On Saturday (23 September) Herald St headed up the flurry of London galleries opening new or revamped spaces in the next couple of weeks. (There is also Sprüth Magers re-opening its Grafton Street space with an extra two floors on 28 September and Stuart Shave’s Modern Art expanding further east into the old Wilkinson Gallery building on Vyner Street.)
Herald St was first-off the blocks as it unveiled a new West End branch situated in a Grade II listed Georgian building on Museum Street, close to the British Museum. This complements their existing East End premises, housed in a former industrial building on the eponymous Herald Street.
But just in case they appeared too swanky, more than a touch of grittiness has been carried over to inaugurate the new gallery, with the first show punctuating the elegant spaces with the wryly titled Four Fucksakes, a quartet of sculptures by Michael Dean. Like Dean’s recent installation at Sculpture Projects Münster, these four “derelict monuments” take their form from the trashed urban environment. Broken streetlamps, cracked paving stones and piles of rubbish have been filtered through the Dean sensibility and made to spell out various renditions of the F-word as well as being given new signs and meanings.
In a gesture especially appropriate for a new gallery’s opening show, a number of their surfaces also bristle with a multitude of cast-concrete crossed fingers. In our current precarious climate, you can’t be too careful.
Louisa Buck