March 07, 2021 at 6:39pm
New York gallery Metro Pictures announced today that it will close its doors after this year’s programming, ending a historic four-decade run. An email sent by the gallery cited “a demanding year of pandemic-driven programming, and the anticipated arrival of a very different art world.”
The decision marks the latest of many upheavals to an art scene whose landscape, like that of most cities, has been transformed by an ongoing pandemic that has decimated jobs, necessitated digital exhibition models, and shuttered small and midsize art spaces.
Founded in SoHo in 1980 by Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring then the director of Artists Space and an employee at Leo Castelli Gallery, respectively Metro Pictures provided an early outpost for the so-called Pictures Generation, a loose affiliation of artists associated with appropriated, often ironized imagery. Among the many artists to have staged significant shows there include Louis
UPDATE: on 9 March, two days after the closure of Metro Pictures was announced, Hauser & Wirth announced that it will now represent Cindy Sherman Installation view of Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour–Frederick Douglass (2019) at Metro Pictures, New York Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York
Metro Pictures, the New York gallery indivisible with the Pictures Movement of the 1980s, has shocked the art world by announcing it will soon close.
In an email, founders Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring announced on Sunday 7 March that they would close Metro Pictures by the end of 2021, bringing to an end a storied and highly influential 40 years at the beating heart of postmodernist and conceptual photography. Speaking to