Located in New York’s Lower East Side, Miguel Abreu Gallery opened in early 2006 with an act of identification. The films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were going to constitute the pivot around which the gallery’s program would unfold. A decision was made to screen one or several of the couple’s films, from time to time, on their own or in conjunction with the work of other artists, to manifest an allegiance to a certain ethic of the image these filmmakers have so potently developed over the last half-century.
Precisely because Straub and Huillet do not consider themselves artists – this word signifies to them creation out of nothing, drawing out of the void – but craftsmen servicing preexisting texts and other source materials from history, there was an attitude here, a palpable spirit of rigorous apprehension, exchange and translation that could be proposed and shared, not only with the other artists in the gallery’s program, but with a potential public at large.
The gallery regularly stages one-person and curated group exhibitions, and organizes film screenings and lectures by leading philosophers and critical theorists, such as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Quentin Meillassoux, and Reza Negarestani. In 2011, the gallery’s publishing division, Sequence Press, was inaugurated as a collaborative enterprise with British publisher Urbanomic and, among other titles, released François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography, Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, Fernando Zalamea’s Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, and Gilles Châtelet’s To Live and Think Like Pigs. Other projects with artists include titles by R. H. Quaytman, Sam Lewitt, Jimmy Raskin, and most recently Documents by Jean-Luc Moulène and the collected Writings of Straub and Huillet.
In 2014, the gallery opened an 8,000 square foot second space two blocks away at 88 Eldridge Street, above a parking garage, to focus on staging large-scale exhibitions.
We represent New York-based artists such as Rey Akdogan, Alexander Carver, Liz Deschenes, Rochelle Goldberg, Tishan Hsu, Sam Lewitt, Dana Lok, K.R.M. Mooney, Paul Pagk, R. H. Quaytman, Eileen Quinlan, Raha Raissnia, Jimmy Raskin, and Blake Rayne. The gallery also works with West Coast and international artists such as Flint Jamison, Scott Lyall, Jean-Luc Moulène, Florian Pumhösl and Pamela Rosenkranz. In 2016, we began representing the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet and the estate of Waclaw Szpakowski.
Participation in international art fairs, such as Art Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze New York and Los Angeles as well as Paris+ par Art Basel, is also part of the gallery’s yearly schedule.