A large, new temporary art venue is opening in central London at the end this month, within walking distance of Tate Modern. The charity Hypha Studios, which hosts studios and exhibitions in vacant buildings, will debut Hypha Gallery South Bank on 25 June, in a former office building on Southwark Bridge Road. The site will include three galleries, a project space, studios and a showroom for the organisation’s sales arm, Hypha Curates.
In partnership with developer HUB and Bridge Fund Management, Hypha Gallery South Bank will support an estimated 600 artists in “making, exhibiting and connecting with each other and new audiences” over the next year, according to a statement. Plans for the offices-turned-arts-space after that time are yet to be confirmed.
Will Jennings, the interim managing director of Hypha Studios, in the new space
Photo: Carlo Zambon; Courtesy Hypha Studios
As Will Jennings, the interim managing director of Hypha Studios, tells The Art Newspaper, “There is a chance it may carry on longer, but this depends on a variety of external factors—but we take pleasure in our different spaces having different lifespans.”
The studio spaces will be occupied for the initial year by 17 artists from a new collective called Lobby. The group, who were awarded the spaces following an open call, will contribute to public events and other programming at the new venue. The inaugural exhibitions in the ground-floor gallery spaces meanwhile include a sculpture show called Bridging the Gap, an exhibition of site-specific works and an immersive sound installation.
Hypha Studios and their collaborators took inspiration from a famous Parisian contemporary art institution to create the nearly 800 sq. m of galleries and more than 400 sq. m of studio space across the Southwark Bridge Road site. “We used the Palais de Tokyo by Lacaton & Vassal architects as a starting point and have stripped everything back to raw industrial surfaces, added a new concrete floor, and built in strategic partition walls,” Jennings says.
Since its founding in 2021, Hypha Studios has transformed approximately 70 vacant properties into free exhibition and studio spaces across the United Kingdom, supporting more than 3,000 artists, according to the charity. Hypha Gallery South Bank is their largest space to date.