Cristea Roberts Gallery, 43 Pall Mall, London SW1Y 5JG
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Cristea Roberts is an unusual gallery in its particular focus on original prints and works on paper. For many years the gallery – founded as the Alan Cristea Gallery in 1995 – was on Cork Street. It moved half a mile south in 2016, at which time you could read about the switch as ‘another nail in the coffin for what was for a hundred years one of the art world’s most famous addresses’. That proved far from the case, longer term, but the bigger space at Pall Mall allows for two substantial exhibitions every couple of months. The name changed in 2019 to incorporate that of Director David Cleaton-Roberts as well as founder Alan Cristea. The gallery doesn’t simply show prints: it also commissions many editions, and represents artists for their unique works as well – for example, Vicken Parsons, due to show next. The programme emerging from that is a mixture of modern and contemporary: recent highlights in the first category include Patrick Heron, Tom Wesselmann, and Anni and Josef Albers.
Among the contemporary shows, one might point to Rana Begum, Marie Harnett, Christiane Baumgartner, Barbara Walker – no shortage of women – and the current takeover by Clare Woods. Upstairs, Woods shows not only screenprints, but also hand-painted collages based on paintings based on photographs… And downstairs she has curated a lively selection of still lifes by the gallery’s artists. She also features in Episode 8 of the gallery’s informative series of podcasts, Making a Mark. That reveals, for example, that Woods has her own print room attached to her studio in Hereford, indicating how seriously she takes editions.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
