Art advisor and curator Victoria Mouraux Durand-Ruel will open Mouraux Durand-Ruel Gallery this September, bringing a new contemporary art space to New York’s Chelsea district during The Armory Show week.
Located at 555 West 25th Street, opposite Pace Gallery’s New York headquarters, the gallery will launch with an exhibition of photographs by Lucien Clergue before introducing an international programme spanning painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, drawing and installation. The gallery aims to create a dialogue between New York and Europe, presenting emerging and established artists alongside carefully selected works from the secondary market.
A Paris-born art advisor and curator, Mouraux Durand-Ruel is the great-great-granddaughter of legendary art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, whose support of the Impressionists helped shape the history of modern art. Drawing on both that legacy and her experience across museums, auction houses, galleries and art fairs, she plans to develop a programme that connects historical scholarship with contemporary practice.
Alongside exhibitions of living artists, the gallery will place Impressionist, Modern and Post-War works into conversation with contemporary practices, collaborating closely with the Durand-Ruel Archives in Paris and Frederick Mouraux Gallery in Brussels to create an ongoing exchange of exhibitions, research and public programming.
The inaugural exhibition will present photographs by pioneering French photographer Lucien Clergue, a close collaborator of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, co-founder of the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival and the first photographer elected to France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts, before the gallery’s second exhibition turns to Mary Cassatt in a presentation marking the centenary of the artist’s death. Rather than a conventional historical survey, the exhibition pairs Cassatt’s prints with archival material to explore how her intimate depictions of women and children continue to resonate with contemporary ideas around identity, education and female autonomy.
The exhibition also reflects the gallery’s wider programme of placing historical art in dialogue with the present. It revisits Cassatt’s groundbreaking colour printmaking, inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e, while highlighting her role as an American artist working in Paris who helped shape the reception of Impressionism in New York—a fitting subject for a gallery seeking to build cultural bridges between Europe and the United States.
Before establishing her own gallery, Mouraux Durand-Ruel studied law before moving into the arts, completing graduate studies at Maastricht University and the University of San Francisco. She has worked with institutions and organisations including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Christie’s, Phillips, TEFAF, and most recently Opera Gallery New York, where she curated the gallery’s last eight New York exhibitions.
Speaking about the new venture, Mouraux Durand-Ruel said:
“My goal is to create an intimate, international space designed to serve as a bridge between Paris, Brussels, and New York. I believe great galleries have a responsibility to champion artists before the rest of the world fully catches up to them. Beyond exhibitions, I want the gallery to become a place for conversation through lectures, publications, performances, and collaborations that bring artists, collectors, scholars, and the broader public together.”
Opening to coincide with Armory Week, Mouraux Durand-Ruel Gallery joins a growing number of international galleries investing in Chelsea while positioning itself as a platform that bridges historical connoisseurship with contemporary artistic practice.
