Sadie Coles opened her third gallery in London yesterday (5 November), in a glass-fronted double-height space on Davies Street in Mayfair designed by 6a architects. In terms of size, the new 3,000 sq. ft building sits between Sadie Coles HQ on Kingly Street and the gallery’s project space on Balfour Mews. The new venue replaces the gallery that closed on South Audley Street in October 2014.
“I want to be able to offer an artist the opportunity to show all aspects of their work, and for that reason you need different scales and different tones,” Coles said in an interview with Flash Art last month, adding that the “quite modest” gallery on Davies Street resembles a “large fish tank”.
The space opened with an exhibition of four new Photorealist paintings by Rudolf Stingel depicting animals in their natural habitat, including a woodpecker peeking out from a hole in a tree trunk and a white rabbit in a snowy landscape. Four more paintings from the group are on show at Kingly Street. The series marks a return to figuration for the Italian-born New York-based artist, whose iridescent abstract works have sold well at auction in the past year.
Stingel is also represented by Gagosian Gallery, which opened its third—and largest—gallery in London in Mayfair last month. Other recent additions to the area include Phillips auction house, which opened its vast European headquarters on Berkeley Square last October—further indicating that Mayfair is once again becoming a centre for contemporary art.