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As artists represented by Ortuzar Projects appear in major biennials and set auction records, one would imagine that the gallery has a long history and an even longer list of artists. Still, Ortuzar Projects, which was founded as a two-year-old project space, is only six years old and intends to keep its roster, if not its recently tripled Tribeca footprint, reduced.
The gallery’s artist roster includes 14 artists from the 20th and 21st centuries who founder Ales Ortuzar says have been overlooked in New York. Two of them, Suzanne Jackson and Takako Yamaguchi, will be present at this year’s Whitney Biennial; an Ernie Barnes painting surpassed its high estimate of $200,000 to sell for $15.3 million in 2022. Through its shortlist, Ortuzar can work closely with artists on exhibitions, publications, acquisitions and the creation of foundations.
Ortuzar, of Spanish origin, who says he is wary of “growth for growth’s sake,” cut his teeth at the mega-gallery David Zwirner; after joining the company in 2008, he rose through the ranks to become a partner during its global expansion. “It had become a very big gallery, putting on so many exhibitions at once and participating in so many art fairs,” he says. When he decided to open an independent art consulting business in 2015, he began to imagine his own gallery on a more intimate scale.
“Having lived in Spain and England before moving to New York, I had the impression that people from a particular city or country all look at the same artists,” he says. “I wanted to break the echo chamber and create a meaningful platform for artists who hadn’t had good exposure here, even if they were well known elsewhere.”
Ortuzar Projects is certainly not alone in spotlighting important artists that history has neglected – indeed, calling artists “neglected” or “rediscovered” is something of a trope – although the emphasis on by the gallery on artists under-recognized in the United States but celebrated elsewhere is a little more precise. For its inaugural exhibition, Ortuzar Projects organized the first American solo exhibition of abstract painter Michel Parmentier, a member of the Parisian artist collective BMPT in the 1960s, combining the artist’s striped canvases and works on paper with documents from ‘archives. His work has been exhibited for decades in his native France.
“This exhibition was, in my opinion, the least fashionable thing [Ortuzar] I could have done it,” says New York painter Matt Connors, who will have a solo presentation at the gallery this summer. “Parmentier is one of my favorite artists and the show was so well documented and beautiful. It was a gunshot heard around my group of friends.
Other firsts followed. Ortuzar Projects presented Lisa Ponti and Claudette Johnson’s first solo exhibitions in the United States and gave Jackson and Key Hiraga their solo debuts in New York. The gallery also mounted exhibitions that ended long dormant periods in the history of artists’ exhibitions in New York. When she conducted a mini-survey of Maruja Mallo’s paintings in 2018, the Spanish artist had not made a single trip to New York since 1948; an exhibition of paintings, drawings, collages and zines by American artist Joey Terrill in 2021 marked his first in the city in four decades. Mallo and Terrill were subsequently featured at the 2022 Venice Biennale and the Hammer Museum’s 2023 Made in LA Biennial, respectively.
The gallery’s clients, Ortuzar explains, are primarily established collectors, with a particular emphasis on institutions. “We have seen a significant reassessment of the art history canon over the last decade in particular, with museums and collectors recognizing how many important and vital artists have been under-recognized and under-collected” , he said.
One of these artists is Feliciano Centurión, born in Paraguay. He is the subject of Ortuzar Projects’ booth at Frieze New York in collaboration with the Institute for Latin American Art Studies, where his work is featured in a group exhibition of Latin American textile art (up ‘to July 27). Centurión, who died of AIDS-related complications at the age of 34 in 1996, created textile works that were subversive, kitsch, tender and, following his diagnosis, diaristic. His practice has attracted attention in recent years, with a notable inclusion at the 2018 São Paulo Biennale and a first solo exhibition in the United States at the Americas Society in New York in 2020.
The works presented on the stand range from $75,000 to $250,000 and include a selection of the artist’s works frazadas – humble blankets that he painted, glued and embroidered with depictions of plants and animals and inscriptions such as “Soy el flujo del tiempo que no se detiene” (“I am the flow of time which does not ‘don’t stop’) – as well as dinosaur toy wearing crochet sets. “I’ve been working for this moment for years,” Ortuzar says. The gallery will mount an exhibition dedicated to the artist later this year.
For Ortuzar, the belief that the gallery “can have a real impact on the career of a particular artist” is at the heart of representation decision-making. Take Jackson, a Savannah-based artist who makes sculptural acrylic paintings without a canvas. After its 2019 exhibition – sold out – Ortuzar Projects mounted a collective exhibition revisiting The sapphire showa historically important presentation of the work of black women artists, including Betye Saar and Senga Nengudi, that Jackson organized at her Gallery 32 project space in Los Angeles over a weekend in the summer of 1970.
“I am exclusively with Ortuzar and will be with them until they or I leave Earth,” Jackson says. The gallery has helped place her work in major museum collections, including MoMA, the Whitney, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she will have a solo exhibition in 2025. “We live in an imperfect world. where artists like Suzanne [Jackson] can go unnoticed for a decade,” says Ortuzar. “It’s gratifying to see this change.”
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