Legal Issues
In 2003, the Internal Revenue Service sued Larry Gagosian and three of his associates, accusing them of evading $26.5 million in taxes, interest and penalties on a 1990 sale of contemporary art. The IRS charged Gagosian and his partners deliberately shifted assets out of a company they created, Contemporary Art Holding Corp., to avoid paying taxes. When French photographer Patrick Cariou launched a copyright lawsuit against Richard Prince in 2009, the suit also named as defendant Larry Gagosian, who had displayed the disputed series of painting in a show titled “Canal Zone”. Also in 2009, a deal that Gagosian Gallery had struck to buy $3 million in gold bricks for the work One Ton, One Kilo by the artist Chris Burden was frozen when it turned out that the bricks had been acquired from a Houston-based company owned by financier Allen Stanford, who was later charged by the S.E.C. and sentenced to 110 years in prison for cheating investors out of more than $7 billion over 20 years in one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history.
In January 2012, Gagosian Gallery was sued by art collector Jan Cowles, who claimed that the gallery sold a 1964 Roy Lichtenstein painting, Girl in Mirror, from her collection in 2008-2009 without her consent.
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