The prominent London gallery Sadie Coles HQ, whose artist roster includes Ugo Rondinone and Matthew Barney, will open a new location in Mayfair this autumn.
Occupying a six-storey Georgian townhouse at 17 Savile Row, the new location will provide 6,000 sq ft of exhibition space, the same size as the gallery’s flagship on nearby Kingly Street, Soho. This space will continue to operate, alongside a smaller space in Bury Street, St James’s, which opened in 2021. The Savile Row location will effectively replace Sadie Coles HQ’s existing Mayfair gallery on Davies Street, the lease for which has ended after ten years.
“I like to move locations periodically,” says the gallery’s eponymous founder. “Artists get bored after they have done two or three exhibitions in a space.”
This is the tenth location the gallery has occupied in London’s West End. It opened in 1997 on Heddon Street with an exhibition of the US painter John Currin and a concurrent offsite show of the YBA Sarah Lucas. Today’s programme continues merge an edgy sensibility borne of London’s 1990s scene with a global outlook.
While the open plan Kingly Street location is, according to Coles, “kunsthalle like”, the rooms in the forthcoming Savile Row gallery will provide a “different scale” for artists. Those who have already expressed interest in creating shows there including Martine Syms and Alex Da Corte. Full details of the Savile Row space’s programme have not yet been disclosed.
Currently being restored by the architecture firm Dara Khera/Work Ltd, the 18th-century building will retain its period features. This will help to continue its illustrious artistic history, having once been home to the Burlington Fine Arts Club, a gentlemen’s club whose members included John Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The gallery will also feature a bookstore designed by Jean-Phillipe Sanfourche.
Now with around 13,000 sq ft of space, a 60-strong artist roster and, according to its latest Companies House filing, a turnover of £51.6m, Sadie Coles HQ is by some measures the biggest London gallery to operate spaces solely within the capital. Asked why she prefers expanding within one city rather than exploring further afield, Coles says: “It’s really down to my personal pleasure. I’m a creature of habit and I want to keep my gallery at a manageable scale. I like being able to walk between my spaces.”
Twenty eight years after opening her first space, Coles remains committed to the West End: “London and the London art market is fed by the ease at which people come in and out of the city. It was always my strategy to be within walking distance of the hotels of this constant flow of wealthy visitors.”
Still, Coles does not entirely discount one day opening elsewhere in the city. “London is evolving all the time and the art scenes in the south and east have grown hugely. Even Acton, west London, now feels like it could be the new Shoreditch. So, never say never.”
Despite now being one of London’s most established contemporary art dealerships, Coles is determined to keep the programme resemblant of its younger, grittier days, and the gallery continues to add new names—something Coles says she “cannot resist”.
Earlier this week, the gallery opened an exhibition of wall-based sculptural works by the South African artist Dada Khanyisa, marking both the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in London. Other recent signings include the painter Nicole Eisenmann and the 94-year-old textile artist and writer Isabella Ducrot, who it showed at last year’s Frieze Masters.
A key way the gallery remains plugged into emerging scenes and gallery programmes is with The Shop, a small ground floor space it opened in 2022. This space lends for free to smaller galleries and non profits which do not have a footprint in central London—a “mutually beneficial” exchange, Coles says
In this same spirit, Sadie Coles HQ has now initiated a monthly evening event of live readings and performances called Gargle, to “connect to communities formed around cultural producers other than visual artists”. Gargle held its first event earlier this month, hosting Climax Books. Asked whether she can envision these events ever amounting to an exhibition in the gallery, Coles says: “Yes, why not. Everything is a learning lesson.”