Galerie Gmurzynska

TEFAF New York Spring, Stand 14

May 4-8, 2017

Park Avenue Armory at 643 Park Avenue, NYC
VIP Preview on May 3, from 12pm to 8pm

Galerie Gmurzynska enlisted designer, scenographer, and creative director Alexandre de Betak to design its exhibition installation, featuring 20th-century masters including Yves Klein, Robert Indiana, Kazimir Malevich, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger among others. A catalog will be published with accompanying text by the renowned art historian and critic, Germano Celant. The artist Christo will also show several works, and will be at the gallery's booth during the VIP preview.

"A brutalist yet minimalist and futuristic setting for a powerful art selection...all in concrete, mirror and light lines in authentic Betak manner! "- Alexandre de Betak

In the overcrowded annual art fair agenda, it is not often that a truthfully distinctive opening, such as the inaugural TEFAF New York Spring, presents itself.

Having been privileged by the TEFAF committee to be selected to exhibit at the “Colonel’s Room” - one of the larger ground-floor “Period Rooms” at the historical landmark of the Park Avenue Armory - it will give Galerie Gmurzynska not only a stand out position at the fair, but it also allowed us to create a truly unique stand installation.

The installation has been envisioned by Alexandre de Betak, who has created shows for fashion’s greatest such as Dior, Celine, Hermes, Calvin Klein, Michael Kors, Diane Von Furstenberg, Rodarte, The Row among many others. Moreover, Betak is known for his various art collaborations having worked with important institutions such as MOCA, LA; MOCA, Shanghai; MUDE Lisboa; Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, Rome and Palais d’Iéna, Paris.

Spanning a 100-year period, the 20th-century masters to be shown by Galerie Gmurzynska, have been the gallery’s focus throughout its over 50-year history.

Galerie Gmurzynska’s specially curated art presentations with creative luminaries such as Karl Lagerfeld, Zaha Hadid, Richard Meier, Claude Picasso, Germano Celant among many others lead a long way back and unite discourses of classic modern avant-garde with scholarship and carefully prepared showcases as part of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Major works span the over 50-year scholarly engagement with different artistic schools ranging from masters of the Russian avant-garde and classic modern masters like Alexander Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger and Wifredo Lam to the neo avant-garde and post-war artists like Yves Klein, Robert Indiana and Tom Wesselmann.

Establishing new perspectives on these grand works, Alexandre de Betak considered a new vision of art experience, where the representation synthesizes new techniques of seeing masterpieces of art. While today publicity and reproductions are championed over various channels like social media – nothing can be like the experience of the original work of art and the cultural authority it exudes.

John Berger, who recently passed away and revolutionized art-theory with his seminal work the “Ways of Seeing”, famously put it: “The way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe”.

Juxtaposing these major avant-garde masterworks and augmenting the gallery’s stand through various lines and selected architectural details, this aesthetic experience of looking at art will link it back to the works’ pure visual desirability.