While working with Babs Haenen, I got to know about various galleries she has collaborated with until today, and one of them is Hostler Burrows. This is a collaboration between Babs and Hostler Burrows that spans 10 years now.When I found out that it was in the United States, I was so excited that I could get the chance to visit Hostler Burrows Gallery since my US stay in the city for my brother’s graduation from Harvard!
But apart from the gallery, Babs introduced me to some private collectors that I could also meet in the United States. I hoped to be ready enough to get interviews from the collectors and the gallerist. But it was an unfounded feeling! Everybody was very kind and welcoming, and I didn’t get “stage fright”. Especially Juliet Burrows, one of the two owners of the Hostler Burrows gallery, who is an amazing woman, was very eager to show me Babs’s artworks they had in storage. I also had a nice interview with her!
During our talk, Juliet gave me an introduction on the creation of the Gallery in New York. She and her partner, Kim Hostler, founded their gallery in 1998, four years after they first met, with a sibling gallery opened in 2019 in Los Angeles and a gallery for solo artist presentations, HB381. They created the gallery as a design gallery, built on their shared taste and aesthetics. And that is why, in the beginning, the art and design of the Nordic countries embodied the intangibles that most inspired them.
Their love for ceramics and shared passion has carried them through a 25-year evolution. Juliet told me that they started with the vintage works by masters of 20th-century Scandinavian design and moved on to integrating contemporary artists, not only Nordic, and mainly work by female artists. She said that Kim and she are very fond of artists who create works by hand. The hallmark of their gallery is the reverence for the natural world, integrity, intention and beauty. Both of them still prefer three-dimensional works, from clay and porcelain and the newly added glass pieces. Besides, they got famous for the furniture they are showing.
They first saw Babs’s work around 10 years ago in Basel, at the Design Miami/Basel fair. Juliet explained that Babs was showing with Gallery VIVID, based in Rotterdam. The first connection happened through a collaboration between the two galleries. Juliet and Kim contacted Babs and asked her to participate in a group exhibition at the Hostler Burrows Gallery in New York under the title “Six Women”, where they introduced six women artists. It was a transitional period for Kim and Juliet since they started working with contemporary artists. They started selling Babs’s artworks in New York and decided to break that collaboration so they could work directly with Babs throughout the next years.
Juliet lived in Amsterdam for about five years when she was younger. Before starting the Hostler Burrows gallery, Juliet was a dancer. So, she loved the fact that Babs had taught Modern Educational Dance. She worked with Hans van Manen, the world-famous choreographer at the Dutch National Ballet, a friend of Babs and collector of her work.
Juliet visited Babs in her studio in Amsterdam a few years later and saw the creational process of her artworks for her solo show in 2018. For this exhibition, they also produced a catalogue. Since that time, Hostler Burrows Gallery has shown Babs’s work at different Art Fairs and, most recently, in 2022, at the Salon of Art and Design, New York.
She described Babs as a person with a really special and incredible energy that is very passionate about what she is doing and about the world in general. Juliet believes that, as an artist herself as well, she feels a partnership with the artists they represent in the Hostler Burrows Gallery, as they work together and hopefully build their careers.
On to the next blog! ヽ(•‿•)ノ
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