TASCHEN Gallery
The Longest Pop-Up
The TASCHEN Gallery was conceived as a pop-up experience, initially envisioned to remain open for just three or four months. Its immediate and overwhelming success, however, kept the gallery in place for nearly four years—an extraordinarily long life for a project that was never intended to be permanent.
When I first proposed the idea to Benedikt Taschen, I imagined a TASCHEN pop-up museum: a space dedicated to showcasing the extraordinary range of art and photography produced by the publishing house over its first 30 years. Benedikt's response was immediate: “I LOVE IT. We’ll do Rolling Stones.”
By that, he meant that rather than beginning with a retrospective of TASCHEN's publishing history, we would launch the gallery with the publication of our monumental, signed-and-numbered The Rolling Stones book, accompanied by a major exhibition of the band's photography.
Our 6,000-square-foot Los Angeles space opened on December 13, 2014, with It's Just a Shot Away: The Rolling Stones in Photographs. The exhibition featured more than 100 images of the band, spanning multiple decades and the work of photographers including David Bailey, Anton Corbijn, Gered Mankowitz, Jean-Marie Périer, Terry Richardson, Dominique Tarlé, and Albert Watson. The star-studded opening drew an extraordinary crowd, including Pamela Anderson, David LaChapelle, Jack Nicholson, Amber Rose, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Tyler, and many others.
What began as a temporary experiment quickly became a destination in its own right. During the gallery's nearly four-year run, I served as both Gallery Director and U.S. Retail Director for TASCHEN America, overseeing the gallery while also managing the company's U.S. bookstores, retail operations, and art fair program.
Over that period, the gallery presented a remarkable succession of exhibitions and welcomed a steady stream of visitors, with opening events regularly attracting more than 1,000 guests. For each exhibition, we reimagined the exterior of the gallery with a new color scheme and custom hand-lettered signage designed to reflect the character and theme of the show, often working with artists such as Sonny Boy, whose work grew out of a tradition of highly crafted sign painting and automotive pinstriping and brought a distinctive, handmade quality to the gallery's identity.
The program brought together work by some of the world's most celebrated artists and photographers, including David Bailey, Allen Jones, David Hockney, Mick Rock, Ethan Russell, Sebastião Salgado, Tom of Finland, Lawrence Schiller, Ellen von Unwerth, Albert Watson, and many more.
All photos © Gregory Bojorquez
