The Vivian Maier exhibition currently on at Fotografiska New York will be the museum’s final show at before it closes.
The fabulous Flemish Renaissance Revival building in Manhattan’s Flatiron District sprawls out over six stories and has been putting on photography shows since 2019 but the space is not working out for Fotografiska which also has museums in Stockholm, Tallinn, Berlin, and Shanghai.
“It’s a very beautiful building, but everything has to be in tandem to work,” Sophie Wright, the private museum’s executive director, tells The New York Times. “We’ve been having ongoing challenges with regard to the exhibition spaces. The verticality of that building is not easy to manage. Our audience has been given a bumpy experience.”
One of the issues is the building’s walls which are only nine feet tall compared to the 12-foot walls in the other Fotografiska locations. Artnet reports that this size limitation restricts what the museum can put on and has even stymied big name photographer shows there.
“Our focus moving forward will be museum operations, upcoming projects in our current and temporary locations, and managing our relocation,” a representative tells Artnet. “Unfortunately, this does mean a reduction down to a core team over the next few months.”
Fotografiska is owned by Berlin-based photographer and investor Yoram Roth who tells The Times that he wants to put on an exhibition about New York nightlife after the Maier exhibit.
“We need to have a building where we can do events and have big parties,” he says.
Fotografiska was founded in Stockholm in 2010 and its declared mission is to create “a destination to discover world-class photography, eclectic programming, elevated dining, and surprising new perspectives.”
In New York, Fotografiska delivered the first U.S. retrospective of David LaChapelle’s work and put on a successful 50 years of hip-hop event. Time Out notes that it introduced Daneiel Arsham’s photography work and put on exhibitions of New York City-based artists like Ethan James Green, Pixy Liao, Kia LaBeija, Adrienne Raquel, and Martin Schoeller.
The Vivian Maier show will run until September 29 and the other final exhibit will be a show of street photographer Bruce Gilden which also runs until September 29.