Olfactory Art Keller

Olfactory Art Keller is not your average gallery. You can’t just stand back and take in the art with your eyes. You have to sniff it out. Open lids. Unscrew bottles. Call up memories. And breathe.

Housed in a 9-by-23-foot former barbershop, the gallery is run by owner and director Andreas Keller, who fills the space with scented objects, olfactory experiences, and smell performances (as fabulous as they sound) designed to awaken and tease your sense of smell.

Some artists are perfumers, but most are creators working with scent to conjure mythical, historical, or entirely imaginary encounters: the resinous air of a dying pine forest, the musk of a teenage boy’s bedroom, the intangible aroma of passion or shame. Together, they explore scent’s power to remind us of our humanness.

Each exhibition is a tiny act of self-destruction: every time you inhale a new smell, you’re breaking apart the molecules that bind to your receptors. In that moment, you’re altering—on a cellular level—your experience of the world forever. Literally.

Andreas Keller holds a Ph.D. in genetics from Julius Maximilians University of Würzburg in Germany and a second degree in the philosophy of smell from the City University of New York (CUNY). In 2006, he published a book titled "Philosophy of Olfactory Perception."

Dr. Keller is on a mission to get people to stop looking and start smelling. That’s why he opened Olfactory Art Keller in 2021. Keller calls himself “the smell guy,” which we think is ironic, given that he treats every piece of scent art with the reverence of a rare antique book, even if it’s priced at just $30.