On July 1st, a special edition of Downtown Dealers, our popular conversation series uniting New York art dealers across generations, was held at Anton Kern Gallery. In celebration of the gallery’s 30th anniversary, its founder Anton Kern sat down for a dialogue with Independent’s founder Elizabeth Dee to explore the evolution of the gallery’s space and programming. Over the decades, Kern has consistently worked with a core group of artists from the United States and abroad, and in honor of that long history, Dee invited several of them to pose questions to the dealer about his own inspirations and artistic heritage, and the throughline that ties everything together at the gallery. Highlights from their discussion, edited for brevity and clarity, are below.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Elizabeth Dee: In 1991, you left Germany for New York, where you interned in the print department at The Museum of Modern Art and, after two years there, you departed to become director of Barbara Gladstone Gallery. You opened your own gallery in 1996 with the goal of exhibiting the work of young and emerging artists. What prompted you to make the move at that time?
Anton Kern: It was a different time altogether. Everything was overall cheaper and accessible. Everything was concentrated in SoHo, which was really the melting point, the mega-art-world center in the world. It is hard to imagine that. I was on Broadway between Prince and Spring, and the closest ally that I had, who I had not met at that point, was Andrew Kreps. He was with a lot of other galleries at 560 Broadway.
My gallery was a walk-up and it was tiny. It was half the size of this room. You can see it in a film that was shot when we had the first opening [a two-artist show of work by Angus Fairhurst and Lothar Hempel]. Angus Fairhurst had a band called Low Expectations, and what was significant about it is they were all lip-syncing—the whole thing was totally “faked.” So it was a conceptual idea.
Elizabeth Dee: What was your rent at the time?
Anton Kern: It was I think maybe $1,500. I am not very good with numbers, but I am good with one thing: anticipating and being frugal with money. I knew my first-year program; I knew the people that I wanted to show—Lothar Hempel, Kai Althoff, John Bock, Monica Bonvicini, Lara Schnitger. I knew those artists and I knew what I wanted to do. And I set out to do that with the rent that we had and I was able to because I put a little bit aside just for that reason.
Elizabeth Dee: Were those artists living partially in New York at the time or were they mainly based in Europe and you wanted to present their work in New York?
Anton Kern: I think they were mixed. The majority were maybe German because I wanted to give them a platform in New York and I felt that was really important. But some people, like Lara Schnitger, Matt Monahan, Ellen Berkenblit, were living in New York. And that is how it started. But then it became more competitive. You could start working with artists and if you are lucky, you don't lose them. If you are not so lucky, you lose them and, hopefully, you have some inventory. It is the truth.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Elizabeth Dee: So, inspired by a model of 20 questions that my great friend and collaborator Matthew Higgs started, I thought I would ask your artists to pose questions they wanted to ask you. The first person who provided a question today was Michael Joo. And maybe you could say a few words about each artist before you hear the question.
Anton Kern: If you don't know Michael Joo's work, it is incredible. It is scientific. It can be beautiful. There was a show recently with old work from the 1990s, down close to Canal Street that [curator] Christopher Y. Lew put together. I thought that was really good.
Elizabeth Dee: Michael wants to ask you this: “Since the earliest days when we worked together, you have had three distinctly different gallery spaces. On Broadway in Soho from 1996 to 2001, to 20th Street in Chelsea from then until 2017, to where you are now, here on 55th Street in Midtown. If each gallery had a scent for those years—turpentine, cigarettes, ambition, sweat—what would it be?
Anton Kern: Yeah, sweat is in all of them. I think this one has some kind of cross between cumin and tulip or rose or something. It is a good smell.
Elizabeth Dee: Why do you think Michael is so interested in Eau de Anton?
Anton Kern: I think you need to look to his art. His parents were scientists in Korea.
Elizabeth Dee: Interesting. Okay, I am going to move on. Chris Martin.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Anton Kern: Chris Martin was very influential for me. I call him the godfather of the art that is going on in the last 20 years. People say he is an underrecognized artist. All of that is true, but he is also a fearless painter who does not consider the canvas as just as a landscape that ends [at some arbitrary size], you know 6-by-4, or 20-by-10 feet, or whatever. He goes beyond it. And he knows when to stop, too. He is really magnificent. He deserves all the respect he gets.
Elizabeth Dee: Chris wants to ask, “Do you remember the initial spark that inspired you to open the gallery 30 years ago? And how has that grown or changed?”
Anton Kern: That is not a fair question, because every morning I think, “Why the fuck am I even getting up? Why am I doing this?” So, the first espresso, I would say, that is the spark.
Elizabeth Dee: Yuli Yamagata.
Anton Kern: Well, Patricia Pericas, my wife, and Fernanda Arruda, who also used to work for me for a while, and Nessie Pope, they curated a show here called Samba in the Dark. That is probably where Yuli appeared to me for the first time. [Brazilian gallerist] Márcia Fortes also works with her. She is another one where you cannot explain the work, you have to look at it. It is inexplicably beautiful and also introverted. And also it is not easy at all. She incorporates things that you would not consider art at all, like bones or a flower or something. But she does it in such a way that is her own language.
Elizabeth Dee: Yuli asked, “Something that I love about you and the gallery is your sense of humor. What kind of role do you think humor plays in the gallery?”
Anton Kern: We like to laugh, but I do not know about humor. Humor is a fickle thing—fickle and weird. The English, for instance, have that particular humor. I still have not gotten it. It is a good one. It is an interesting one. Have you ever seen Fawlty Towers with John Cleese? It is hilarious, but you cannot explain the humor. It is like a smell. If you like the smell of somebody, then you most likely like the person.
Elizabeth Dee: Ellen Berkenblit.
Anton Kern: She is here, I saw her. She is awesome. But, again, you have got to see the work. It looks like maybe there is repetition in the image or something, but it is not about that. It is deeper than that. And to me that is true for a lot of art. When you look at figuration, is it really about the figuration? Is it about the image or is it about the painting? My father [the artist Georg Baselitz] said it best, he said: “Both are true.”
Elizabeth Dee: Ellen wants to ask, “If one day there was a film based on the real adventures of the Anton Kern Gallery, who would direct it? And which actor would play you, living or dead?”
Anton Kern: Pee-wee Herman, Paul Reubens.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Elizabeth Dee: Liz Larner.
Anton Kern: She is somebody whose work I have loved for more than 20 years. She is just an alchemist again. She works with material in a way that I have never seen.
Elizabeth Dee: Liz asks, “Anton, you are the son of an artist and his muse and production assistant, Elke Kern. Do you have any observations for children of artists and their artist parents?”
Anton Kern: That is a really, really tough one because I want to say that every child of every person loves their parents and steps into the footpath of their parents, or does their own thing, but it is just not true. Some of them are fuck-ups. I have met a lot of artists’ children who are serious fuck-ups, and I hope I am not one of them.
Photo by Leandro Justen.
Elizabeth Dee: Marcus Jahmal—who is a more recent addition to your program—is that correct?
Anton Kern: That is correct. The one thing about Marcus is that he is not a trained painter. I did not know that at first, but it is clear when you see the work. There is a chutzpah, there is an incision in the work that comes very late into it. And it is pretty great.
Elizabeth Dee: He wants to ask, “What is the throughline linking the first few artists you showed to the artists you work with now?”
Anton Kern: Well, it is pretty much me. I always think about the next step that an artist would be taking and I need to be excited about that. In a world like this, it is important that you have chemistry. It does not work just for the monetary part. Not for me.
Elizabeth Dee: Do you feel that you have to be able to see where the body of work might be going?
Anton Kern: That is what I meant. I feel like I have to see—not the body of work, but I have to see that there is something that is exciting for me tomorrow.