Galerie Huit

Galerie Huit was a GI artists’-run cooperative and exhibition space founded in 1950 by a group of American expatriate artists in Paris. Its members included Oscar Chelimsky, Sidney Geist, Burton Hasen, Paul Keene, John Levee, Reginald Pollack, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Hugh Weiss. Other artists associated with the gallery included Haywood Jablonski, Shirley Jaffe, Sam Francis, Norman Bluhm, and Kimber Smith, among others.

Located on the Left Bank, the gallery functioned as a cooperative space that enabled artists to exhibit their work outside the constraints of commercial galleries. It presented rotating exhibitions of its members and associated artists, providing early exhibition opportunities for painters connected to postwar abstraction and Abstract Expressionism. Its programme reflected a range of approaches, from gestural abstraction to more structured and experimental practices.