Iris Clert Gallery - Legacy

Legacy

The Galerie Iris Clert was, for a brief moment in time, the nexus of artistic developments. To assume that this gallery merely housed or displayed these works of art would be incomplete, since, much like Clert herself, the gallery was knee-deep in the artwork, and largely inseparable from it. Not only that, the nature of the art, the very art the gallery championed, was often not possible to display in the conventional sense, and even immaterial in some of the extremes.

Clert instead created a dynamic space, one which acted as a sort of canvas, rather than a null-object. That is not to say that the gallery was the art, per se, but that the gallery, its personality, its size, its white-wall aesthetic, its aggregate ethereal qualities, facilitated a different manner of art altogether. There was a greater interactivity between curator, artist, and viewer, a critical collaboration of personalities, ideas, and aesthetics. Although Clert’s gallery did facilitate the commerce of art, to an extent, the sporadic sales and often "value"-less nature of the exhibitions pointed to the more intangible, collaborative role of the gallery itself. Arman noted that Clert "introduced modern techniques for the presentation of art, into a business that was previously more like antique dealing. She was a pioneer in this."

The Iris Clert Gallery was known for its single-concept exhibitions. This was partly due to the size of the gallery itself: the one small room could physically house only a single concept at a time. More tellingly, however, was Clert’s more active role in the artwork displayed in her gallery, and the dynamic nature of the gallery itself. In cases such as the Micro-Salon d’Avril, the concept was just as important as the artworks themselves – in fact, most of the artwork was made specifically for the show, with the concept in mind.