Marc Selwyn Fine Art Gallery – Frederick Fisher and Partners

Our collaboration with gallerist Marc Selwyn centers on synergy between light, space and art. We designed three galleries for him over twenty years, each an understated, well-structured envelope for the contemporary and historic art he exhibits. Each balanced natural and artificial light and integrated easily into its urban environment.

The new Marc Selwyn Gallery opened in 2014 in Beverly Hills, the neighborhood where many of the gallery’s clients live and work. Clients stop by on lunch breaks or on their way home, making the space part of a community’s daily rituals. Our design, simple and minimal in its ethos, makes room for these daily interactions while keeping art in the spotlight. Formerly home to Al Grimmett & Sons Garage and built in the 1940s, the original building featured brick walls and wooden trusses. We embraced this resilient and elegant industrial fabric, transforming the structure into a 3,000-square-foot home for exhibitions, art storage, private offices and meetings.

The red brick façade remains and existing recesses became windows and doors, wide glass squares along the sidewalk that give passersby a glimpse of the art. Inside, the rooms achieve an organic rhythm, inviting visitors to meander from one volume into the next. The corridor between the street and the main galleries serves as a feature wall for exhibiting small groups of artworks and leads into one small and one large exhibition space. In these galleries, the white-painted trusses create a high-ceilinged, wide-open effect, but the walls themselves are lower and uninterrupted, keeping the expanses of space and surface adaptable to a wide variety of artworks.

Both sky-lit with adjustable track lighting suspended above, the rooms adapt gracefully to either monumental or intimate projects. For the inaugural show of work by landscape photographer Richard Misrach, the galleries held large, formally compelling abstractions of foliage, and the long walls served as wide, neutral frames. A year later, Lee Mullican’s obsessive, spiritual paintings hung alongside Marjorie Cameron’s much smaller, vulnerable drawings. This time the architecture functioned more as a shelter, the design’s clean lines securely holding these profoundly personal experiments.