Estate of Bernd and Hilla Becher Heads to Paula Cooper Gallery

Paula Cooper Gallery in New York now represents the estate of the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose pictures of architectural structures are integral to the history of Conceptual photography. The news follows a show featuring the artists’ work mounted at the gallery this past spring. In a release, Paula Cooper Gallery said it will host its first solo show of the Bechers’ work in 2020.

Working together for several decades, the Bechers created influential series of photographs that visualized the recurrence of forms throughout time and space. (Bernd died in 2007, and Hilla died in 2015.) They are most known for their “typologies”—gridded sets of stark black-and-white pictures that focus on particular kinds of industrial buildings and show them reappearing in different places, in each case looking almost exactly the same.

The Bechers’ estate will also continue to be represented by Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco; Konrad Fischer Galerie in Dusseldorf and Berlin; and Sprüth Magers in Berlin, London, and Los Angeles.