Ahead of the artist’s centenary in 2027, the gallery will work with the Foundation to advance international recognition of Fenichel’s seven-decade career
LONDON / NEW YORK / BAKU – Gazelli Art House is pleased to announce its representation of the Lilly Fenichel Foundation, formalising a relationship developed over several years and marking a new chapter in the international recognition of Austrian-born American artist Lilly Fenichel (1927–2016).
The representation comes at a pivotal moment in the reassessment of Fenichel’s place within post-war American abstraction. Over a career spanning seven decades, she moved between some of its most significant artistic centres — San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and New Mexico — while maintaining an uncompromising independence from the movements and categories that surrounded her. Her work evolved continually, from the gestural language of her early paintings to geometric abstraction, sculpture, and experiments with unconventional materials, resisting any singular definition of her work.
As the centenary of Fenichel’s birth approaches in 2027, Gazelli Art House will work closely with the Foundation to expand international awareness of her practice through exhibitions, institutional engagement, research, and scholarship. The partnership will culminate in a major solo exhibition at Gazelli Art House New York in 2027, marking the centenary of the artist’s birth. The announcement also comes amid renewed institutional attention to Fenichel’s work, with a series of museum presentations across the United States at Wichita Art Museum, Muscarelle Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, Grinnell College Museum of Art, and Mobile Museum of Art.
This September, Gazelli Art House will present Fenichel’s work in two concurrent presentations in New York. At The Armory Show 2026 (September 24–27, Stand 424), Continuous Abstraction brings her work into dialogue with Gillian Ayres, Alice Baber, Sandra Blow, Perle Fine, Grace Hartigan, Helen Pashgian, and Joan Truckenbrod. Fenichel will simultaneously feature in Put the Kettle On (September 23–October 31, 2026), the inaugural exhibition at Gazelli Art House’s new gallery at 545 West 25th Street in Chelsea.
Charles Martin, Trustee of the Lilly Fenichel Foundation, said:
“Lilly was an important and enigmatic artist whose brilliant oeuvre defies definition as she defied the commercial, male-dominated art world of the day. It was that defiance, as well as being part of the feminist movement, that meant that she, along with many other women artists of the second half of the twentieth century, did not get the recognition that she deserved during her lifetime. As we approach her centenary next year, we are so excited to be working with Gazelli Art House to bring her work to wider attention both in Europe where she was born and in the US, where she lived and worked. The Lilly Fenichel Foundation is an art education charity, and we look forward to the support for our work that this important relationship will bring.”
Born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1927, Fenichel fled Nazi-occupied Austria with her family in 1939, travelling first to Britain before settling in California. She studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and later at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where she studied under Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, alongside teachers including Hassel Smith, Edward Corbett, David Park and Elmer Bischoff. Her early practice emerged within the context of the Bay Area School, alongside a generation of artists including Jay DeFeo, Sonia Gechtoff, and Joan Brown, before Fenichel moved to New York in 1952 and encountered the milieu of the New York School.
Her subsequent movement between New York, Los Angeles, and New Mexico placed Fenichel at the intersection of several important strands of post-war American art. In California, she shared a studio with Sam Francis, while her work developed in parallel with artists ranging from Grace Hartigan and Helen Frankenthaler in New York to Jay DeFeo and Sonia Gechtoff on the West Coast and Agnes Martin in New Mexico. Yet Fenichel consistently resisted identification with any one school or movement. She rejected the designation of Abstract Expressionist in favor of “non-objective” painter, encapsulating her resistance to the art world’s changing fashions in the declaration: “I do not make hemline art.”
Recent exhibitions have begun to situate Fenichel more fully within this expanded history of abstraction. In 2023, her work was included in Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–70, an exhibition of more than eighty women artists that challenged the traditionally male and predominantly American narrative of Abstract Expressionism. The exhibition brought Fenichel into an international context that included Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Perle Fine, Elaine de Kooning, Jay DeFeo, and Sonia Gechtoff, among artists working across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Gazelli Art House first presented Fenichel’s work in the London group exhibition Montage in 2024, followed in 2025 by Against the Grain, her first solo exhibition in the UK. The new representation builds upon this relationship and the gallery’s commitment to bringing Fenichel’s work into dialogue with both her contemporaries and subsequent generations.
Together, the representation, museum presentations, and forthcoming centenary mark an important new chapter in the recognition of an artist whose career intersected with many of the defining developments of post-war American abstraction, while remaining resolutely her own.
