It was the autumn of 1980 and Reiring and her partner, Helene Weiner, opened the door to more than just the first location of their gallery (the one that will close at the end of this year is the third). His selection of twelve artists -among them Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Laurie Simmons and Richard Prince– would give shape to what was later called the “Pictures generation”, because their style involved using images from mass media or advertising photography to express their ideas. His works, which flirted with appropriation, worked because they were recognizable, and the fact that they were so made them very close and familiar to the public.

The connection of the fruit of their work with the viewer happens so easily that it may seem that finding the artists, grouping them together, choosing their works and helping them to build their careers in parallel was easy as well. But in every product of human creation there are things we don’t see. Not to mention the difficulty of continuing to discover new profiles to add to their portfolio. Those twelve pioneers were later joined by Louise Lawler, Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, René Daniëls and Latifa Echakhch. “What Metro Pictures achieved would be considered a turning point equivalent to what Ileana Sonnabend and Leo Castelli achieved“, said Douglas Eklund, curator of the exhibition that the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to the gallery in 2009, in an interview with The New York Times. For the uninitiated, the Sonnabend-Castelli couple discovered Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning among others.