London Art
What’s up with the spate of London gallery closures?
The bitter winds of Brexit, Covid and economic downturn finally blew a terrifying gale across London last year, claiming multiple gallery victims. It’s been a tough few years that many galleries have survived, but Simon Lee, Fold, and Darren Flook in Mayfair and Fitzrovia didn’t manage to endure. The Zabludowicz Collection and the Jewish Museum also closed, as did Gagosian’s Britannia Street branch. Are these the end times for London’s art scene?
Simon Lee, founded in 2002, was one of London’s most successful major galleries, specialising in the upper end of the art market: big artists making big art for big money. They had spaces in Hong Kong and New York, they represented painters and photographers like Christopher Wool, Dexter Dalwood, Rachel Howard, George Condo and Michelangelo Pistoletto, taking them to art fairs around the world. And they did interesting, adventurous stuff too, not just rampant commercial painting shows. In 2014 they held a wildly popular sale of Larry Clark photos that allowed visitors to rifle through boxes of his test prints and pick one up for just £100 (I bought one so full-frontally raunchy I’m almost too embarrassed to have it on display), they showed mythical queer black art by April Bey and hyper-militaristic weirdness by Mai-Thu Perret. They were the model big gallery, in other words.
Read more: https://www.timeout.com/london/art/gallery-closures-2024
In this post, I summarise every exhibition I’ve seen over the last few weeks, not just those I write about in other publications, and you get my honest thoughts on them.
This shorter version covers the final shows I caught in December, so I’ve made it free for all subscribers. The normal fuller-length diary entries will resume in two weeks, make sure you’re a paid subscriber to receive those and future interviews.
Read more: https://londonisturbanpalette.substack.com/p/diary-of-a-london-art-critic-the?utm_medium=web
As the art market shows signs of slowing, London is looking to attract a new generation of art buyers — and showcase young emerging artists in the process.
Global art sales slid 4% year-on-year in 2023, according to the Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report 2024, falling to $65 billion after two years of growth.
It has led industry professionals — such as Elio D’Anna, co-founder and CEO of the House of Fine Art (HOFA) gallery in London’s Mayfair district — to shift their focus toward both younger collectors and younger artists.
“Five years ago … our target was more in the 35- to 45-year-old buyers, almost 50/50 men and women. But now we are seeing more the 25- to 35-[year-old] buyers,” he told CNBC’s “The Art of Appreciation.”
This increase in younger collectors comes as artificial intelligence — and how it can be used to create work — remains a hot topic in the art world.
It’s certainly a focus for D’Anna. HOFA represents artist Sougwen Chung, who uses a robot Chung designed to co-create work. Chung, who uses the pronoun they, calls the machine a drawing operations unit, or DOUG.
Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/28/art-in-london-the-city-wants-to-attract-younger-collectors.html
The JD Malat Gallery hosts contemporary Romanian artist Ur Kasin’s debut solo exhibition in London. Titled All Is Blurred, the show features six monumental compositions “that explore the psychological journey of a character that he has created, navigating his way through a complex and unforgiving world.”
Kasin subverts the traditional subject matter of the large-scale canvas, typically reserved for grand historical subjects, by focusing on everyday actions, the gallery explained.
“Whether it’s enjoying a glass of Asahi, indulging in that McDonald’s drive-through meal, or clutching onto your morning coffee as you rush to work: Kasin depicts these habitual actions, inviting viewers to look beyond the ordinary. What initially seems like routine behaviour reveals deeper layers of hidden pressures and unhealthy societal habits embedded in our daily lives, transforming common actions into a powerful critique of contemporary culture,” reads the press release.
Read more: https://www.romania-insider.com/ur-kasin-exhibition-london-gallery-nov-2024
