Based in the culture-rich Back Bay area of Boston, Krakow Witkin Gallery is a leading Boston art gallery with national and international reach. Maintaining a consistent focus on minimal, reductivist, and conceptual art from the mid-20th century to the present the gallery presents the work of a diverse selection of artists, ranging from emerging Boston locals to established international names.
Read MoreBarbara Krakow, Krakow Witkin Gallery’s founder, has been an influential figure in the Boston art world since the 1960s. She began her career as an art dealer in 1959, first running a gallery space out of her own carriage house. Building on close relationships with important 20th-century artists such as her friends Sol LeWitt, Fred Sandback, and Mel Bochner, Krakow has steered her gallery through various iterations and partnerships before establishing its current space on Newbury Street in 1983. Prior incarnations include Carriage House Gallery, Parker 470, Harcus Krakow Rosen Sonnabend, and Harcus Krakow Gallery. The Newbury Street iteration, then called the Barbara Krakow Gallery, was renamed Krakow Witkin Gallery in 2017. Its new name reflects the ongoing partnership between Krakow and artist and gallery professional Andrew Witkin, which began in 2000.
Taking advantage of its architectural configuration, Krakow Witkin Gallery holds simultaneous six-week shows exploring the work of 20th and 21st century artists through group and solo survey and thematic shows. Inspired by one of Sol LeWitt’s last drawings for the gallery in 2008, the gallery’s ongoing One Wall, One Work project allows viewers to see one artwork in isolation on its own wall. Since the early 2000s, the gallery also holds an annual benefit exhibition selling artworks to raise funds for AIDs charities. Keen to celebrate its uniquely Boston roots, the gallery is particularly active in supporting the community. The gallery is credited with bringing the art world to Boston and Boston to the art world.
Krakow Witkin Gallery Artists
While overall remaining focused on Minimalism and conceptually driven art Krakow Witkin Gallery’s large selection of artists is particularly diverse. It presents paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photography, film, and video works by emerging and established artists at the state, national, and international level. Heavily featured in the gallery’s roster are European and American pioneers of mid- and late-20th-century art such as Josef Albers, John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Mel Bochner, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Sarah Charlesworth, Agnes Martin, Daniel Buren, Richard Serra, and Julian Opie. They are joined by other long-established figures such as Jenny Holzer, Scott Hadfield, Liliana Porter, and Kiki Smith. Alongside these bigger names the gallery presents a younger generation through artists such as Amy Stacey Curtis, Frank Poor, Kelly Sherman, and Sam Durant. The gallery also represents the estates of influential artists such as LeWitt and Sandback.
Krakow Witkin Gallery Exhibitions and Art Fairs
As a member of the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) and the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) Krakow Witkin Gallery maintains its presence on the international art scene by participating in The Art Show and the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair, both in New York. The gallery is also active in publishing literature relating to artists including catalogues raisonnés for prints by artists such as Mel Bochner, Sol Lewitt, and Fred Sandback.
Ocula Photolog ADAA The Art Show 2020 Members of The Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) joined forces for The Art Show at the end of February (27 February–1 March 2020). The 2020 iteration saw more than half of its presentations dedicated to a single artist and 19 exhibitions focused on female artists, in addition to vibrant thematic and group surveys.
Ocula News London Auction Sales Down Despite $30m Hockney Splash London, 18 February 2020 The third highest price fetched by Hockney at auction contributed to over US $500 million in sales.
Ocula Insight Liliana Porter’s Theatre of the Absurd By Tessa Moldan, Boston Liliana Porter delights in dissonance, which she stages in assemblages that place a host of recognisable characters in unlikely companionship, from rubber ducks and plastic soldiers to porcelain figures of Chairman Mao and Elvis Presley. In some scenes, minuscule figures perform colossal tasks: painting a human-sized chair, for instance, or an...
Ocula Conversation RoseLee Goldberg: Performance Then and Now By Fawz Kabra RoseLee Goldberg had long been invested in contemporary performance art before her founding of the inter-disciplinary arts organisation Performa in New York in 2004. Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied political science and fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and then art history at the Courtauld...
Related Press Paper work – the British Museum shows off its collection of contemporary drawings 4 November 2019, Apollo Magazine Anish Kapoor, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gerhard Richter. These may not be names that spring to mind when you think of the British Museum, but they all have work filed away in its extensive archive of prints and drawings. 'Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now' lifts a lid on a lesser-known collection at a museum renowned...
Related Press Sarah Sze’s Gleaming, Ephemeral Universe 5 October 2019, Hyperallergic The internet's utopian promise in the 1990s may have been to make the world more interconnected, but its current state has exposed the fraying that accompanies every connection. The same might be said about production and consumption, which, far from creating an efficient feedback loop, have spewed their hazardous byproducts far into the air and...
Related Press Kara Walker at Tate Modern Review: Venus, Sharks and the Sadism of Empire 4 October 2019, Frieze At the pinnacle of Kara Walker's 13-metre-high fountain in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, a Black woman's breasts and slashed jugular spurt water. It is horrifying. Maybe not so when you perceive the water as emerging only from her breasts, although the supposed excess layered onto Black femininity might jump out, but it chills to locate the source...
Related Press ArtSeen Richard Serra 2 October 2019, The Brooklyn Rail Sculptors have always had it tough. Any unique instance of exploratory form in three-dimensions ultimately can't compete with the diverse world of objects and the inexorable gravity that pressurizes it all into our consciousness. Historical ways to outwit this "outside" pressure have ranged from twisting an animated mimesis from the...
Related Video & Audio How we experience time and memory through art 30 April 2019, TED2019 Artist Sarah Sze takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through her work: immersive installations as tall as buildings, splashed across walls, orbiting through galleries — blurring the lines between time, memory and space. Explore how we give meaning to objects in this beautiful tour of Sze's experiential, multimedia art.
Related Video & Audio Sarah Sze – ‘You Mark Time Through Objects’ | TateShots 11 January 2019, Tate Sarah Sze discusses her installation Seamless as it is installed at Tate Modern, London, 2018.
Related Video & Audio Philip Guston exhibition at Hauser reviewed by Caroline Chiu 19 June 2018, Caroline Chiu Studio Art Reviews Caroline Chiu is a Hong Kong based art critic and collector who has been presenting Caroline Chiu Studio Art Reviews with Hong Kong radio station RTHK4 since 2005. In this podcast episode, published in a collaboration between Chiu and Ocula, the Hong Kong based critic reviews the exhibition Philip Guston: A Painter's Forms, 1950–1979 at...
Related Video & Audio Sarah Sze: ‘Afterimage’ 11 June 2018, Victoria Miro 'You're having this filmic way of reading images as they move, and you move, through space.' In this film, the artist discusses the process of creating the new site-specific works in her exhibition at Victoria Miro: Images in Debris, an installation of images, light, sound, film, and objects, that seeks to transform the visitor's perception and...
