Metro Pictures was founded in 1980 by Janelle Reiring, formerly of Leo Castelli Gallery, and Helene Winer, formerly of Artists Space, at 169 Mercer Street in New York. The gallery’s inaugural exhibitions featured artists such as Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, James Welling, Richard Prince, and Walter Robinson–artists who would later be identified by critics and historians as Pictures artists.
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Many of them were prominently included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation. In 1982 the gallery presented the first New York exhibition of Mike Kelley soon followed by shows of John Miller, Jim Shaw, and Gary Simmons–artists who would elaborate ideas proposed by the California conceptual artists with whom they had studied at CalArts. In 1983 the gallery relocated to 150 Greene Street. During this period, René Daniëls and Martin Kippenberger had their first exhibitions outside of Europe at the gallery. Metro Pictures moved to its present location in Chelsea in 1997 and in 2016 1100 Architects renovated the gallery with an award-winning new design. Newer generations of artists have continued to expand the gallery, including Andreas Slominski, Olaf Breuning, André Butzer, Isaac Julien, David Maljkovic, Paulina Olowska, Trevor Paglen, Catherine Sullivan, Sara VanDerBeek, Tris Vonna-Michell, B. Wurtz, Alexandre Singh, Camille Henrot, Nina Beier, Oliver Laric, Judith Hopf, and Cui Jie. In 2020 the gallery announced representation of Latifa Echakhch and the Gretchen Bender Estate.
Ocula Conversation Gary Simmons: History as Residue By Casey Carsel, New York Looking at the racial stereotypes of 20th-century cartoons, Gary Simmons' canvases are palimpsests in which history is written and rewritten, yet never fully disappears.
Ocula Report Armory Week Lowdown: Art Shows to See By Casey Carsel, New York After structural issues forced The Armory Show into last-minute relocation pirouettes last year, the fair returns between 5 and 8 March 2020 with a flourishing programme, complemented by stand-out shows across New York City.
Ocula Photolog Art Basel Miami Beach 2019 'In Art Basel's American show, leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia show significant work from the masters of Modern and contemporary art, as well as the new generation of emerging stars. Paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, films, and editioned works of the highest quality are on display in the main...
Ocula Conversation RoseLee Goldberg: Performance Then and Now By Fawz Kabra RoseLee Goldberg had long been invested in contemporary performance art before her founding of the inter-disciplinary arts organisation Performa in New York in 2004. Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied political science and fine arts at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and then art history at the Courtauld...
Related Press Trevor Paglen trains his sights on the rise of machine vision 17 October 2019, Apollo Images are not what they used to be. Or put a little more precisely, images are not for who they used to be for. Known for his in-depth investigations of contemporary state surveillance, the American artist Trevor Paglen has been focusing for the past several years on the rise of machine vision, an expanding realm of images made by machines for...
Related Press 600,000 Images Removed from AI Database After Art Project Exposes Racist Bias 23 September 2019, Hyperallergic ImageNet will remove 600,000 images of people stored on its database after an art project exposed racial bias in the program's artificial intelligence system. Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects.
Related Press Gates to the City: Cui Jie 3 September 2019, Mousse Magazine Looking at the work of Cui Jie from a northern European perspective, the first error is probably to think you're seeing some form of lament for a modernist past. That narrative is fairly familiar now, based on a longing for the largest-scale remnants of the material culture of postwar social democracy or state socialism—the buildings they...
Related Press ‘I’m trying to erase myself’ – an interview with Cindy Sherman 27 June 2019, Apollo There is something profoundly uncanny about seeing Cindy Sherman in person for the first time. When she greets me at the door of her SoHo studio one afternoon in April, casually dressed and wearing no obvious make-up, I recognise her features, but not, exactly, her face. For more than 40 years, Sherman has appeared in nearly all of her work, but...
Related Video & Audio /Dialogues: Visibility | Invisibility — Sculpture in Everyday Space 14 September 2017, EXPO CHICAGO Nina Beier (Artist, STANDARD (OSLO), joségarcía, mx), Tom Burr (Artist, Bortolami Gallery). Moderated by Stephanie Cristello, Director of Programming, EXPO CHICAGO and Editor-in-Chief, THE SEEN What is the responsibility of formalism in the twenty-first century? This panel will trace the work of contemporary artists whose diverse sculptural...
