The latest addition to the Mayfair gallery landscape was duly anointed during last night’s opening party at 1 Davies Street. Sadie Coles’s new gallery was inaugurated with an exhibition of new paintings (and a photo piece) by Rudolf Stingel based on wildlife photographs from a vintage German calendar. The show also continued across town at her existing space in Kingly Street. (She’s also keeping her small project space round the corner from the new premises in Balfour Mews)
There was much praise for the 3000 sq. feet, double height gallery that Coles has disarmingly described as being “like a large fish tank” with an elegant suite of first floor rooms. The new space was designed by 6a architects, who are becoming renowned for their sympathetic and finely detailed gallery conversions. These include Alex Sainsbury’s Ravens Row, the South London Gallery and a studio for Coles’s husband, Jürgen Teller.
Despite Mr. Stingel not being a huge fan of shindigs, the festivities continued with a substantial dinner in the art-bedecked surroundings of 34 restaurant in Grosvenor Square. The hundred or so guests included the directors of the Whitechapel Gallery, Iwona Blazwick, and the National Portrait Gallery, Nicholas Cullinan; the newly appointed Serpentine Galleries’ head of programmes, Lizzie Carey-Thomas; artists Steven Claydon, Don Brown and Simon Periton; and Coles’s buddies Johnnie Shand-Kydd, and Margot and Fergus Henderson. A large family affair for one of London’s best-loved galleries.
