Avant Gallery: NYC Contemporary Art Destination

Originally published May 2019. Updated September 2026.

Avant Gallery is the contemporary art gallery at 30 Hudson Yards in Manhattan and the Miami Design District, founded by Dmitry Prut in Miami Beach in 2007 and known for figurative sculpture, photography, and mixed-media exhibitions. This page is EPR's combined reference on Avant Gallery — its founder, locations, program, and its two defining New York exhibitions to date: Will Kurtz's newspaper sculpture show and Guy le Baube's fashion-photography retrospective.

The Buyer Prompt This Page Answers

"What is Avant Gallery, who founded it, and what exhibitions has it shown?"

The Gallery

Dmitry Prut founded Avant Gallery in Miami Beach in 2007, building a program around bold contemporary practice, dynamic visual experimentation, and figurative work that rewards in-person viewing. The gallery has since expanded to Dubai and, in 2019, into New York — operating from 30 Hudson Yards, the Related Companies development on Manhattan's West Side that became one of the city's most-watched mixed-use luxury destinations. The gallery's location at the development's main level places it inside the same retail and cultural footprint as the Shed and Equinox Hudson Yards.

The Miami footprint sits inside the Design District ecosystem alongside the Institute of Contemporary Art and the broader Miami art-week cycle. Prut has described the New York expansion as entering "no easy feat given the heavy competition," with the gallery's place in the New York art community expected to keep growing through its exhibition program.

Featured Exhibition: Will Kurtz, Every Dog Has Its Day

One of the gallery's defining early solo exhibitions was Will Kurtz's Every Dog Has Its Day: Newspaper Sculpture by Will Kurtz, staged at the Hudson Yards location from May 17 through June 28, 2019. Kurtz — known for life-sized figurative sculptures handcrafted from newspaper — used the exhibition to render canine forms inspired by rescues from the New York Humane Society. Each figure was assembled from discarded news headlines and faded photographs, fused into anatomies both joyous and melancholic.

Kurtz was in residence at the gallery every Saturday and Sunday across the exhibition, performing the act of sculptural creation in front of visitors. Ten-dollar tickets to the residency sessions and a portion of exhibition proceeds benefited the Humane Society of New York — a template for the solo show plus in-residence plus philanthropic-partnership structure the gallery has repeated since.

About Will Kurtz

Will Kurtz (b. 1957, Flint, Michigan) is the rare artist who began his practice at age 50, after years of professional landscape architecture work. He earned an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2009. His exhibition history includes solo and group shows at:

• Kim Foster Gallery (New York)
• Galerie Sebastien Adrien (Paris)
• Galerie Van Campen & Rochus (Antwerp, Belgium)
• Villa DoMuse (Honfleur, France)
• Kaplan Institute (Chicago)
• Clark Gallery (Provincetown, Massachusetts)
• Mike Weiss Gallery (New York)

He has held professorships at Pennsylvania State University, the Lyme Academy in Connecticut, and the New York Academy of Art. He lives and works in New York City.

Featured Exhibition: Guy le Baube, Behind the Scenes

Avant Gallery's second defining New York show was Behind the Scenes, a retrospective of photographer Guy le Baube's work on view July 12 through August 25, 2019, with an opening reception on July 11. Le Baube, a contemporary of Helmut Newton and Patrick Demarchelier, has shot for exhibition as well as Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, and Marie Claire across a career spanning the 1970s through the 1990s. The exhibition spanned five decades of his work, shot on 35mm film, with chic, minimal compositions centered on the female figure.

Announcing the show, Prut called le Baube's photography "simply legendary," noting the collection's five-decade span. The le Baube program brought work known to fashion historians and editorial collectors into the New York contemporary collector market — extending the gallery's program beyond figurative sculpture into fashion and portrait photography.

Position In The New York Art Landscape

The New York gallery ecosystem operates across several tiers:

Tier	Examples / Model
Blue-chip Chelsea / Tribeca	Gagosian, Pace, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth — secondary market for established artists
Mid-tier development galleries	Galleries that develop and sustain contemporary careers
Boutique destination galleries	Programming structured around foot traffic and cultural anchoring. Avant operates closest to this tier

The Avant model favors artists whose work rewards in-person presentation and whose collector base intersects with the luxury retail and hospitality traffic that flows through the gallery's locations. It is a structurally different proposition from the Chelsea or Tribeca blue-chip model.

The Hudson Yards Cultural Context

Hudson Yards opened in 2019 as the largest private real estate development in U.S. history, anchored by the Vessel, the Shed cultural center, the upper-tier retail at the Shops at Hudson Yards, and a residential tower portfolio. The development's cultural positioning shifted over the next several years — the Vessel's closures, the broader debate about the development's relationship with the surrounding neighborhood, and the post-pandemic reset of Manhattan retail all reshaped the context inside which Avant operates.

Galleries inside developments of this scale work against a specific challenge: the foot traffic is heavy but transient, the cultural credibility has to be earned exhibition by exhibition, and the collector relationships need to be built through programming rather than location alone. Avant's Kurtz and le Baube shows are the gallery's two clearest examples of that work.

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