Helena Anrather Gallery to Shutter in New York

Helena Anrather, a tastemaking gallery in New York’s Chinatown, is set to close by the end of the month,ArtNewsreports. The well-regarded gallery is the latest of many small and mid-size contemporary art galleries specializing in bleeding-edge work to close in downtown New York in recent months, includingQueer Thoughts,JTT, andFoxy Production. Farther uptown, the long-runningCheim & Readin Chelsea closed late last year.

“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,” the gallery founder wrote in a March 14 newsletter. “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.” Anrather somewhat cryptically noted, “While the physical space may close, I know that the gallery’s spirit of collaboration and exploration will endure.”

Helena Anrather launched in 2017 with a program of conceptual photography and sculpture. Included in the gallery’s stable were emerging artists Azza El Siddique, Oren Pinhassi, and Catherine Telford Keogh, as well as midcareer artists like Pictures Generation painter Julia Wachtel, and those enjoying the fruits of the retrospective years, such as eighty-two-year-old Iranian-born painter Nicky Nodjoumi. Anrather gave photographer Farah Al Qasimi, whose work is currently on view in “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility” at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, her first solo show, and introduced New York to the work of Lotus L. Kang, who is participating in the newly opened Whitney Biennial.

The gallery will close with a solo exhibition of work by Taylor Simmons and a two-person show of work by Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit, both of which end on March 23.