Helene Winer (born 1946) is an American art gallery owner and curator. She co-owned Metro Pictures Gallery in New York City with Janelle Reiring. Metro Pictures closed in late 2021. Her career deeply involved the postmodern artists of the 1970s and 1980s known as the Pictures Generation. She lives in Tribeca. [1]
Born in 1946 in Los Angeles, Winer was raised in Westchester and received a B.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California in 1966. [2] [3] She started as an assistant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before travelling to Europe, where she took the position of assistant director of the Whitechapel Gallery. [3]
In late 1970, Winer returned to Southern California, where she was appointed as Director of the Museum of Art at Pomona College, [4] and as an assistant professor of art. [5] At Pomona, Winer organized the first solo shows of Jack Goldstein and William Wegman, as well as exhibitions of John Baldessari, Joe Goode, Bas Jan Ader, John McCracken, Ed Moses, Allen Ruppersberg, and Ger van Elk. [6] She also organized sometimes-controversial presentations for performance artists Chris Burden, Hirokazu Kosaka, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and John M. White. [7] [8] [9]
After leaving Pomona, Winer spent a brief period writing for the Los Angeles Times , before moving to New York and freelancing before becoming Director of the non-profit Artists Space in 1975. [7] The 1977 show Pictures, curated by Douglas Crimp, featured the early work of Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo, and Philip Smith. [10] Pictures turned out to be a seminal exhibition for that group of emerging postmodern artists, who later came to be known as the Pictures Generation, whom Winer's influence helped shape and bring together. [11] [12]
Winer left Artists Space and joined with Reiring, formerly of the Castelli Gallery, to open Metro Pictures in 1980. The opening group exhibition featured works from Pictures Generation artists Brauntuch, Goldstein, Levine, Longo, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and James Welling. [13] Subsequent individual exhibitions that followed marked the first major exhibitions for these artists in New York. In the years that followed, new artists have joined the gallery and continued to present new and varied conceptual works, including Olaf Breuning, André Butzer, Andy Hope 1930, Gary Simmons, Andrea Slominski, Isaac Julien, Claire Fontaine, David Malkjovic, Paulina Olowska, Trevor Paglen, Catherine Sullivan, Sara VanDerBeek, Tris Vonna-Michell, B. Wurtz, Camille Henrot, and Nina Beier. The gallery closed in late 2021.
Jack Goldstein was a Canadian born, California and New York-based performance and conceptual artist turned post-conceptual painter in the 1980s.
Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger's artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations.
John Anthony Baldessari was an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lived and worked in Santa Monica and Venice, California.
Robert Longo is an American artist, filmmaker, photographer and musician.
Sherrie Levine is an American photographer, painter, and conceptual artist. Some of her work consists of exact photographic reproductions of the work of other photographers such as Walker Evans, Eliot Porter and Edward Weston.
Louise Lawler is a U.S. artist and photographer living in Brooklyn, New York City. Lawler’s work has focused on photographing portraits of other artists’ work, giving special attention to the spaces in which they are placed and methods used to make them. Examples of Lawler's photographs include images of paintings hanging on the walls of a museum, paintings on the walls of an art collector's opulent home, artwork in the process of being installed in a gallery, and sculptures in a gallery being viewed by spectators.
Allen Ruppersberg is an American conceptual artist based in Los Angeles and New York City.
Metro Pictures was a New York City art gallery founded in 1980 by Janelle Reiring, and Helene Winer. It was located in SoHo until 1995 when it moved to Chelsea. The gallery closed in December of 2021.
Sprüth Magers is a commercial art gallery owned by Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers, with spaces in London, Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York, and offices in Cologne, Hong Kong, and Seoul. The gallery represents over sixty artists and estates, including John Baldessari, George Condo, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Andreas Gursky, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, David Ostrowski, and Rosemarie Trockel.
James Welling is an American artist, photographer and educator living in New York City. He attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied drawing with Gandy Brodie and at the University of Pittsburgh where he took modern dance classes. Welling transferred to the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California in 1971 and received a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. in the School of Art. At Cal Arts, he studied with John Baldessari, Wolfgang Stoerchle and Jack Goldstein.
The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 was an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City that ran from April 29 – August 2, 2009. The exhibition took its name from Pictures, a 1977 five person group show organized by art historian and critic Douglas Crimp (1944–2019) at New York City's Artists Space gallery. The artists exhibited from September 24 to October 29, 1977 were Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Philip Smith.
Matt Mullican is an American artist and educator. He is the child of artists Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado. Mullican lives and works in both Berlin and New York City.
The Richard Kuhlenschmidt Gallery was a contemporary art gallery originally located in Los Angeles, California, USA. It played an important part in setting the stage for Los Angeles' emergence as an international art center in the 1980s. It opened in 1982 and eventually closed in 1993 but it was preceded by Jancar Kuhlenschmidt Gallery that put down most of the ground work for what would follow.
William Leavitt is a conceptual artist known for paintings, photographs, installations, and performance works that examine "the vernacular culture of L.A. through the filter of the entertainment industry...drawing on 'stock environments' and designs of films as well as the literature of the place." A critical figure in the West Coast conceptual art movement of the late 60s, Leavitt himself has managed to maintain a low profile. "Over the last 40 years, William Leavitt has made a name for himself as an influential artist while staying so far out of fame's spotlight that his hard-to-categorize works have been all but invisible to the public," wrote the LA Times. While his work is collected by high-profile artists such as John Baldessari and Mike Kelley, Leavitt himself has eschewed celebrity.
Nancy Dwyer is an American contemporary artist whose works include paintings, works on paper, public art, word sculpture and furniture art. Her work has been exhibited widely at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the New Museum in New York and many others. Her work was included in the 2009 exhibition “The Pictures Generation” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, alongside the work of her peers and contemporaries, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, with whom she cofounded Hallwalls in Buffalo, New York in 1974, as well as work by Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, John Baldessari, Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine, among others.
Wolfgang Eberhard Stoerchle was a German-American conceptual artist known for influential performance and video works made in Southern California in the 1970s.
Gisela Colon is an American international contemporary artist who has developed a unique vocabulary of Organic Minimalism, breathing lifelike qualities into reductive forms. Operating at the intersection of art and science, Colon is best known for meticulously creating light-activated sculptures through industrial and technological processes. Drawing from aerospace and other scientific realms, Colon utilizes innovative sculptural materials such as carbon fiber and optical materials of the 21st century, to generate her energetic sculptures. Colon's gender-fluid sculptures disrupt the traditional view of the masculine minimal object, by embodying qualities of energy, movement and growth, through a merger of industrial with the organic.
Kim McCarty is an artist and watercolor painter living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been exhibited in over twenty solo exhibitions in New York and Los Angeles. She often works in large formats using layers of monochromatic colors.
Michael Maloney is a Los Angeles-based art appraiser and art dealer. He owned and operated the Michael Maloney Gallery in Santa Monica, California (1985–90) and Maloney Fine Art in Culver City, California (2006–16), and since 1998 has pursued a career as an art appraiser and private dealer in Los Angeles and New York.
The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, known colloquially as the Benton, is an art museum at Pomona College in Claremont, California. It was completed in 2020, replacing the Montgomery Art Gallery, which had been home to the Pomona College Museum of Art (PCMA) since 1958. It houses a collection of approximately 19,000 items, including Italian Renaissance panel paintings, indigenous American art and artifacts, and American and European prints, drawings, and photographs. The museum is free to the public.