are you working on?

I applied for an MTA project at the New York Botanical Garden [Metro North station in the Bronx], it’s an outdoor station. So I photographed the garden. I’m very excited about it. When I was much younger, I used to go to the Botanical Gardens or near there, and I would feed the squirrels when it was really cold. I’m an animal fanatic. 

The project for the station is stained-glass. I’m really excited about that part of it. I did another stained-glass work for the University of Texas. It’s circles in different colors, some with numbers. 

You’ve been a professor for so much of your life, a school environment must be very familiar to you.

Forty-three years. I don’t miss the committee stuff. I liked working with the students. When I first started—in 1979, on Long Island, which is very prejudiced—the students that were the most difficult to deal with happened to be white women. One of our graduate students, who’s Native American, they harassed her, too. But she was a tough cookie, she could manage them. I was so disappointed that you had to watch your back.

And then I was chased by one of the students, a white male, whose father wanted him to go to medical school, and he was demanding that I move his grade from a B+ to an A. He went to the chairman and complained. The chairman said, “I’m not doing anything about that.” I was glad to not have to deal with that sort of thing anymore. But it became less and less prevalent the longer I stayed.

“About Time,” the title of Charles Atlas’s first career retrospective, now on view at the ICA Boston, is both a joke and completely serious.

On the one hand, Atlas’s work has always had a temporal focus, capturing the fleeting feeling of viewing live performance, the immediacy of personal interactions, the perma-scroll of TikTok, and the free association of thought. On the other, it is long overdue for a media artist of Atlas’s caliber—one who has been working for over five decades, basically invented the translation of contemporary performance onto screen, and has collaborated with the likes of Merce Cunningham and Marina Abramović—to finally get the retrospective treatment. 

“He's been in three Whitney Biennials, he's received a special mention award at the Venice Biennale, his work is in the collections of so many major museums,” says the show’s curator, Jeffrey De Blois. “Yet he hasn't had this more concentrated celebration of his work and legacy.” 

And that’s not because Atlas hasn’t been open to the prospect. For the past 10 years, he has been working closely with his gallery, Luhring Augustine, to find a museum that would be able to take on a retrospective of his work and the technical challenges it involves. This is especially complicated because his practice has evolved since the 1970s—from creating small-scale videos meant to be viewed on television monitors, to producing room-sized immersive installations that visitors can walk into and around. “This is really a huge order, there’s not many museums that could do it,” Atlas says, adding that the exhibition at the ICA Boston involves 31 channels of video, spread across four gallery-filling installations. These in turn draw on clips from some 125 works Atlas has created over his career, which he has digitized and remixed.

The show opens with The Years, 2018, an installation Atlas created to serve as a self-contained survey of sorts, featuring elements of 77 of his works, starting with his very first solo experimentations on Super 8 film in the '70s, Cartridge Lengths and Long Shots. These are presented in a slow, end credits-style scroll on four vertical monitors installed like futuristic tombstones, while a projected group of young girls look stoically on from above, like teenaged Fates, deciding his legacy. Atlas also published his own catalog with Prestel in 2015, with the help of Luhring Augustine, in which he reflects on his earlier work with characteristic frankness. The thouht behind these projects, Atlas recalls, was: “Well, if no one is going to do a retrospective, I’m going to do it myself.”

Delving back into his earlier work has become a crucial part of Atlas's practice for the past decade. “I'm hoping that when I finish this [retrospective], I can move forward again,” he jokes. MC⁹, 2012, for example, is a dynamic memorial to Merce Cunningham, the modern dance master who was Atlas’s close friend and first major collaborator. Atlas taught himself to use a Super 8 camera in 1970, at the age of 20, while working as an assistant stage manager for Cunningham's dance company. 

He created short films in his hotel room while on tour, and experimented with Cunningham and other dancers like Douglas Dunn in ways their movements could be transposed to film, starting with Walkaround Time, 1972, a recording of a dance performance inspired by the dawning computer age that featured sets and costumes by Jasper Johns. By the end of the decade, Atlas was the company’s resident filmmaker. MC⁹ features snippets from 21 videos made with Cunningham, including a personal moment in which the choreographer dances by himself to house music, filmed just before his death in 2009.

Similarly, A Prune Twin, 2020, revisits Atlas’s collaborations with the Scottish dancer and choreographer Michael Clark, including Hail the New Puritan, 1986, an “anti-documentary” that was commissioned for Channel 4 in the U.K. The installation—with another classic tongue-in-cheek title that is a partial anagram of the original—was created for a survey of Clark’s career at the Barbican in London. While the documentary on its own holds up remarkably well, encapsulating the anarchic energy of punk-era England, the installation with its multiple jumbo-sized screens positioned at different levels brings the characters and their movements to startling life. 

“The context of my work has changed,” Atlas says of the expectations around video art, and maintaining visitors’ attention. “I didn’t want people to sit down and watch a thing in the gallery. I wanted to make a walk-through experience.” This instinct mirrors the way Atlas himself broke down the barriers between camera and choreography in his earliest pieces, moving in between and around the dancers when filming them, to emulate the sympathetic rush one feels when watching live performers. 

“That's the fun part about some of the multi-channel video installations, they make you want to choreograph your own movements,” De Blois says. That effect is something that comes from Atlas’s decades of experience working directly on the stage, the curator adds: “He has a sense of theatricality, he understands lighting, he understands movement, he understands the proscenium stage, and the ways to disrupt expectations too. That all filtered into how he makes his work now. And that’s really unique and remarkable and specific to him.”

Atlas’s interest in film and performance dates back to his childhood in St. Louis, where, he told the curator Stuart Comer in 2011, “​​cinema was my escape outlet. I loved movies. I’m the perfect audience: I laugh, I cry, I cringe—whatever you’re manipulated to do, so cinema always had a power over me.” After dropping out of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Atlas moved to New York in 1968 with the aim of seeing “every movie ever made” and he absorbed anything from silent films to the experimental works of Stan Brakhage. A stage-managing gig at an off-Broadway theater led to the opportunity to work with Cunningham, which Atlas jumped at because of the choreographer’s association with an artist he long admired, Robert Rauschenberg. 

These kinds of personal connections have become a defining aspect of Atlas’s career, as can be seen in his newest installation created specifically for the ICA show, Personalities. This work from 2024 features video portraits of some of his famous collaborators who have also became close friends, such as fellow artists Marina Abramović, Leigh Bowery, Johanna Constantine, and Annie Iobst, as well as family, including his father, Dave Atlas, and his partner, the writer Joe Westmoreland. The work is presented on 12 monitors arranged on pedestals that form a spiral, in a gallery painted orange—Atlas’s signature hue, the color he dyes his sideburns—with wallpaper printed with screenshots from his 2003 project Instant Fame! at Participant Inc in New York, in which Atlas created live video portraits of gallery visitors. 

Despite already having done the hard work of a retrospective himself, pouring over his back catalog with a critical eye and selecting the pieces he wants to redisplay, actually seeing all that work in a single show is a different experience altogether for Atlas. “I realized that I never showed more than one piece at a time. Seeing all these pieces together, it kind of just hit me, you know, that this is… it's big, it encompasses a lot of ideas,” he says, adding later in the conversation: “It's a little overwhelming to see everything from 50 years gone by.” 

"Charles Atlas: About Time" is on view at the ICA Boston from Oct. 10, 2024, through March 16, 2025.