Heller Gallery has long been recognized for playing a seminal role in promoting contemporary sculpture that celebrates the use of glass as a fine art medium. For over twenty five years Heller has exhibited the premier international artists working in glass and has been a valuable resource for artists, museums, collectors, public institutions and studios worldwide. New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art have acquired works from the gallery for their collections as have The Corning Museum of Glass, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and numerous museums abroad, including Victoria & Albert Museum, Musee des Arts Decoratifs de Louvre, and Hokkaido Museum, among others.

The artists who exhibit at Heller work in a broad range of styles and techniques and explore subject matter equally diverse. Some take on the material itself, testing its limits in monumental sculptures or exploring its fundamental qualities in works that play with the interactions of color, light, transparency and form. Others are more interested in delving into emotion and myth or commenting on art history and do so in more expressive styles, casting figurative sculptures, painting on glass or composing elaborate assemblages of looping, brightly colored glass tubes, objects and images.

During the Spring of 1996 New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art featured an exhibition of contemporary glass sculpture that celebrated the use of glass as a fine art medium. The exhibition was a "coming of age" for a generation of inspired artists who cut their teeth making innovative art with a material that thirty years ago was considered either purely utilitarian or purely decorative. Since 1973, Heller Gallery has been at the center of the emergence of glass art, showing the work of the very artists -- Ginny Ruffner, Bertil Vallien, William Morris and Stanislav Libensky among them, recognized by the Metropolitan for their maturity, mastery and vision.

After 16 years in SoHo, Heller Gallery began its 25th year of business in a new 7000 sq. ft. bi-level space at 420 W.14th Street in Chelsea. With the move, Heller Gallery joins the scores of galleries who have settled in the neighborhood over the past few years, making it the epicenter of contemporary art in New York City.

Indeed, Chelsea is anything but an outpost on the far edge of New York art and culture. Though the neighborhood is in transition from its former role as a wholesale meatpacking district, it is, like SoHo in its early years, attracting waves of galleries, artists, and designers. In their footsteps have followed restaurants, cafes, bakeries and night-life that never stops. There is also the incredible Chelsea Market, the sprawling retail outlet for some of New York's finest wholesale bakers, florists, importers, and dealers in fish, meat, wine and other gourmet foods. And it's all easily accessible by car, subway or bus: The West Side Hwy is a block away, there is a gated parking lot nearby and parking on the street after 4pm. On foot, the gallery is a short walk from the 14th Street stops on both the 8th Ave. and Broadway subway lines.

Though the address has changed, Heller Gallery will continue to exhibit contemporary sculpture with a focus on glass and wood. With exhibitions featuring new work by both internationally acclaimed and emerging artists, the gallery will remain an important destination for curators and collectors from around the world.