Ramo. (Patrick McMullan)

Carolyn Ramo, a former partner at Chelsea gallery Taxter & Spengemann, which closed at the end of last year, has landed at the nonprofit Artadia, where she will serve as executive director. Before joining T&S, Ms. Ramo had been a production director at David Zwirner, a director at Nicole Klagsbrun.

“I think there are a lot of different art worlds,” an elated Ms. Ramo told Gallerist by phone yesterday evening from the organization's Dumbo offices. “The one that I know from working at David Zwirner and Taxter and Spengemann is quite small, and what’s wonderful about Artadia is that it expands that. I’ll be bridging the gap between the two.”

Artadia was founded in 1997 as the ArtCouncil by investment banker and art collector Christopher E. Vroom with the mission of supporting artists through unrestricted cash awards. Since 1999, the nonprofit has given roughly $3 million in awards, which are open to all artists and presented by juries involving prominent curators, artists and critics. The first awards were given in San Francisco, but Artadia soon expanded to include other cities like Chicago, Houston, Boston and Atlanta. They're about to do award cycles in Chicago and Houston, in September and October respectively.

Beyond those awards, Artadia gives artists a range of support. In 2009, it opened an artist residency program in New York, which brings Artadia award winners from other cities to New York for a three-month stint at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn. In 2010, Artadia launched a publications program and an Exhibitions Exchange program that presents the work of the awardees from one city in a venue in another city—like an exhibition of Boston artists that it organized at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Last night, when we spoke to Ms. Ramo, she was preparing for an opening of Artadia's first in-house exhibition—a show of artists who have received Artadia awards before and have moved to New York. The event also served to debut Artadia's new space in Dumbo—its headquarters were formerly located in Chelsea. "Through all these experiences, we try to shepherd them into their next steps," she said, sounding not unlike a dealer of emerging artists.

Congratulations to Ms. Ramo.

Matt Johnson "Malus Sieversii" (2008). Courtesy Saatchi Gallery.

Matt Johnson, who formerly showed at Taxter & Spengemann, which closed at the end of last year, is now represented by Chelsea's 303 Gallery.The artist announced the news this afternoon on his Facebook page.

Mr. Johnson is a conceptual sculptor whose pieces have ranged from severe minimalism (a box with two blocks of wood resting on it) to incredibly intricate--like his maple wood sculpture of an apple core made of a network of intertwining staircases.

This is the second Taxter & Spengemann artist this week to land at a new gallery. Earlier, we reported that Frank Benson would now show at Andrew Kreps. Pascal Spengemann also found a new home this week as director of Marlborough Chelsea.

Mr. Spengemann.

Yesterday news broke that Pascal Spengemann, whose Taxter & Spengemann gallery closed this fall, will be the new director at Marlborough Chelsea. Reached for comment today, Mr. Spengemann said he's eager to start, and busy meeting artists.

The hiring is new enough that Mr. Spengemann said his plans for the gallery are still in the air, but had kind words for the space's 24-year-old owner Max Levai.

"For someone so young he's very bright," Mr. Spengemann said. "He's grown up in the biz, and I feel like he has a really great handle on it. I feel really excited about working together."

Mr. Spengemann said he wasn't sure if he was going to be bringing in any new artists into the program, let alone ones from Taxter & Spengemann, adding that he's entered "a very different kind of scenario from T and S."

Recently Marlborough Chelsea began a campaign to differentiate itself from its 57th Street location, which has served as its headquarters since 1963 (the two will have separate booths at the Armory Show this year). The downtown iteration has been host to a number of high-profile shows lately, including the group show "Blind Cut," which opened with a madhouse reception last week.

"I think that kind of show points out that there's a real opportunity there to have a broad appeal and I think that's already started happening," Mr. Spengemann said. "I think that's something that's really intriguing about working for the gallery."

Kelly Taxter and Pascal Spengemann. (Courtesy Artnet)

Chelsea gallery Taxter & Spengemann announced today that it will close its doors at the end of 2011. "Thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and interest in all we have done the past nine years," directors Kelly Taxter, Pascal Spengemann, and Carolyn Ramo wrote in an e-mail to the gallery's mailing list.

Taxter & Spengemann was opened by Bard Center for Curatorial Studies graduates Kelly Taxter and Pascal Spengemann in 2003.

Among the artists the gallery currently represents are Frank Benson, Xavier Cha, Matt Johnson, Andrew Kuo, Carter Mull and A.L. Steiner.

Reached for comment, the gallery declined to discuss the circumstances that led to the decision, however gallery partner Carolyn Ramo told Gallerist that it had been decided very recently, and was not due to any problems with the partnership among Ms. Taxter, Mr. Spengemann and herself; with the artists; or with the “vitality of the business.”

Ms. Ramo added that it was a “difficult but necessary decision. We are proud of our accomplishments and the legacy we are leaving."

Ms. Ramo said that the gallery's artists have not yet made decisions about what galleries they will go to. We will keep you updated.

Only a single sculpture was present, a life-size, grey skinned woman wearing a shiny black tunic and chunky sunglasses, her hair pulled into a bun. A circular vase sat at her feet, propped against the pedestal on which she stood. For one moment she looked like a real person. But then it became clear that she was completely frozen: an almost perfect copy of a woman, with almost every skin pore and muscle strangely visible.

T Magazine shares the story of how Mr. Benson made it:

"He started with a photo of a model (who also happens to be a close friend), spent months working with a technician to 'sculpt' a 3-D rendering and then created 3-D prints through a relatively new process called rapid prototyping. These prints were then cast in bronze at foundry in Upstate New York. 'I liked the image because it is at once very classical, totally contemporary and a little ’80s, making it very hard to place chronologically,' he explained."

We had the uncanny feeling that we had seen the work before, but we couldn't place it. So we signed the gallery's guestbook, said hello to two prominent New York collectors who were in the back of the gallery and picked upa press release. The work, we learned, is called Human Statue (Jessie) (2011).

And then, as Gallerist got in our rental car and hopped back on Sunset Boulevard it hit us: we had seen the work on the Taxter & Spengemann website.

A quick visit to the site confirmed it, and earlier this week, back in New York, we paid the gallery a visit. There she was again, standing in the center of the gallery, impassive, hiding behind her shades. But there was one key difference, one of the gallery directors told us. We stared at her for a long time. Was her bun different? Was she holding a different pose? The director pointed to the tunic. In New York, Jessie sports an understated, far less lustrous black; it is a serious tunic, a uniform fit for the East Coast.

As it happens, the work is an edition of four, and the other two are also on view at the moment, at the Hydra Workshop in Hydra, Greece, and the Fundação Bienal in São Paulo, Brazil. That quartet represents a remarkable feat: four intricately produced bronze sculptures, that most prized artistic material, transformed into terms that one could almost describe as digital. They are replicated almost identically and sent around the world. It could be the Neoclassical version of Martin Kippenberger's Metro-Net (1993-1997).

Of course, such comments could be made of almost any editioned sculpture, but Mr. Benson's obsessive attention to detail and the simultaneous display of the works heightens the uncanny quality of the copy, pushing it into some other zone. (One does not have this same feeling when viewing two castings of a gritty Giacometti, for instance.) That exhibition technique also begs another question: Will anyone complete the full Jessie grand slam, visiting all four of her locations?

Oddly, the same day that we visited Jessie at Taxter & Spengemann, a friend who is a New York painter sent us this text message: 'Are you in LA? Just saw your signature in Overduin & Kite." We almost answered yes.