What’s up with the spate of London gallery closures?

The bitter winds of Brexit, Covid and economic downturn finally blew a terrifying gale across London last year, claiming multiple gallery victims. It’s been a tough few years that many galleries have survived, but Simon Lee, Fold, and Darren Flook in Mayfair and Fitzrovia didn’t manage to endure. The Zabludowicz Collection and the Jewish Museum also closed, as did Gagosian’s Britannia Street branch. Are these the end times for London’s art scene? 

Simon Lee, founded in 2002, was one of London’s most successful major galleries, specialising in the upper end of the art market: big artists making big art for big money. They had spaces in Hong Kong and New York, they represented painters and photographers like Christopher Wool, Dexter Dalwood, Rachel Howard, George Condo and Michelangelo Pistoletto, taking them to art fairs around the world. And they did interesting, adventurous stuff too, not just rampant commercial painting shows. In 2014 they held a wildly popular sale of Larry Clark photos that allowed visitors to rifle through boxes of his test prints and pick one up for just £100 (I bought one so full-frontally raunchy I’m almost too embarrassed to have it on display), they showed mythical queer black art by April Bey and hyper-militaristic weirdness by Mai-Thu Perret. They were the model big gallery, in other words. 

But things were not going well. In July last year, after a few months of eerie, shuttered silence, Simon Lee announced that they were going into administration. In other words, they had debt, a lot of it, and they weren’t going to be paying it back. This came after a Companies House notice to be dissolved over a tax dispute, an insolvency hearing and one of their major artists – Sonia Boyce, who won the Golden Lion prize at the Venice Biennale – leaving after just two years on their books. After the gallery went into administration, it emerged that multiple artists hadn’t been paid for works which had sold, and the most recent accounts the gallery filed (in 2023 for the 2019 tax year) showed them making a loss of more than £3 million. 

The real victims are the artists who often end up unpaid for works that have sold

Fold was a much smaller gallery than Simon Lee, in terms of both profile and income, but it was a mainstay of Fitzrovia’s gallery scene. Founded by Kim Savage 15 years ago, it showed a wide variety of younger, early career artists like the brilliant Olivia Bax, Benjamin Cohen and Márton Nemes. But in August last year, they entered voluntary liquidation. ‘The tank is empty,’ Savage said in a letter to the gallery’s artists, blaming Fold’s closure on ‘mounting historic debts, the fallout from the pandemic, lockdowns, Brexit, inflation and a general downturn in sales’.

Darren Flook was another Fitzrovia gallery (on a similar scale to Fold) which closed its doors in 2023. ‘2023 was awful sales-wise,’ Flook himself says. ‘We have closed our space on Great Portland Street [but] there will be shows and one very big project in 2024’. So it’s curtains, as they say, but maybe just for an interval in Flook’s case. 

The other commercial casualty was Gagosian, one of the world’s biggest galleries, who chose to close their massive Britannia Street space. You might remember the cavernous concrete warehouse in Kings Cross for its big shows of work by Damien Hirst and Richard Serra, but it seems to have run out of usefulness. Could they no longer afford it? Did they simply not have enough art to fill this huge gallery? The answers aren’t clear, but Gagosian still has two spaces in Mayfair, so don’t feel too sad for them. 

The real victims in these commercial closures are the artists who often end up unpaid for works that have sold while gallery directors live it up flying first class to swanky art fairs, downing buckets of Moët and taking jet ski holidays (an actual rumour we heard about one director). 

Away from the commercial gallery closures, last year also saw London losing both the Zabludowicz Collection (a private museum in a beautiful old church focusing on innovative, technological contemporary art) and the Jewish Museum. Citing a loss of income after the pandemic, dwindling visitor numbers, rising energy bills and fewer donations, the Jewish Museum in Camden closed in July. The Zabludowicz Collection, not far down on the road in Chalk Farm, announced they would be permanently closing in December. Losing the Jewish Museum, which has been a part of London’s cultural landscape since 1932, is devastating, but losing the Zabludowicz Collection isn’t great either. They put on some of the most adventurous shows in town – giving space to artists like Jon Rafman and Donna Huanca to go wild with performance and technological experimentation, all for free. They also gave some great young artists – Rosie Gibbens, Lindsey Mendick, Jake Elwes – their first proper shows.

‘I have had several conversations with dealers who say how tough this year has been for those in the middle and lower-ends of the market,’ says Anny Shaw, a journalist for The Art Newspaper who has reported on the issue. ‘Many cite the fallout from Brexit, the pandemic lockdowns, spiralling costs and inflation as problems. Britain’s share of the global art market fell to 17 percent in 2021, its lowest in a decade, but crept back up to 18 percent last year.’ 

Britain’s share of the global art market fell to 17 percent in 2021, its lowest in a decade

You might be thinking: so what? Why should I care about the closure of these fancy art spaces, where art is sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds? What’s it got to do with me? Well, when you combine the struggles of these galleries with the government pulling arts funding away from London, studio rents becoming increasingly unaffordable and a general cost of living crisis, you have the makings of a crisis for artists in the city. If the trend continues, there will be no new, young, exciting art left here, and that would be a travesty for all of us. 

But in among the gloom of dramatic gallery closures, there have been some rays of positive light poking through. Some smaller galleries aren’t just surviving, but thriving and expanding. There have been great galleries opening like Rose Easton, Neven and Sherbet Green: a new vanguard of contemporary art spaces in the city, showing artists you might never have heard of, but who might just be the stars of the future.

Smaller spaces are doing well too. Castor Gallery recently moved from Deptford to Fitzrovia (and might soon be trading up again), Ginny on Frederick opened a bigger second space to accompany their sandwich shop gallery in Smithfields, and established mega-galleries like Alison Jacques, Pilar Corrias and Stephen Friedman Gallery moved to new, bigger, more central locations. Those are galleries which represent some of the biggest, best artists in the world (like David Shrigley and Yinka Shonibare) and they’re going from strength to strength. In their new homes, all perfect cast concrete and bright white lighting, they’re like a single, huge, free museum stretched out across Mayfair. 

Another smaller space, east London’s Emalin, expanded recently too, taking over the beautiful Clerk’s House in Shoreditch as their second space. ‘Never before in our lifetime have we seen such a rapid shift from one crisis to the next – the political, economic and health landscapes have continuously shifted and thereby the approach to what and how we consume has shifted alongside’, said Emalin directors Angelina Volk and Leopold Thun. ‘This meant that one can no longer blindly follow the blueprints of galleries that were successful in the 2000s and 2010s, but one has to continuously adapt and reinvent one's approach.’

Things are undeniably bleak out there, but there are success stories too, and 2024 is already promising more new spaces. Galleries close, galleries open, maybe it’s all part of a healthy ecosystem of rebirth and renewal. ‘At a grassroots level, London’s unique energy lives on through a younger generation of gallerists,’ says Shaw. Places like Simon Lee and Fold may have crumbled, but a new crop of art spaces is making things feel like there’s life in the old art dog yet. Galleries in London seem to reflect life: lots of deaths, lots of births, and a whole bunch of hard times in between.

Read more: The future of London art – the nine best young artists working in the city today