Kent Fine Art is an art gallery in New York City founded in 1985 by Douglas Walla.[1][2]
Founded in 1985, Kent Fine Art opened at the corner of Madison & 57th Street in the Fuller Building, New York.[3] Since 57th Street, the gallery has maintained galleries in Soho, and the Chelsea arts district in New York. Early exhibitions and publications focused on the lifetime sculpture of Medardo Rosso, the surrealists Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, the catalogue raisonne for John Heartfield AIZ/VI, and the last lifetime show of Henry Moore: From Model to Monument. All of the works mentioned above were placed in museum collections in the United States, Europe and Japan. Contemporary research and exhibitions focused most notably on Dennis Adams, Antoni Muntadas and Pablo Helguera, along with painters Llyn Foulkes, Irving Petlin, the Boston Visionary Paul Laffoley and the metaphysical photography of John Brill.[4] Along with an active publication program, KFA’s web presence began in 1997 largely as a publishing vehicle that was more efficient in distribution than by mail.
In 2017, Kent Fine Art launched a redesigned and comprehensive website containing the archives of the gallery artists’ collaborations. Given a 30 year back catalogue of exhibitions, it was also a convenient method to access the gallery history. Given the advances in digital technology as well as the use of hand-held devices for collecting information, the aim was to create a user friendly, and efficient platform to share their archives with the public. Artists and exhibitions presented ranged from Surrealism, Symbolism and Dada, to more current artists of conscience, and institutional critique as well as conceptual rigor. Kent Fine Art attempted to provide economic value to collectors by providing thoughtful basis regarding decisions about art rather than financial engineering or gaming the system.
Along with gallery sales of modern and contemporary art, curating programs and exhibitions, recent projects include the completion of The Essential Paul Laffoley University of Chicago Press following the death of the artist in 2016, research concerning the oeuvre of Irving Petlin, and the development of a major monograph documenting 40 years of street architecture, interventions, and video of Dennis Adams.