Olfactory Art Keller.

A scientist opens a gallery

Andreas Keller holds two doctorates, one in neuroscience and one in philosophy. He has spent some twenty years researching smell, and in 2018 he wrote Philosophy of Olfactory Perception, on how smelling differs from seeing when both are treated as ways of knowing the world.

In 2021 he opened Olfactory Art Keller in Manhattan. The gallery now sits at 25 Henry Street, in Chinatown. It has one clear principle: the work is the smell. There may be things to look at, there may be words, but they only accompany it.

Keller is not looking for imitations. A work here is not meant to make people exclaim that it smells like banana. It is meant to put forward an idea, with smell as the material of that idea, the way paint is the material of a painting.

What sets the gallery apart from a luxury perfume shop is time. Each exhibition has an opening date and a closing date. People come, smell, and leave. There is nothing to take home. The smell stays in the room and in memory.

Unafraid of unpleasant smells

The perfume industry works almost entirely with pleasant smells. Olfactory Art Keller sets no such limit. One example is Shame by Rachel Barfield, which places materials that recall human bodily secretions beside florals and musks. The work sets out to make the viewer uneasy, and in doing so questions the standards of beauty the perfume industry keeps.

The exhibitions go in many directions. Minimal Scents explored minimalism in making smells. Portraits in Scent and Found Scents were group shows trying to capture intangible things in smell. In early 2024, Basenote Bitch by Elizabeth Renstrom recalled adolescence through mass market perfumes familiar to a whole generation, the apple and sweet fruit smells lined up on shopping mall shelves.

In late 2024, Missense by Sean Raspet and Maxwell Williams produced deliberately ambiguous smells that each person perceives differently. Raspet has long worked with odour molecules, as in Residuals.

Submissions to the gallery's open calls grew from around 40 to around 100. They come from many directions: professionals in perfumery, and people just learning to mix smells.

One lilac season

Of the works shown at the gallery, Bloom Dates by Miriam Songster is the most memorable because it does nothing at all. Lilac branches were placed in the room through New York's lilac season. The flowers opened, gave off their smell, and wilted. The work ended when the flowers faded.

No formula, no bottle, no copy. The smell in Bloom Dates cannot be kept or sold. It is a stretch of time measured by the nose. Someone who came in the first week smelled one thing. Someone who came in the last week smelled another.

That work sums up the spirit of the whole gallery. Smell is a living material; it changes and it disappears. Bringing it into a gallery is not about keeping it forever but about making a place where people notice it while it is still there.

In 2022 a selection from the gallery's first year travelled to Los Angeles in the exhibition OAK@IAO. But the room on Henry Street remains the starting point: a place in New York where people go to smell, not to buy.