Sean Kelly Gallery

Profile

Artist-gallery owner Sean Kelly got his start in the British museum world by curating special shows by sculptors like Richard Deacon and Anthony Gormley when they were still green. He went on to open his place in SoHo in 1995, where he earned a reputation for hands-on work with artists from both sides of the pond. There are the gutsy, politically loaded shows of Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, whose performance for the Venice Biennale featured the artist scrubbing meat off an enormous pile of animal bones, one by one, in a complex protest of the war in the Balkans. Joseph Kosuth, the supposed granddaddy of conceptual art, is also at Kelly, with his Wittgenstein-inspired (and somewhat snoozy) text works. James Casebere exhibits his carefully staged photos at the gallery, using immaculate sets and models to create evocative images of imaginary spaces. And for downtown cred, there’s the late cult-legend (and National Endowment for the Arts sensation) Robert Mapplethorpe. — Alex Mar