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.
Exhibition view: Louise Lawler, One Show on Top of the Other, Metro Pictures, New York (3 May–5 June 2021). Courtesy Metro Pictures, New York.
Ocula News The Curtain to Fall at Metro Pictures After 40 Years New York, 8 March 2021 New York gallery Metro Pictures which represents Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Robert Longo and other major artists to close.
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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...
