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Mayfair’s Cork Street is bedecked with banners covered in clocks, butterflies and question marks, all the work of Britain’s Venice Biennale artist John Akomfrah. His floating project heralds the fourth edition of London Gallery Weekend (May 31-June 2) for which 134 commercial and contemporary art galleries across the city extend their opening hours and lay on special events.
Conceived during the Covid lockdowns, which put art fairs and their concentrated crowds on hold, London Gallery Weekend is on its way to becoming a fixture in the art calendar. While London already boasts a slew of fairs and exhibitions, by making an event of gallerists’ day-to-day business, the weekend sparks the imaginations of the city’s most creative traders — and brings in the crowds.
“London Gallery Weekend is distinctly different from our peer events [such as the Frieze fairs] in that it’s about driving people into the gallery’s own spaces,” says co-director Sarah Rustin, also a senior director at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery.
This year’s participating galleries stretch from Harlesden High Street in north-west London to Xxijra Hii and Studio/Chapple in south-east Deptford. Emerging spaces such as Palmer Gallery and Hot Wheels, among the participants that opened in the past year, mix with the likes of London long-timers Sadie Coles and Maureen Paley as well as global outfits Gagosian and David Zwirner. The map can look daunting — London Gallery Weekend is by far the biggest such event worldwide — so organisers have also pulled together route suggestions from art world experts, including the artists Lubaina Himid and Flora Yukhnovich.
“You can see how the gallery geography has changed since we started,” says the event’s founder Jeremy Epstein, also co-founder of Edel Assanti, which shows a striking installation by Jodie Carey of 150 jesmonite sculptures, moulded around flowers and soil. Epstein notes a marked consolidation into central London, extending beyond the thriving Cork Street — which has 10 participating spaces — to Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia (where Epstein’s gallery is located). In the post-pandemic, work-from-home environment, “there have definitely been deals on commercial property and business rate relief,” he says. This has resulted in some invitingly non-traditional gallery buildings: Union Pacific’s latest space is in a former production agency office in Bloomsbury where it will show paintings by the Seoul-based Jin Han Lee.
London Gallery Weekend’s website lists 128 events at time of writing, some starting earlier in the week. These range from the usual 6pm-8pm openings to full-blown parties. Borough gallery Copperfield marks its 10th anniversary with a “10pm till late” party on June 1 while Harlesden High Street offers a day-long “Caribbean food & music event” on June 2. Possibly less fun, but still engaging, is Hauser & Wirth’s 90-minute “informal gathering” on June 1, for which visitors are encouraged to “express your own opinions” on its concurrent shows of Harmony Korine and Isa Genzken.
This year fields more performances, two organised by London Gallery Weekend and UP Projects, by the Italian artist Adelaide Cioni (two performances on May 31) and Turkey’s Nil Yalter (June 2). Each also has a coinciding show at their respective galleries, The Approach and Ab-Anbar. Other performances come through the participants themselves, including one by Berlin artist Anna-Lena Krause, whose work questions “the bonds connecting people in the modern world” (Guts Gallery, June 2).
Other galleries are using the opportunity to get collaborative. In south London, Matt’s Gallery and The Sunday Painter have joined forces for the first time for a two-venue showing of new work by London artist Harminder Judge, based on a Native American ceremony. The 10-minute walk between the galleries “is part of the experience of seeing the show,” says Tim Dixon, deputy director at Matt’s. A purpose-built tunnel that leads into his gallery’s exhibition is echoed through a railway tunnel on the walk between the spaces, he notes.
Sadie Coles takes collaboration to a new level on Kingly Street with an ambitious Matthew Barney show, Secondary, a project that runs across galleries in Los Angeles and at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Coles also hosts Margate’s 243Luz in her residency space.
Historic highlights include a standout show of the collection of the critic and curator Guy Brett, who died in 2021, mostly cutting-edge, 20th-century Latin American works, at Alison Jacques. At Thaddaeus Ropac is Robert Rauschenberg’s ROCI project, an exploration of international artistic exchange that gets its first gallery showing since a major 1991 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.
It certainly isn’t all oil paintings, a reflection of taste moving beyond this most traditional of media. There’s a prevalence of photography, including Gagosian Gallery’s showing of Nan Goldin’s early black-and-white works in its Burlington Arcade space, an extension of its takeover of the former Welsh Chapel on Charing Cross Road. Elsewhere, Maureen Paley shows Hannah Starkey, TJ Boulting has Adam Rouhana and Soft Opening shows Dean Sameshima. Ceramics feature at Kate MacGarry (Renee So) and tapestries at Lisson Gallery (Otobong Nkanga).
Galleries are pushing the boat out, Sadie Coles says, because the event now brings in collectors and curators. “It started out as a nice collegial idea through a WhatsApp group during Covid and has become very professional and very ambitious. People come out and see the shows that weekend,” she says. Visitors include those from outside London, she notes, with travel and accommodation support for curators from museums across the UK, in partnership with the Art Fund, as well as bursaries for approximately five curators from Europe.
Organisers emphasise that the event is not just for art world cognoscenti. “There’s potentially a much larger public for art,” Epstein says. And while the shows are commercial endeavours, visiting is free, unlike at art fairs and most institutional exhibitions. There’s even a charitable aspect this year: as well as his own exhibition of work by Michaël Borremans, David Zwirner hosts a show of editions sold to raise funds for London’s Gasworks, which provides studio spaces for London-based artists.
The event’s range is a reminder of the city’s creative clout, despite Brexit’s negative impact on the arts and a downbeat economic environment. “We talk so much about the market but look at the offering that London has in terms of being a hub for the next generation of artists,” Rustin says. Coles summarises: “There is a feeling of collaboration, which builds on itself and shows that when we work together we will thrive. London Gallery Weekend has proved its worth.”