The Parisian contemporary art dealer Kamel Mennour is opening a small London gallery at 51 Brook Street next to Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair.
The first show, devoted to the Moroccan-born artist Latifa Echakhch, begins on 4 October (until 12 November). Echakhch’s work will also be presented in a solo display on Mennour’s stand at Frieze.
Mennour is the fourth European art dealer to invest in a new or expanded outpost in the British capital in recent months, despite the country’s vote to leave the European Union in June. “Of course we are all worried about Brexit but London is an extremely visited city and it is a second home for me. I visit two or three times a month—it’s so easy to get to from Paris—and I love the idea of the interconnection between these two big cities,” Mennour tells The Art Newspaper.
Also on 4 October the Paris- and Brussels-based dealer Almine Rech, who opened a first-floor gallery in Savile Row in 2014, is inaugurating a new ground floor showroom at Grosvenor Hill in Mayfair, opposite the Gagosian Gallery, with a Jeff Koons show. The Swedish-born, New York dealer Per Skarstedt, who opened a modest first-floor gallery in Old Bond Street in 2012, is opening a 4,000 sq ft space at 8 Bennet Street in St James’s with a display of History Portraits by Cindy Sherman and Tapestry Paintings by David Salle.
Meanwhile, the Austrian dealer Thaddaeus Ropac is adding a five-floor Mayfair space in Dover Street to his two Salzburg and two Paris galleries. The outpost opens next spring. “Despite the result of the EU referendum in the UK, I have no doubt that London will continue to be one of the most vibrant and quintessential art centres in the world,” Ropac said in a statement when he announced the new gallery.
“My London gallery is extremely intimate,” Mennour says. “I don’t want to compete in a race for a huge super space,” he says. Instead, the new 60 sq m outpost will enable the dealer to “echo” the programming of his three Parisian galleries. “I always said I would never open another branch abroad but then this opportunity came up and it was too good to pass up.”