Back in the day, it would have been a total catastrophe if three gala events and two major exhibition openings were all taking place on the same night. But such is the expansive nature of London’s current contemporary art that there was no shortage of punters for each of last night’s cornucopia of events unfolding and overlapping across the capital. Way out to the west of the city, Artangel’s opening of Ben Rivers’s multi- screen installation in the former White City BBC Television building was very well attended, as was South London Gallery’s radical re-arrangement courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn’s dramatic new intervention In-Between. Also south of the river there was partying at New Dawn, the 20th birthday and profile-raiser for Beaconsfield art space. There were performances by artists Russell Haswell, Sean Dower and Boo Saville, as well as former member of Soft Cell, and nearby Kennington resident, David Ball, with lawyer and Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti among the throng of guests.
Then up north in leafy Hampstead, Camden Arts Centre was celebrating its 50th birthday at an artist filled bash (including Jeremy Deller, Tasha Amini, Mark Wallinger, Simon Periton, Hannah Collins) which was hosted by patrons Freda and Izak Uziyel, in their art-filled home and stunning garden. Here there was much amusement that the only one of their impressive array of al-fresco sculptures marred by the avian life of north London was Elmgreen and Dragset’s bronze scarecrow, with surrounding works by Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Schütte and Daniel Silver all utterly guano free.
Finally, in the West End there was no shortage of Chisenhale Gallery patrons to party in the glitzy Hyde Park mansion of Yana and Stephen Peel, where artists including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Patrick Staff, together with collector couples Muriel and Freddy Salem and Joe and Marie Donnelly, were served gin and coriander cocktails by fleets of absurdly handsome male-model waiters. Oh, what a night…
