Gagosian to close its vast Britannia Street gallery in London after two decades

It’s not typically you hear of the world’s most mega gallery closing an area, however, after 20 years, Larry Gagosian has introduced he’s shutting his Britannia Avenue location in King’s Cross, north London.

The Britannia Avenue area’s monumental proportions—its largest room measures 28 metres lengthy and virtually six metres excessive—makes it supreme for large sculpture and bold initiatives. It launched in 2004 with an exhibition of ten large-scale work by Cy Twombly, adopted by a present that includes two monumental sculptures by Martin Kippenberger.

The American seller gave no motive for his choice, although a spokesman says the gallery is creating a brand new platform for large-scale sculpture that may “proceed and increase the custom” of Britannia Avenue. Launching in October, to coincide with Frieze London, this new enterprise, referred to as Gagosian Open, “will see artwork works put in at public websites in London”, they are saying. “[It] will present artists with the chance to show bold initiatives past the partitions of the gallery and can permit new audiences to expertise exceptional artworks in solely completely different contexts—from beforehand inaccessible places to public areas all through the town.”

It’s a new tack for Gagosian, who has constructed an empire on the standard bricks-and-mortar gallery mannequin, even in instances of financial downturn. Within the early Nineties recession, he reopened his Los Angeles gallery, whereas in 2007, shortly earlier than the worldwide financial crash, he opened an area in Rome. In 2012, The Artwork Newspaper estimated his world galleries totalled greater than 14,200 sq m, greater than your entire exhibition area of Tate Fashionable, which spans 13,500 sq m.

Since then he has opened three areas in Paris in addition to galleries in Basel and Gstaad in Switzerland. In 2021, he closed his San Francisco area. Lately, query marks hung over the Britannia Avenue area, which early on mounted well-liked exhibitions by Jeff Koons ard Richard Serra, in addition to Cecily Brown’s first present within the UK, in 2006.

Much less well-received was American Pastoral, an exhibition pitting Nineteenth-century masters agains huge modern names comparable to Ed Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein, which opened in early 2020. “Visiting it’s a bit like stumbling into the gallery’s stockroom,” wrote the Telegraph’s Alistair Sooke.

In the meantime, for an entire 12 months, between April 2021 and April 2022, Gagosian gave the keys to the gallery to Damien Hirst, who mounted a collection of reveals of his personal works together with Pure Historical past, of his animals pickled in formaldehyde.