The distinguished London gallery Sadie Coles HQ, whose artist roster consists of Ugo Rondinone and Matthew Barney, will open a brand new location in Mayfair this autumn.
Occupying a six-storey Georgian townhouse at 17 Savile Row, the brand new location will present 6,000 sq. ft of exhibition house, the identical measurement because the gallery’s flagship on close by Kingly Road, Soho. This house will proceed to function, alongside a smaller house in Bury Road, St James’s, which opened in 2021. The Savile Row location will successfully exchange Sadie Coles HQ’s current Mayfair gallery on Davies Road, the lease for which has ended after ten years.
“I like to maneuver places periodically,” says the gallery’s eponymous founder. “Artists get bored after they’ve completed two or three exhibitions in an area.”
That is the tenth location the gallery has occupied in London’s West Finish. It opened in 1997 on Heddon Road with an exhibition of the US painter John Currin and a concurrent offsite present of the YBA Sarah Lucas. At the moment’s programme continues to merge an edgy sensibility borne of London’s Nineties scene with a worldwide outlook.
Whereas the open plan Kingly Road location is, in line with Coles, “kunsthalle like”, the rooms within the forthcoming Savile Row gallery will present a “totally different scale” for artists. Those that have already expressed curiosity in creating reveals there embrace Martine Syms and Alex Da Corte. Full particulars of the Savile Row house’s programme haven’t but been disclosed.
At the moment being restored by the structure agency Dara Khera/Work Ltd, the 18th-century constructing will retain its interval options. It will assist to proceed its illustrious inventive historical past, having as soon as been residence to the Burlington Superb Arts Membership, a gents’s membership whose members included John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The gallery may even characteristic a bookstore designed by Jean-Phillipe Sanfourche.
Now with round 13,000 sq ft of house, a 60-strong artist roster and, in line with its newest Corporations Home submitting, a turnover of £51.6m, Sadie Coles HQ is by some measures the largest London gallery to function areas solely throughout the capital. Requested why she prefers increasing inside one metropolis reasonably than exploring additional afield, Coles says: “It’s actually right down to my private pleasure. I’m a creature of behavior and I wish to preserve my gallery at a manageable scale. I like with the ability to stroll between my areas.”
Sadie Coles
© Sadie Coles. Picture: Jack Andrew Davison
Twenty eight years after opening her first house, Coles stays dedicated to the West Finish: “London and the London artwork market is fed by the benefit at which individuals come out and in of the town. It was all the time my technique to be inside strolling distance of the accommodations of this fixed stream of rich guests.”
Nonetheless, Coles doesn’t solely low cost sooner or later opening elsewhere within the metropolis. “London is evolving on a regular basis and the artwork scenes within the south and east have grown vastly. Even Acton, west London, now feels prefer it could possibly be the brand new Shoreditch. So, by no means say by no means.”
Regardless of now being certainly one of London’s most established modern artwork dealerships, Coles is decided to maintain the programme resemblant of its youthful, grittier days, and the gallery continues so as to add new names—one thing Coles says she “can not resist”.
Earlier this week, the gallery opened an exhibition of wall-based sculptural works by the South African artist Dada Khanyisa, marking each the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in London. Different current signings embrace the painter Nicole Eisenman and the 94-year-old textile artist and author Isabella Ducrot, who it confirmed ultimately 12 months’s Frieze Masters.
A key approach the gallery stays plugged into rising scenes and gallery programmes is with The Store, a small floor flooring house it opened in 2022. This house is loaned without spending a dime to smaller galleries and non income which don’t have a footprint in central London—a “mutually useful” change, Coles says.
On this similar spirit, Sadie Coles HQ has now initiated a month-to-month night occasion of stay readings and performances known as Gargle, to “connect with communities fashioned round cultural producers aside from visible artists”. Gargle held its first occasion earlier this month, internet hosting Climax Books. Requested whether or not she will envision these occasions ever amounting to an exhibition within the gallery, Coles says: “Sure, why not. All the things is a studying lesson.”
