Established in 2001 by Bruce Silverstein and situated on the third floor of a building on West 20th Street in New York’s Chelsea art district, Bruce Silverstein Gallery specialises in exploring and expanding knowledge of international contemporary and influential 20th-century photography. With its photographic emphasis the gallery is a member of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD). Seeking to explore and uncover new ideas, and present previously unknown works by influential photographers of the past century alongside the work of modern innovators, the gallery has amassed an inventory of masterworks of modern photography. Striving to create a broader dialogue encompassing multiple art forms, the gallery also represents a growing selection of contemporary mixed-media artists.
Read MoreOpening with Picture Stories (2001)—an exhibition of the early-20th-century pioneering photographer Lucien Aigner—most of Bruce Silverstein Gallery’s early exhibitions featured masters of 20th-century art photography, including Aigner, Aaron Siskind, Barbara Morgan, Karl Struss, Werner Bischof, and Mark Cohen. From the mid-2000s the gallery started to incorporate more contemporary photographers—such as Zoe Strauss, Scott Peterman, and Nicolai Howalt—while continuing to exhibit works across the spectrum of 20th-century modern photography. Since the late 2000s the gallery has expanded its scope beyond contemporary photography and related practices, showing mixed-media contemporary artists such as Frederick Sommer, Martin Denker, John Wood, Keith A. Smith, and Max Neumann.
Representing a sizeable number of artists and estates, Bruce Silverstein Gallery’s roster is diverse and represents nearly a century of photographic practices. Amidst the gallery’s selection of 20th-century photographers are the names of important and well-known photographers who have influenced the shape of contemporary photography, such as Louis Draper, René Magritte, Man Ray, Lisette Model, Daido Moriyama, André Kertész, Frank Paulin, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ryan Weideman. At the same time the gallery represents a selection of more contemporary, established, and mid-career artists including Shinichi Maruyama, Trine Søndergaard, and Todd Hido. The gallery also represents several prominent sculptors, such as Constantin Brancusi, focusing specifically on their lesser-known photography. Not all of the gallery’s artists have purely photographic leanings, as seen with mixed-media artists such as Alfred Leslie, Max Neumann, and Frederick Sommer.
With its diverse roster of artists, Bruce Silverstein Gallery participates in a broad range of major international art fairs. These include Frieze Masters, London; The Photography Show, New York (presented by AIPAD); Paris Photo; The Armory Show, New York; and Art Basel in Miami Beach and Basel. Bruce Silverstein also builds upon well-established connections with private collectors, art consultants, and public galleries and institutions around the world to present public exhibitions of the gallery’s artists; prominent recent examples include Trine Søndergaard’s STILL, Maison Du Danemark, Paris (2019); Women and Photography, The National Arts Club, New York (2019); and Keith Smith at Home, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2018).
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