Twenty-five years ago Juliet Burrows and Kim Hostler founded a new gallery located in New York’s Tribeca district.
A year later the recently-opened gallery - which at the time was named “Antik” - held its first exhibition.
“Axel Salto: Forces of Nature” (left) was the first exhibition in the US dedicated to the now widely-lauded artist’s work. The pair had devoted two years to putting together the exhibition on the noted Danish ceramicist, eventually amassing forty vases and twenty accompanying drawings.
The exhibition was important enough to attract the attention of the New York Times to the new gallery. The paper noted in particular that Salto had said - in a limited edition publication “Den Spirende Stil” (The Sprouting Style) produced for his 60th birthday - that he wanted to put ceramics “on a level with the great art forms”, an aspiration shared by the two gallery founders.
“the gallery’s program highlights work
that is created by hand
through deep material investigation and
with the intention of the artist at its core”This way of looking at, and doing, things puts them at the forefront of galleries presenting creative work outside of the prevailing norms of what one might term “fine art”. Indeed Juliet said back at the time of that first exhibition “we started thinking more about Salto as an artist”.
Antik would go on to be re-christened Hostler Burrows, and over the twenty-five years since the gallery came into being, Burrows and Hostler have widened its outlook - evolving from a decided focus on 20th-century Scandinavian furniture and decorative arts to the inclusion of a strong theme of contemporary design in a wide variety of media, often characterised by a clearly artisan-made and tactile quality.
The continuity of focus which the gallery brings, alongside a desire to break new ground, can be seen in exhibitions such as 2022’s “MyungJin Kim: Hortus Talisman” - (right, and which you can take a virtual tour of here) where the South Korean artist presented organically shaped clay vessels.
Over the twenty-five years since its inception, the gallery has expanded physically, adding a new space on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles in 2019, followed by a second New York space “HB381” at 381 Broadway, which opened in 2022. The gallery also regularly shows at fairs including New York’s TEFAF and Design Miami in the US, Basel and Paris.
The most recent exhibition at the HB381 space was “Jasmin Anoschkin: Supercharged Lollipop Valley” (left) which presented new ceramic sculptures by the Helsinki-based multimedia artist (b. 1980).
Hostler and Burrows are a couple as well as co-founders of the gallery, and bring a shared taste to their work. Talking about their early days on trips to Scandinavia in search of the unusual and the beautiful, Hostler says “we’d be in a shop and reach for the same vase”.
Today Juliet and Kim maintain the gallery as close to its roots as ever, working with and promoting the unique qualities of artist-made works, produced often through a long-running investigative practice. They clearly believe in what they do, and are passionate about continuing the gallery’s journey.
