The Armory Show’s Gramercy International Prize supports young and pioneering New York galleries. Each year, the Prize awards a complimentary booth to a gallery that embodies the spirit of the fair’s founders, who aimed to support the avantgarde. This year’s recipient is Margot Samel, founder of the eponymous New York-based gallery.
This year, Margot Samel Gallery presented artists Leroy Johnson and Sasha Brodsky in Presents, the young galleries section at the fair that took place from September 24–27, at the Javits Center in New York City.
The Armory Show asked Margot Samel what inspired her to be a gallerist and what are her guiding principles.
Margot Samel: I don’t know if I ever made a conscious decision to become a gallerist. It felt less like a career choice than a gradual realization that I wanted to spend my time creating a context for artists whose work stayed with me long after I’d left the studio.
I was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in Estonia in the late 1980s and 1990s, when contemporary art didn’t feel like a fixed canon; it felt like something that was still being negotiated and invented. That experience made me comfortable with uncertainty and skeptical of rigid categories, and it’s shaped the gallery from the beginning.
We’ve introduced many artists from Estonia and the Baltic region to New York audiences, while also working with artists from different generations, geographies, and backgrounds, including many self-taught artists. What interests me are practices that resist easy classification and continue to reveal themselves over time. I hope each exhibition complicates the one before it rather than simply reinforcing the gallery’s identity.
TAS: You’ve been awarded the Gramercy International Prize, with a booth at The Armory Show this year. What does this opportunity mean for your gallery?
Margot Samel: What I appreciate most about the Prize is what it makes possible. It creates the conditions to pursue a curatorial idea with a greater degree of conviction than might otherwise be possible. I’ve never thought of an art fair presentation as fundamentally different from an exhibition. Although the format may be compressed, the ambition doesn’t have to be. I’m interested in presentations that reward sustained attention because I tend to return to works that don’t make themselves immediately available. The Prize allows us to present them in a way that remains faithful to the artists’ practices.
For the full interview go to:
https://www.thearmory-show.com/news/margot-samel
The next step for the Margot Samel Gallery would be Art Basel at Miami Beach in the beginning of December this year where Margot Samel together with Olga Temnikova would present Swedish-Estonian artist Marje Taska.
