Peter Hujar Archive and Foundation Departs Pace Gallery for Ortuzar

New York’s Ortuzar Gallery will now represent the Peter Hujar Archives and Foundation jointly with San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery. The archive will continue to work on selected projects in collaboration with Mai 36 Galerie in Zurich and Maureen Paley in London.

The news also means the Hujar Archives will be leaving its longtime representative, Pace Gallery, which last hosted a solo show for Hujar in September 2023 at 125 Newbury, Tribeca. The late artist’s archive has been represented by Pace/MacGill, an independent gallery specializing in photography since 2013, which merged with Pace in 2020.

The gallery’s founder, Ales Ortuzar, said he still remembers first seeing Hujar’s work nearly two decades ago, when Maureen Paley organized an exhibition of the artist’s work in London in 2008. “This piece has been with me — in my consciousness — ever since,” he said. “I really care about it.”

He added, “Not to sound cheesy, but in this case one has to pinch themselves with excitement because Hujar is an artist that I have long and deeply followed and it’s a pleasure to welcome these archives into the gallery.”

The representation agreement with the Hujar Archives and Foundation “happened in a very organic way,” Otuzar said. The estate got in touch with us and we realized we shared a lot of values. They had seen our work with certain artists in the United States, from Joy Terrill to Suzanne Jackson.

Hujar will be the first photographer to be represented by Ortuzar since its launch in 2018. “He was undeniably one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century and one of the greatest portrait painters,” Ortuzar said, pointing to his now iconic photographs of Susan Sontag, Paul Thek, Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs, John Waters, Candy Darling and David Wojnarowicz, among others. “As far as fitting into the program, it’s really about excellence, and that’s undeniable with Hujar.”

Hujar’s work has recently experienced a resurgence in popularity. Filmmaker Ira Sachs is directing a 2025 biopic about the artist, starring Ben Whishaw as Hujar, and Liveright is reissuing his 1967 book portrait of life and deathmaking Hujar one of the top talents of his generation. This year, the Morgan Library and Museum will present “Hujar: Contacts,” an exhibition highlighting its collection of more than 5,700 of the artist’s contact sheets, while the Gropius Bau will present an exhibition curated by Eva Respini that pairs Hujar’s work with that of Liz Deschenes.

His work was also featured in several high-profile museum exhibitions last year, such as “Queer History” at the Museum of Fine Arts in São Paulo and “Susan Sontag: Seeing and Being Seen” at the Kunsthalle Bonn, Germany. Recent solo exhibitions include Raven Row, London (2025), the Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and concurrent events at the Venice Biennale in 2024.

in a American Art Articles Art historian Jackson Davidow, reflecting on Hujar’s resurrection, wrote: “[Hujar] Increasingly becoming a figure in the history of Pop Art, this is a fascinating case study of photographic subjectivity and identity from an era when photography, art and the queer world in New York established a fraught yet flirtatious relationship. ”

Ortuzar will present two concurrent exhibitions for Hujar this spring. The first exhibition, titled “Gracie Mansion Exhibition Revisited,” will recreate Hujar’s 1986 exhibition at the East Village gallery’s Gracie Mansion, a year before his death from AIDS-related complications. The show was revived last fall, and Ortuzar said the upcoming 40th anniversary of the iconic show prompted him to bring it back to New York.

The second exhibition will be a group show focusing on artists from the Hujar circle, curated by critic Andrew Durbin, which will be published in April Almost a Wonderful World: The Lives of Peter Hugar and Paul Thekabout the decades-long relationship between two artists. Altuzal said the exhibition “really explains and reinterprets Peter and his background, his world, and his impact on a new generation of people who are new to the work and who may not understand the context in which the work evolved. That’s what we wanted to show.”