Lehmann Maupin has taken on a permanent space on the first floor of London’s No. 9 Cork Street, the gallery hub run by Frieze, and has committed to holding three to four exhibitions a year in the Mayfair building’s ground floor gallery.
“New York is our flagship, but we work with a lot of institutions, artists and collectors in the UK and Europe. London is very important to us,” says Isabella Icoz, the partner at Lehmann Maupin who runs its Europe activities out of the UK capital. Recent institutional shows for their artists in London include Do Ho Suh’s Walk the House at Tate Modern last year and Gilbert & George’s 21st Century Pictures, which closed at the Hayward Gallery last week.
Of the split between the two spaces in No.9, Icoz explains that “the permanent viewing space [upstairs] will mirror shows at institutions, our other galleries and beyond”. It opened this week with a show of Billy Childish, who currently has an exhibition in the gallery’s West 24th Street in New York. Future exhibitions here will include the photographer Catherine Opie, to coincide with her exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, Icoz says. She adds that the plan is to develop further the gallery’s secondary market business from this base.
For the downstairs gallery, Lehmann Maupin has effectively taken a block booking at No. 9 Cork Street and has three shows in the planning for this year, coinciding with London’s seasonal peaks. Their opening show on February 26 is of the British painter Freya Douglas-Morris, a new artist to the gallery’s roster (Douglas-Morris is co-represented in New York by Lehmann Maupin and Alexander Berggruen). There will be around a dozen of Douglas-Morris’s vivid, layered imagined landscapes, priced between about £40,000 and £60,000.
Teresa Solar Abboud
Tunnel Boring Machine, 2025
Courtesy the artist, Lehmann Maupin and Travesía Cuatro
In April and May, Lehmann Maupin London will show the New York-based, South Korea-born artist Anna Park, while in September, it will open with the Madrid-based Teresa Solar Abboud, whose sculpture of large, pink tongues currently stands outside the Hayward Gallery.
“We’re so mindful of the amount of art fairs that we do, the amount of institutional shows and biennials that our artists are in involved in, while we are also juggling galleries in New York and in Seoul. We really want to make sure that when we are doing a show in London, it is all new work, really engaging and that our artists are really inspired… We’ve been very strategic about the timing,” Icoz says.
Lehmann Maupin first opened in London in 2020 as the anchor tenant for the South Kensington gallery hub, Cromwell Place, which last year had to rethink its strategy and now operates primarily as a restaurant called The Lavery. Icoz says that the gallery’s priorities in London have since changed. “We had a smaller team then and perhaps location was less important,” she says. In 2025, the gallery trialled shows at No. 9 Cork Street and found that its Mayfair location was among the things that “made sense,” she says.
Icoz reveals too that Mary Cork, previously at Stephen Friedman gallery, has joined as a senior director of Lehmann Maupin in London.
