Gallery House, London was a nonprofit art space founded in 1972 by Sigi Krauss, which was open for sixteen months until its abrupt closure in 1973. Gallery House hosted exhibitions, residencies, performances, "happenings", and events.

History

Gallery House occupied a vacant mansion owned by the German government, next to the

Goethe Institute The Goethe-Institut (, GI, en, Goethe Institute) is a non-profit German cultural association operational worldwide with 159 institutes, promoting the study of the German language abroad and encouraging international cultural exchange and ...

on Exhibition Road in

South Kensington South Kensington, nicknamed Little Paris, is a district just west of Central London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Historically it settled on part of the scattered Middlesex village of Brompton. Its name was supplanted with ...

.Hudek, Antony. "A Porous Entity: The Centre for Behavioural Art at Gallery House, 1972-73", in ''London Art Worlds: Mobile, Contingent, and Ephemeral Networks, 1960–1980.'' Eds. Jo Applin, Catherine Spencer, Amy Tobin. Pennsylvania State University, 2018. . pp. 39-51. The inaugural exhibition included works by

Stuart Brisley Stuart Brisley (born 1933) is a British artist. Education Brisley studied at Guildford School of Art from 1949 to 1954 and at the Royal College of Art from 1956 to 1959. In 1959–60 he attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Ger ...

, Gustave Metzger, and

Marc Camille Chaimowicz Marc Camille Chaimowicz is a London-based contemporary artist whose works are in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Victoria and Albert Museum collections. His cross-disciplinary work in painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, installation, ...

. Having himself been appointed by the German cultural attaché to London, Sigi Krauss brought in as co-director Rosetta Brooks, then an undergraduate student at the

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

, who took an active role in the Gallery's programming. The exhibition format Krauss and Brooks adopted was loose, with no set open hours, no compensation for staff, no entry charge, and no censorship of artists. Within this framework, Gallery House staged exhibitions that gained critical attention, including some of the earliest recorded shows of ‘expanded cinema’, new film, and video work. Among them were Brooks' ambitious, influential three-part ''Survey of the Avant-Garde in Britain'' which included British video artist David Hall's first multiscreen installation, and

' career-making ''Celebration? Realife,'' in which the artist filled the House's ballroom with party lights, disco detritus, and found objects, invited viewers to discuss the work over coffee in the adjacent gallery, and slept in the building at night for the exhibition's duration. Documents from Gallery House, including meeting minutes, diaries, correspondence, artifacts and audio-visual resources, are held by the

Tate Gallery Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

Archive, along with material from Sigi Krauss Gallery and the later Artists Meeting Place space.

Contemporary Interest

In 2006, the Centre of Attention curatorial collective organized ''Fast and Loose: My Dead Gallery,'' an exhibition at Fieldgate Gallery in London that celebrated defunct alternative art exhibition spaces in London, prominently including Gallery House. The exhibition drew attention from leading art journals, appearing on top-ten-of-the-year lists by then-Tate Modern film curator Stuart Comer in ''

Frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

','' and by

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is an art museum in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighborhoods of Manhattan in New York City. It was founded in 1930 by Gertrude ...

curator Chrissie Iles in ''

Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...

,'' who wrote that these spaces "nurtured an alternative practice that has remained largely invisible due to its ephemerality, yet were enormously important for the development of artists". In 2017, curators Antony Hudek and Alex Sainsbury mounted ''This Way Out of England: Gallery House in Retrospect'' at

Raven Row A raven is any of several larger-bodied bird species of the genus ''Corvus''. These species do not form a single taxonomic group within the genus. There is no consistent distinction between "crows" and "ravens", common names which are assigned t ...

, an exhibition in which artists who had shown at Gallery House were invited to reenact or rethink their interventions in the space. Artists who exhibited at Gallery House included

, British experimental film collective Filmaktion, Avital Geva,

Menashe Kadishman Menashe Kadishman (Hebrew: מנשה קדישמן; August 21, 1932 – May 8, 2015) was an Israeli sculptor and painter. Biography Menashe Kadishman was born in Mandate Palestine in the family of two Zionist (supporters of the state of Israel as ...

Anthony McCall Anthony McCall (born 1946) is a British-born New York based artist known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with "Line Describing a Cone," in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves ...

David Medalla David Cortez Medalla (23 March 1942 – 28 December 2020) was a Filipino international artist and political activist. His work ranged from sculpture and kinetic art to painting, installation, and performance art. Early life David Cortez Medal ...

Gustav Metzger Gustav Metzger (10 April 1926, Nuremberg – 1 March 2017, London) was a German artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. Together with John Sharkey, he initiated the Destruction in Ar ...

, Robert Morris,

Joshua Neustein Joshua Neustein (born 1940) is a contemporary visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He is known for his Conceptual Art, environmental installations, Land Art, Postminimalist torn paper works, epistemic abstraction, deconstructed c ...

Hermann Nitsch Hermann Nitsch (29 August 1938 – 18 April 2022) was an Austrian contemporary artist and composer. His art encompassed wide-scale performances incorporating theater, multimedia, rituals and acted violence. He was a leading figure of Viennese Ac ...

, and

Carolee Schneeman Carolee Schneemann (October 12, 1939 – March 6, 2019) was an American visual artist, visual experimental artist, known for her multi-media works on the body, narrative, human sexuality, sexuality and gender. She received a Bachelor of Arts, B.A ...

References

{{reflist South Kensington Art venues 1972 in London 1973 in London Art galleries established in 1972 Art galleries disestablished in 1973