Follow Friday: Five Longtime Galleries Celebrate Their 19th, 25th, 30th, 35th, and 36th Anniversaries
With nearly 150 years of experience between them, these five galleries have been in the business long enough to know the ins and outs of the art world. From Australia to Germany to the American West, these mainstays continue to collect an impressive array of modern and contemporary artworks from icons and mid-career innovators alike.
The Leipzig-based Galerie Kleindienst showcases German artists whose works are often visually or conceptually provocative, like those of Rosa Loy, who creates otherworldly, romantic feminine scenes using the ancient medium of casein; Julius Hoffmann, a painter whose almost mythical scenes are truly modern, with their hallucinatory color palettes and near-digital construction; Falk Gernegroß, whose concern with the female nude pervades even the painter’s clothed subjects, who find themselves positioned in uneasy configurations; and Tobias Lehner, an abstract painter whose psychedelic, geometric distortions produce an uncanny sensation despite their lack of figuration. The nearly 20-year-old gallery will make an appearance at PULSE Miami Beach next month, bringing a group of unsettling, erotically charged paintings by Corrine von Lebusa and Christoph Ruckhäberle.
Santa Fe-based gallery Aaron Payne Fine Art has a strong connection to New York City, where the gallery’s founder got his art world start 25 years ago and where many of the artists on its roster—like Werner Drewes, the Bauhaus transplant who helped spread the movement to the U.S., and pioneer of African-American art Romare Bearden—have lived or spent time. With a special emphasis on art collectives, Aaron Payne maintains a diverse collection of modern and contemporary art that includes works from Santa Fe Art Colony members Gustave Baumann, Raymond Jonson, and Cady Wells; artists from the Taos Moderns movement like Emil Bisttram and Dorothy Brett; and members of the Stieglitz Circle, such as Oscar Bluemner and John Marin.
An early supporter of Australian artists working in abstraction, Charles Nodrum opened in 1984 in Richmond and celebrated its 30th anniversary this year. With a special penchant for mid-century works, the gallery’s pioneering collection of Aussie artworks includes David Aspden’s bright, patterned abstractions, Sydney Ball’s geometric, almost neon paintings, Sadie Chandler’s muted, off-kilter compositions, Guy Stuart’s near-figurative drawings, Ann Thomson’s thick, muddled oil paintings, John Peart’s spare, angular paintings, and the biometric hallucinations of David Harley. The gallery is currently featuring a series of surreal, mythological paintings by the late James Gleeson, one the most prominent figures of Australia’s art scene throughout his life.
Robert Berman is currently showing a collection of watercolor paintings and prints by legendary musician Neil Young, just one of the famous names that dot the gallery’s 35-year history. The L.A. gallery opened in 1979 with a series of early exhibitions of future icons like Keith Haring and Raymond Pettibon, and is celebrating their anniversary with a rotating exhibition of artists they’ve featured in the past—from their 1980s showcases of Chicano street artists and muralists like John Valadez, to their seminal 1990s exhibitions of Man Ray, William S. Burroughs, and George Herms, to more recent shows featuring the likes of Shepard Fairey and Alex Prager, whose first solo show was with the gallery.
Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art
This L.A. gallery maintains a top-notch collection of postwar art, spanning major movements like Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art. Jonathan Novak’s more than 35 years in the business have garnered an almost impossible lineup of major works, as exemplified in the gallery’s upcoming Art Miami presentation, which features art world powerhouses Wayne Thiebaud, Niki de Saint-Phalle, Julian Opie, Alexander Calder, Paul Jenkins, David Hockney, Jim Dine, Sam Francis, Jean Dubuffet, Michael Craig-Martin, famed New Yorker cartoonist Saul Steinberg, and photorealist pioneers like Richard Estes, Luigi Benedicenti, Robert Bechtle, John Baeder, and Ralph Goings.
Follow Galerie Kleindienst, Aaron Payne Fine Art, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Robert Berman Gallery, and Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art on Artsy.
