Nick James obituary | Art

My friend Nick James, who has died aged 75, set up a spoof art gallery in London in the early 1970s that invited the art world to take a good look at itself.

He opened up his space, called simply The Gallery, in 1973 as a critique of the commercial art gallery system as it related to conceptual art, which had become all the rage a few years earlier. The Gallery’s first show consisted of some crude potato prints, followed by several exhibitions featuring the invented work of madeup conceptual artists.

As it was just around the corner from the much better known Lisson Gallery, which promoted real-life conceptual art, a number of visitors confused the two galleries, much to Nick’s delight. Better still, the madeup “artists” were subsequently offered a group show by a curator at the ICA, who had mistaken their work for something genuine.

Subsequently, I suggested to Nick a series of displays at The Gallery focusing on appearance rather than concept, a deliberate reversal of the thrust of conceptual art, and a more sophisticated critique than straight spoofing. He agreed and invited me to join him as co-director.

With no artists in sight, real or invented, we put on exhibitions featuring images taken from various mundane sources – including a German knitwear machinery company and the sociology department of Sheffield Polytechnic. Nick explained it all in his persuasive, charming way to puzzled art critics, and big names from the art world started visiting to see what was going on.

A later show exhibited facsimiles of the work of eight conceptual artists who had gone on record as saying they had no problem with reproductions of their work. Their dealers thought otherwise, of course, and we were issued with writs. We cut the show short as a result, replacing the exhibits with copies of the legal letters we had received.

Not long afterwards The Gallery began to start showing work by real conceptual artists, including John Latham, but it closed in 1978 when the lease on its building ran out.

Born in Bromley, Kent, Nick was the son of Fritz Wegner, an illustrator, and his wife, Janet (nee Barber), a journalist. He studied at University College school, Hampstead, and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he painted in the post-impressionist style.

Over the years Nick made a living teaching art evening classes in Hackney, east London, offering private art classes and taking on freelance work as an illustrator for advertising agencies.

He also set up Cv/Visual Arts Research, an imprint that published books, pamphlets and audio books on art, including Painted Lives by Marina Vaizey (2019) and works by David Hockney and Vanessa Bell.

All the while he painted under the name of Philip James, having changed his surname in adulthood. Elected a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in 2016, he exhibited every year at its exhibition in London as well as at the Royal Academy of Arts summer exhibition, the Turner Gallery in Exeter and Whittington Fine Art in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire.

He and his wife, Sarah Batiste, a painter and sculptor, married in 1985. She survives him, as do their children, Alexandra, Emma and Lucy.