Profile

Relocating from California in 1976 to Marlborough Gallery, Douglas Walla began his vocation as an art dealer by serving as vice president of the New York branch for seven years.  In 1985, he founded a new company entitled Kent Fine Art with a newly constructed space in the historic Fuller Building located at the intersection of Madison & 57th Street.  Following the years uptown, the gallery relocated nearer the artist community in Soho for an entire decade before building its present space in Chelsea.

Concerning the program, we’ve allowed ourselves to be influenced by the chance encounter with artists: past, present, future.  Our slant leans toward art that has aesthetic and intellectual impact.  With the late 70’s flowering of Warholism which was easier to appreciate, a new kind of art emerged that was more like entertainment, more attached to media attitudes.  This new contemporary art has by now become the dominant form.  It’s much closer to entertainment and depends on production value and spectacle in a way that serious art never did before.  It makes me think of the following parable.

A dog barks into the night. 
The neighbour's dog starts to bark too. 
And the same happens to his neighbour's dog. 
Soon, dogs are barking everywhere, one louder than the next.
Something must be going on, the dogs are absolutely convinced of this.

Works of art presented here, however intensely marked by the creative intelligence and private obsession of their individual makers, are the products of collective negotiation and exchange.  Therefore, the gallery  functions as a hybrid space: part symbolic representation of concrete history, part social dialogue, part addressing the viewer and the viewed as portrayed in the media landscape. The works themselves will address simultaneous “histories”, and their connection with culture, society, politics, and ultimately economics as well.