Clayton Press and Gregory Linn are well known as early identifiers of emerging talents, many of which have developed into artists who are well recognized in the contemporary canon – from Richard Prince to Diana Thater, from Jutta Koether to Borna Sammak.
Our approach is to develop portraits of artists' careers, collecting several works – 5, 10, 15 – over time. For us, we are most interested in making a commitment to artists who are doing something fresh and evolutionary. We own paintings, time-based media, photography, sculpture, installation, and even several URLs (domain name and web application). Here is an example by Damon Zucconi, www.dictionary.blue.. By supporting these artists longer term, we feel – rightly or not – that we are encouraging them to push forward and through.
We took this approach first with the Pictures Generation, and then we did this with artists like Angela Bulloch, Stan Douglas, Zoe Leonard, Jason Rhoades, Kay Rosen, Diana Thater, Franz West, TJ Wilcox, and Christopher Williams in the 1990s. Next came, Matthew Brannon, Wade Guyton, Jutta Koether, Seth Price, and Kelley Walker in the 2000s. Now we are making similar, deep commitments to artists like Adam Henry, Jacob Kassay, Win McCarthy (whose work we first saw at Art Cologne in 2014), Borna Sammak, Kyle Thurman, and Damon Zucconi.