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, ''Goethe Institute'') is a Nonprofit organization, nonprofit German culture, cultural organization operational worldwide with more than 150 cultural centres, promoting the study of the German language abroad and en ...

on Exhibition Road in

South Kensington South Kensington is a district at the West End 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 the advent of the ra ...

.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, Ge ...

, Gustave Metzger, and

Marc Camille Chaimowicz Marc Camille Chaimowicz (25 January 1946 – 23 May 2024) was a French contemporary artist who was based in London. His works are found in the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Victoria and Albert Museum collections. His cross-disciplinary wo ...

. 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 University College London (Trade name, branded as UCL) is a Public university, public research university in London, England. It is a Member institutions of the University of London, member institution of the Federal university, federal Uni ...

, 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 object A found object (a calque from the French ''objet trouvé''), or found art, is art created from undisguised, but often modified, items or products that are not normally considered materials from which art is made, often because they already hav ...

s, 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 UK ...

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 Stuart Comer is an American art curator and writer who is currently Chief Curator of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was co-curator of the 2014 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, alongside M ...

in ''

Frieze In classical architecture, the frieze is the wide central section of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic order, Ionic or Corinthian order, Corinthian orders, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Patera (architecture), Paterae are also ...

','' and by

Whitney Museum The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

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 × 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notably ...

,'' 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, 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,

Susan Hiller Susan Hiller (March 7, 1940–January 28, 2019) was a US-born, British conceptual artist who lived in London, United Kingdom. Her practice spanned a broad range of media, including installation, video, photography, painting, sculpture, per ...

, Menashe Kadishman,

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 evol ...

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 Me ...

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

Robert Morris Robert or Bob Morris may refer to: :''Ordered chronologically within each section.'' Politics and the law * Robert Hunter Morris (1700–1764), lieutenant governor of Colonial Pennsylvania * Robert Morris (financier) (1734–1806), one of the Foun ...

, Joshua Neustein,

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

, and Carolee Schneeman.

References

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