Anton Kern Gallery

About the Gallery
Anton Kern Gallery is a New York contemporary art gallery that represents 40 contemporary artists from the US, UK, Europe, Asia, and South America. The gallery has established a rigorous exhibition program of mostly one-person shows and has developed lasting relationships with international collectors and institutions. The gallery was established in SoHo in 1996 with the intention to exhibit the work of young and emerging artists, and to bring it to the attention of a large audience as well as collectors and museums.

Over the past 30 years, the gallery has consistently worked with a core group of artists to successfully build their careers. Artists who were once emerging are now in their mid-careers, many with museum shows and publications to their credit, and major works placed in international private and museum collections.

Gallery artists have been included in invitational exhibitions such as the Carnegie International (John Bock, Nicole Eisenman, Richard Hughes, Matthew Monahan, Manfred Pernice, Wilhelm Sasnal, David Shrigley), the Biennale di Venezia (John Bock, Matthew Monahan, Alessandro Pessoli, Erik van Lieshout, Nicole Eisenman), Whitney Biennial (Nicole Eisenman, Matthew Monahan, Aliza Nisenbaum), Documenta (Anne Collier, John Bock, Nicole Eisenman, Marcel Odenbach), and Skulptur Projekte Münster (Manfred Pernice, Nicole Eisenman).

About the Presentation
Anton Kern Gallery will present work by David Byrd in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. David Byrd (b. 1926, Springfield, IL; d. 2013, Oxford, NY) was a highly productive yet reclusive artist. After serving in the army during World War II, Byrd briefly studied at the Dauphin School of Art in Philadelphia through the G. I. Bill, and then at the Ozenfant School of Fine Arts in New York. In the 1950s, he worked odd jobs across New York State, including as a deliveryman, janitor, and movie house usher, which inspired his genre-scene paintings. Starting in 1958, he worked as an orderly in the psychiatric ward at the Veterans Administration Medical Hospital in Montrose, New York, for 30 years. He simultaneously developed an expansive body of paintings about his patients, routines, and the surrounding landscape. Upon retirement, he devoted himself fully to his art; however, did not publicly exhibit it until a few months before his death.

Since taking on Byrd's Estate in 2019, Anton Kern Gallery has held four solo exhibitions in New York (2019, 2021, 2024, 2025), curated presentations at Art Basel in Switzerland (2023) and Miami Beach (2019), and published the artist's 216 page manuscript, which is the codex for understanding his oeuvre of paintings, drawings, and assemblage sculptures. In 2025, the gallery and the David Byrd Estate published the artist's online catalogue raisonné. They have also commissioned scholarly texts in order to broaden awareness of the artist and contextualize his work within 20th Century art history. Byrd's legacy continues to be fostered through collaborations with international curators and institutions.