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
Writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent collects various writings here, including his Gallery of the Week column for FAD art news and texts from the shows he has curated. He currently writes freelance including for Art Monthly, Seisma, STATE, Border Crossings and World of Interiors. See Instagram for his daily choice from current shows. Some non-art content, such as photo-poems, is also included.
Angela Flowers (1932-2023) founded her eponymous gallery in 1970, initially concentrating on living British artists in Central London before expanding the roster and pioneering the late 90’s trend of galleries moving east
Krittika Sharma co-founded indigo+madder in Deptford in 2019, then moved to a more central location last year –
Tension Fine Art has operated since 2019 in the somewhat unlikely locality of Penge in South-East London.
The National Gallery… it sounds pretty comprehensive, though there’s no sculpture (where’s that national gallery?) and a more accurate title would be something like ‘The National Gallery of European Paintings by Men, 1260 – 1920’, with hardly anything from other continents and just 0.5% by women.
If anyone tells me they are going to White Cube’s Bermondsey space, I advise them to drop in at Cecilia Brunson Projects, which flies comparatively under the radar but is only a stone’s throw away.
Damien Hirst: ‘Octa’, 2021 from the ‘Seascapes’ – oil on canvas, 122 x 183 cm Phillips, 30 Berkeley Square, London… Read More
Jay Jopling set up White Cube in a small space on Duke Street, St. James’s, where 75 shows by 75 different artists were presented between 1993-2001, including several by the YBAs with whom the gallery become closely associated.
Ask London artists who they would most like to show with, and the answer is often ‘Sadie Coles’
Lehmann Maupin, though, has had a permanent presence since October 2020, when Cromwell Place became the London location of the gallery founded by Rachel Lehmann and David Maupin in New York in 1996
Ben Brown’s background was in the secondary market – he spent ten years at Sotheby’s, taking a particular and ongoing interest in Italian art – before he opened his eponymous gallery in London in 2004
The gallery was established in East London in 1995, and for much of this century was on Hopton Street, conveniently close to Tate Modern.
Tracking back, The Mayor Gallery was actually the first to open on the street, when founded by Fred Mayor (1903-73) in 1925.
Skarstedt originated in New York and now operates in Paris and London as well. It was founded in 1994 by Swedish-born Per Skarstedt
In something of a contrast to last week’s David Zwirner, Aleph – founded in 2019 – has the simplest of gallery models:
It’s hardly a surprise that there are good things to see at David Zwirner, generally considered to be one of the four biggest ‘mega-galleries’ in the world
When I first met Andy Wicks, he was an artist (and I liked his work). But his role arranging artist-run pop-ups led him to morph towards gallerist, and Castor Projects was born in 2016.
VITRINE, following the opening of a new Fitzrovia space in May 2022 and last month’s relaunch of its original Bermondsey space – a shopfront-style space – might now be seen as a mega-gallery
Jean Cooke: ‘Beach, Birling Gap’ 1975 Piano Nobile, 96/129 Portland Road, London, W11 4LW www.piano-nobile.com Instagram @pianonobilegallery Piano Nobile was… Read More
I’ve been around long enough to remember when Pippy Houldsworth opened on Cork Street in 1999, moving west for a while before settling in Heddon Street from 2011.
That tricky spelling is the Latinate version of the gallerist’s first name: he was born in 1960 as Thaddäus within a family of Carinthian Slovenes in southern Austria. He interned with Joseph Beuys, opened his first gallery in 1981, and now leads a global brand
Somers Gallery, handily placed between Euston and Kings Cross, is an unusual space which should be better known. It’s run by a Mexican, Javier Calderon, who also owns Flori Canto,
London / New York gallery Luxembourg + Co. emerged in 2020 out of Luxembourg & Dayan, founded in 2009 by Daniella Luxembourg and Amalia Dayan
Tate Britain opened as the National Gallery of British Art on the site of the former Millbank Prison in 1897, but soon became commonly known as the Tate Gallery, after its founder Sir Henry Tate.
Montenegrin gallerist and curator Fedja Klikovac, who arrived in Britain in 1992, currently shows mainly from his home in Islington – though there are plans to change that.
