The outstanding 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 area, the identical dimension because the gallery’s flagship on close by Kingly Avenue, Soho. This area will proceed to function, alongside a smaller area in Bury Avenue, St James’s, which opened in 2021. The Savile Row location will successfully exchange Sadie Coles HQ’s present Mayfair gallery on Davies Avenue, the lease for which has ended after ten years.
“I like to maneuver areas periodically,” says the gallery’s eponymous founder. “Artists get bored after they’ve accomplished 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 Avenue with an exhibition of the US painter John Currin and a concurrent offsite present of the YBA Sarah Lucas. At this time’s programme continues to merge an edgy sensibility borne of London’s Nineteen Nineties scene with a world outlook.
Whereas the open plan Kingly Avenue location is, in line with Coles, “kunsthalle like”, the rooms within the forthcoming Savile Row gallery will present a “completely different scale” for artists. Those that have already expressed curiosity in creating reveals there embody Martine Syms and Alex Da Corte. Full particulars of the Savile Row area’s programme haven’t but been disclosed.
At present being restored by the structure agency Dara Khera/Work Ltd, the 18th-century constructing will retain its interval options. This can assist to proceed its illustrious inventive historical past, having as soon as been residence to the Burlington High-quality Arts Membership, a gents’s membership whose members included John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The gallery may also characteristic a bookstore designed by Jean-Phillipe Sanfourche.
Now with round 13,000 sq ft of area, 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 inside the capital. Requested why she prefers increasing inside one metropolis moderately than exploring additional afield, Coles says: “It’s actually all the way down to my private pleasure. I’m a creature of behavior and I wish to maintain 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 area, 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 town. It was all the time my technique to be inside strolling distance of the motels of this fixed movement of rich guests.”
Nonetheless, Coles doesn’t totally low cost in the future opening elsewhere within the metropolis. “London is evolving on a regular basis and the artwork scenes within the south and east have grown massively. Even Acton, west London, now feels prefer it might be the brand new Shoreditch. So, by no means say by no means.”
Regardless of now being one in every 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 embody the painter Nicole Eisenman and the 94-year-old textile artist and author Isabella Ducrot, who it confirmed eventually 12 months’s Frieze Masters.
A key means the gallery stays plugged into rising scenes and gallery programmes is with The Store, a small floor flooring area it opened in 2022. This area is loaned totally free to smaller galleries and non income which should not have a footprint in central London—a “mutually helpful” change, Coles says.
On this similar spirit, Sadie Coles HQ has now initiated a month-to-month night occasion of reside readings and performances referred to as Gargle, to “connect with communities shaped 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. Every thing is a studying lesson.”
