Edel Assanti begin 2022 with the opening of their new gallery space. Situated at 1 Little Titchfield Street architects Sanchez Benton have transformed a derelict Victorian building into a 4,000 square feet unique gallery space. The impressive listed building includes a 23ft-high conservatory and was constructed in 1904, originally as a hostel for the Young Women’s Christian Association.
The gallery’s expanded footprint paves the way for new programme developments – in 2022 Edel Assanti will present solo exhibitions by five new artists to their programme, including the first London solo exhibitions for Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Agata Bogacka and Lonnie Holley. Holley’s show will be his first UK solo exhibition since his 2004 retrospective at Ikon Gallery and coincide with the second edition of London Gallery Weekend in May.
The design of the new space has been artist-led, emphasising the dramatic proportions of the two ground floor galleries (with entrances on Little Titchfield Street and Mortimer Street). A seven-metre-high conservatory bathes the space in natural light, while the ground floor galleries’ combined twenty-six metre length provides space for large-scale installations by our artists whose practices comprise site-specific work, such as Jodie Carey, Marcin Dudek, Victoria Lomasko and Oren Pinhassi.
The lower ground floor includes a third gallery space, enabling the presentation of two concurrent exhibitions, with a project-led programme planned to introduce new artists to the gallery’s audience, starting with exhibitions by London-based artists Nour El Saleh and Anna Perach. The Mortimer Street space will host a biannual gallery residency, providing a free platform for overseas partner galleries to stage exhibitions in London at peak times of year.
The inaugural exhibition is from Noémie Goudal who was the first artist to join the gallery’s roster in 2010.
Noémie Goudal’s inaugural exhibition encompasses both floors of the building in an expansive presentation of work produced over the past two years. Goudal’s recent work examines the earth’s landscape from the perspective of deep time. Measured in millions of years, this timescale reveals the geographies that define landscapes to be merely momentary states of flux.
The main space presents two new photographic series housed within a site-responsive installation. The gallery’s floor is concealed beneath an installation resembling a jigsaw puzzle of wooden, rectangular platforms, installed across the space at varying heights. Navigating this uneven landscape, the viewer encounters photographs suspended on freestanding tripods. The images are illuminated by low hanging neon strip-lights, evoking rudimentary human outposts in tropical regions. The photographs themselves provide windows onto illusionistic installations staged by the artist within the jungle, prompting us to question the authenticity of the scenes alongside our constructed conceptions of the natural world.
The ground floor Mortimer Street gallery presents an anamorphosis installation – a layered, photographic sculpture that appears to represent a distorted image until it is viewed from the perfect optical vantage point, from which a perfect image suddenly comes into focus. Goudal’s latest film diptych will be on view in the downstairs gallery, a sequel to the film which was presented by the gallery at Frieze London 2021.
