Bortolami Gallery in New York

Editorial Profile

Bortolami is a commercial gallery founded in 2005 by Stefania Bortolami, initially in Chelsea before relocating in 2017 to its current home at 39 Walker Street in Tribeca, where it now operates three distinct exhibition spaces — including a shared venue at 55 Walker with Andrew Kreps and Kaufmann Repetto. The gallery's program centers on established and mid-career contemporary artists, with a curatorial sensibility that privileges conceptual rigour, material experimentation, and sustained engagement with questions of space and identity. Among the artists with whom the gallery has maintained long-standing relationships are Daniel Buren, Tom Burr, Barbara Kasten, and Renée Green — figures whose practices span institutional critique, photography, installation, and research-based work. More recent additions to a roster of over thirty artists and estates reflect an expanding international scope, encompassing painters such as Ella Kruglyanskaya, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, and Marina Rheingantz, alongside conceptually driven practitioners like Paul Mpagi Sepuya and Lena Henke.

Within contemporary art in New York, Bortolami occupies a distinctive position as a mid-size gallery that resists the expansionist logic of mega-gallery platforms, deepening its engagement through collaborative and site-specific initiatives. Chief among these is the Artist/City project, launched in 2015, which pairs artists with American cities for year-long exhibitions in unconventional venues — a format that extends the program well beyond the traditional white cube. In 2024, Bortolami co-founded The Campus in Hudson, NY, a former school transformed into a collective exhibition space alongside five partner galleries, including James Cohan, Anton Kern, and Kurimanzutto. Alongside consistent participation in Art Basel and Frieze New York since its inaugural edition in 2012, these initiatives place Bortolami among the most programmatically ambitious of galleries in New York, contributing to an ecology of independent, mid-scale spaces that continue to define the city's contemporary art landscape.