Among the proliferation of shiny new atrocities that are turning the Vauxhall district on London’s south bank into Dubai by the Thames (don’t get me started on the American Embassy building), the new Cabinet gallery building now nearing completion on the edge of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a more congenial presence.
The distinctive 12-sided, five-storey building has been designed by architect Trevor Horne (also responsible for Victoria Miro Gallery and Peer Gallery in Hackney, north London). The design has had very close input from Cabinet founding directors Andrew Wheatley and Martin McGeown, and their friend and backer Charles Asprey. With two floors of gallery space and three of residential, the building marks an ambitious departure for Cabinet, which started life in a one-room flat in Brixton in 1992.
Cabinet has an almost perverse determination not to conform to art world conventions, and its new building is no exception. With walls of handmade bricks, an unusual faceted shape and distinctive angled oak-framed window panes, the new Cabinet has an Expressionist, Jugendstil-with-a-twist look. To my knowledge it is the first purpose-built art gallery to be sited in a London park. Another first is the close involvement of gallery artists in the fabric of the building. The windows are courtesy of Marc Camille Chaimowicz (whose three-week solo show at the Serpentine starts on 29 September). There are large decorative ceramic panels on the park-side balconies designed by the Scotland-born, Brussels-based Lucy McKenzie. And the glazed door onto the pleasure gardens was produced by veteran West Coast conceptual artist John Knight.
Cabinet’s new incarnation opens on 30 September with a solo show of strangely off-kilter female faces drawn and painted by the Chicago artist Jim Nutt, veteran of such 1960s artist groups as The Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. It seems especially appropriate that a gallery that refuses to be pigeonholed according to style, mode or medium is occupying a site that for two centuries or so attracted all kinds of public spectacle and artistic expression, not to mention every social class. Between the 1650s and 1850s Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was a mass entertainment hub. It was also the stamping ground (and subject matter) of the likes of Samuel Pepys, William Hogarth, Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, and where many of George Frideric Handel’s most famous works were premiered. It’s a lot to live up to, but Cabinet likes a challenge.