Curiosity, a sense of wonder, and the belief that anything can be art are the elements that helped make Stefan Eins into an innovative art figure in the 1970s. Among the first ready-mades he exhibited at the 3 Mercer Street Store were a crowbar and pulley. For Eins, the wonder of how this pair of primitive tools helped people move…
Born and raised in Austria, Eins came to NYC in 1967, and settled into a small storefront in Soho in 1972 when it was still a deserted manufacturing district. When art galleries began moving into the area, Eins hid his bed behind a screen, and turned his live-in studio into a D.I.Y. exhibition…
In 1982 the idea of the DIY artist store went mainstream when the upscale German exhibition documenta 7 asked Stefan Eins & Jenny Holzer to create a Fashion Moda Store.
Stefan Eins’s storefront at 3 Mercer Street pointedly called itself a store, not a gallery. Doubling as Eins’s illegal living quarters with a bed hidden behind a screen, the space (which operated from 1974 – 1979) epitomized the provocative DIY populism that made Downtown New York such a creative cauldron in the 1970s.