Gavin Brown is an art dealer and owner of Gavin Brown’s enterprise, an art gallery with locations in New York and Rome.
Born in London in 1964 and working in New York since 1988, Gavin Brown has owned and operated his gallery in several locations in Manhattan since 1994, about six months after his first exhibition with work by Elizabeth Peyton in the Hotel Chelsea.
Brown relocated the gallery to West 15th St. in 1997, where he staged exhibitions with, amongst others, Martin Creed, Peter Doig, Chris Ofili, Laura Owens, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Rob Pruitt. In 1999, he opened a bar, Passerby, next door to the gallery space.
In 2003, Brown moved to even larger premises in the West Village where he inaugurated the space with Jonathan Horowitz’s exhibition “Go Vegan!” a clear nod to the gallery’s previous life as Pat LaFrieda’s meat market. Brown stayed there for 13 years and in that time consolidated his position as one of the premier contemporary art galleries in the world, with a consistent series of exhibitions that were groundbreaking and extremely well received.
In 2016, Brown relocated the main gallery space to an expansive, four-level former brewery on West 127th Street.
In addition to his primary gallery location on 127th Street, Brown operates other gallery spaces in New York, at his home in Harlem and as of 2014, at 291 Grand Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Since 2013, he has co-owned 356 Mission Road, a multi-use exhibition space in Los Angeles’ downtown neighborhood, with Wendy Yao and artist Laura Owens. He is also co-owner, along with artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, of Unclebrother in Hancock, NY, a convivial and seasonally open restaurant-cum-art gallery on the Delaware River.
After her studies at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London in 1991/2, Anke Kempkes has worked as an independent curator, scholar and critic in Berlin from 1993-2002. In 2003 she directed The Martin Kippenberger Estate in Cologne, Germany. In 2004 she held the position of Curator at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, where she curated the exhibition “Flesh at War with Enigma” (with rediscovered postwar Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow in dialog with four international contemporary artists).
Anke Kempkes has contributed to numerous international art magazines, periodicals (e.g. Frieze and Texte zur Kunst) and catalogs. She continues her scholarly work in art criticism, public talks and panels, with focus on feminist art history and critical discourse. In 2009 and 2014 she gave talks at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw: “The Incommensurable Contemporaneity of Alina Szapocznikow” and “Maria Bartuszova: Pioneer of Form. The Futurism of Women Avantgardists”. In 2017 she will give a talk at the Xawery Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture at the Królikarnia Palace, Division of The National Museum in Warsaw on Wanda Czelkowska and Rosemarie Castoro: “The Third Gender: Life in the Studio”.
Gallery History:
In 2005 Anke Kempkes founded the gallery BROADWAY 1602 in New York City where she presented the first solo show of Alina Szapocznikow in the United States. The gallery program has since focused on reintroducing women artists from the 1960s and 70s, such as Babette Mangolte (France/US), Rosemarie Castoro (US), Idelle Weber (US), Sylvia Palacios Whitman (Chile/US), Evelyne Axell (Belgium), Gina Pane (France), Lenora de Barros (Brazil), Lydia Okumura (Brazil/US), Ewa Partum (Poland), Teresa Murak (Poland), Wanda Czelkowska (Poland), Penny Slinger (UK), among others.
Next to this core engagement for female artists, BROADWAY 1602 also represents other cultural agents and outstanding personalities of the New York postwar avant-garde, such as The Archive of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), David Tudor & Composers Inside Electronics (CIE), and collaborations with the The George and Helen Segal Foundation, Robert Whitman and the Robert Anton collection. Since 2010 BROADWAY 1602 represents the Estate of prewar Bauhaus artist and Black Mountain College pioneer Xanti Schawinsky and in 2016 began a collaboration with the family of 1920s stage design avant-gardist Boris Aronson .
In 2016 the gallery opened two new locations BROADWAY 1602 UPTOWN & HARLEM.
STATE OF THE ARTS NYC 