We are delighted to announce the opening of our fifth gallery in West Palm Beach’s emerging Cultural Quarter on 2414 Florida Avenue. The 3,000 sq ft space will become the gallery’s first permanent home in the United States.
Since opening in 2012, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery has gained a reputation for its diverse, international program of emerging and established artists and innovative approach to exhibiting art. Alongside three existing permanent spaces, two in London and one in Berlin, the gallery has been hosting annual summer exhibitions in Norway and in a sprawling 18th-century German castle outside of Berlin. The gallery in West Palm Beach occupies a former warehouse building that has been elegantly converted to make the most of the 16-foot-high ceilings with clearstory windows that maximise wall space while flooding the rooms with an ambient natural light.
The centrl space provides the opportunity to exhibit large-scale works and installations, while the four other rooms offer more intimate viewing experiences. Also on the ground floor are the club room and the dining room for special events and private dinners.
Already home to the Norton Museum of Art, a Sotheby’s outpost and numerous other galleries, West Palm Beach is fast becoming one of the art world’s most exciting destinations. Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery looks forward to becoming part of this thriving cultural scene and to introducing new audiences to its ever-expanding roster of artists.
The gallery’s inaugural exhibition, No Visible Means of Support, presents a bold new body of work by the London-based artist Sara Berman whose practice draws on personal experience to explore the impacts of societal expectations on women. Berman begins by painting the distinctive diamond-shaped pattern of the harlequin’s costume onto the canvas to create what she describes as ‘the soul’ of the painting. This is then worked over with further layers of paint that pushed and scraped across the surface to create a bruised, translucent skin while her figures loom, larger-than-life in awkward and sometimes, confronting poses.