Helena Anrather, New York Gallery with a Cutting-Edge Program, to Close

Helena Anrather, a gallery in New York’s Chinatown neighborhood, will end its brief but closely watched run this March, joining a slew of galleries in Manhattan that have shuttered over the past year.

Founded in 2017, Helena Anrather had a program that stood out in a New York gallery ecosystem where much of the offerings tend to be figurative painting. By contrast, Helena Anrather gallery tended toward heady sculpture and conceptual photography.

“We are immensely proud of the community that has grown around the gallery, and the foundation of this community has always been the brilliant artists whose passion has engaged us, propelled us, and brought us together,” its eponymous founder said in a newsletter sent out on Thursday. “It has been an extraordinary privilege to work with so many inspiring artists over these years and we extend our deepest thanks to all of them.”

Among those artists were photographer Farah Al Qasimi, whose first solo exhibition in the city where she is based was held with the gallery in 2018; Al Qasimi now figures in the current Guggenheim Museum exhibition “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility.”

Lotus L. Kang, an artist in the just-opened Whitney Biennial, also had her first New York exhibition with Helena Anrather. Meanwhile, Nicky Nodjoumi, a painter who is now in his 80s, had several shows with the gallery before becoming the subject of an HBO documentary this year.

Much of the gallery’s program was shows for young artists on the rise, from Azza El Siddique to Oren Pinhassi and Catherine Telford Keogh. But the gallery also periodically showcased works by mid-career artists such as Julia Wachtel, a painter associated with the Pictures Generation movement of the 1980s.

The past year has brought a string of gallery closures in New York, most notably the beloved JTT, whose founder, Jasmin Tsou, has since joined the staff of the much larger and decidedly more blue-chip Lisson Gallery. Other young enterprises to have shuttered include Foxy Production and Queer Thoughts.

Yet it is not just outfits devoted to emerging artists who have been impacted. Cheim & Read, a blue-chip gallery specializing in painting, concluded 26 years of business at the end of last year, and Betty Cunningham, a veteran New York dealer who had shown realist painter Philip Pearlstein for years, is set to close her gallery in June, 20 years after it was founded.

Helena Anrather’s reasons for closing were unclear, based on the newsletter. She said in her missive, “While the physical space may close, I know that the gallery’s spirit of collaboration and exploration will endure.”

The gallery will finish out its program with a solo show for Taylor Simmons and a two-person show for Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit, with both exhibitions closing on March 23.