Matthew Marks is an art gallery located in the New York City neighborhood of Chelsea. Founded in the early 1990s by Matthew Marks, it specializes in modern and contemporary art in a variety of media: including painting, sculpture, photography, installation art, film, and drawings and prints. It represents a broad spectrum of artists, from established figures like Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns to a younger generation of artists like Robert Gober and Nan Goldin. The gallery has three exhibition spaces in the city.
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Matthew Marks worked for the Pace Gallery in New York and Anthony d’Offay in London prior to opening his own gallery.[1] At Pace, he organized his first show of American prints in 1983 at the age of twenty, and co-organized a show of Picasso sketchbooks in 1986.
After working for three years at d’Offay, Marks moved back to New York to open his own gallery on Madison Avenue. The Matthew Marks Gallery had its first exhibition, Artists’ Sketchbooks, in February 1991, including Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Jackson Pollock, and Cy Twombly.
The gallery opened its first space in Chelsea on 22nd Street in 1994. By 1997, the gallery was fully transplanted to Chelsea, and the Madison Ave. space was closed.
Matthew Marks has a reputation for working closely with artists. His first show of artists’ sketchbooks set the tone for the gallery’s future. Nothing was for sale, and most of works had never been seen before by the public. A catalogue was published to accompany the exhibition.
Brice Marden, one of the gallery’s stalwart artists, said “Crudely spoken, [Matthew Marks] seems to be a little less in it for himself than a lot of the other dealers.”[2] Established dealer Barbara Gladstone said that ‘the artists love him. He’s comfortable with artists; he really puts himself out for them.”[3] And collector Eli Broad was quoted as saying, “I do not believe artists go to his gallery for his savvy as a businessman,” comments the collector Eli Broad…“[Marks is respected] for his sure taste and for the seriousness he brings to everything he does” (translated from French).[4]
The gallery has invited art historians like Thomas Crow and Harry Cooper to write essays for gallery catalogues for the exhibitions it has organized over the years, beyond the usual monographic and group shows. The artists Charles Ray and Robert Gober were invited to organize shows. In 2005, the Matthew Marks Gallery organized Jasper Johns: Catenary, which was the first exhibition of the artist’s work since his 1996 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Marks also co-founded the Gramercy International Contemporary Art Fair (now renamed the Armory Show: The International Fair for New Art after the infamous Armory Show in 1913 that introduced modern art to many Americans), which is the largest contemporary art fair in New York and one of the largest in the world.[5]
It has also exhibited work by painters Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud and Cy Twombly.
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