Klaus Kertess

Klaus Kertess has been a major influence on the New York art scene in his capacity as a dealer, a curator and critic making him an astute commentator on the subject. His writings about the works of the artists with whom he was associated are collected in the volume, Seen, Written.

In 1966 Kretess founded the Bykert Gallery where he represented the works of Chuck Close, Ralph Humphrey, Barry Le Va, Brice Marden, Navid Novros, and Dorothea Rockburne among others. He left the gallery in 1975 to pursue his interest in curating and in writing. His essays and reviews have appeared in Artforum and Art in America among others, as well as catalogs and monographs. He became an adjunct curator of drawing at the Whitney Museum in 1989. In 1995 he was the curator of the Whitney Biennial.

Since the Biennial he has worked as an independent, curating many exhibitions, most notably, Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/ Seeing Drawing (1998), and most recently, Mediation in an Emergency for the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. Kertess is the mentor to today's most important Dealers, leading critics and curators as well as arts administrators.

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