Each Gallery Weekend has its personality. Since in 2005 the gallery owners of Berlin saw clearly that it was much more profitable for them to organize a weekend with the galleries open, enhancing the spaces themselves, inviting the best collectors among all of them and saving themselves the costs of having to participate in one more fair on the calendar. The succession of cities that joined the successful initiative was immediate. The one held in London at the beginning of the month stands out for being, among the twenty that are counted internationally, the one that contemplates a greater activation of spaces. In its third edition, the British capital brought together more than 125 galleries of all sizes.
The program, directed by Sarah Rustin and Jeremy Epstein, focused on specific areas. If the first day opened with a series of performances and a visit to the galleries of Mayfair, SoHo and Fitzrovia, where the big ones are located alongside the luxury brands, the second and third days focused on the South and the East End. A walk through Peckham was an invitation to discover the most transgressive. Or one of the new enclaves of emerging galleries in the south of the metropolis, Deptford, which is not only flourishing thanks to more affordable rents, but its multiculturalism giving way to more open proposals, such as South Asian art, performance practices or the media. art .
The more than one hundred programmed activities make the experience in each gallery different. Two of them made me think. At Gagosian, Gary Garrels, the exhibition’s curator, gave a long dissertation on the importance of being in person when contemplating works of art, demonstrating that the essence of many paintings is inappreciable on screen. In Thaddaeus Ropac, the photographer Bob Colacello exhibited and recounted his photographs from the eighties in New York, and transported us to his experiences with Andy Warhol and his gang.
London is suffering the consequences of a Brexit that art professionals did not want. Its business figures have been affected to the detriment of cities like Paris. However, it would be misleading to say that the city has lost a bit of its interest and all you have to do is take a tour of the galleries to experience first-hand the infinity of top-level artistic offerings.
