As for business, Epstein (a co-founder of London Gallery Weekend) says: “For us, business has been relatively steady. But speaking to our colleagues, everyone seems to have had a different experience over the past two years. It has been quite exciting really because it suggests that everyone has been finding different strategies and that audiences are quite different from gallery to gallery. In our case, one of the things that has allowed us to do this has been the fact that we have a long-standing support network of clients—we’ve got photos of a lot of them at our very first openings over a decade ago.”
As for the choice of Noémie Goudal for the first show, titled Post Atlantica, (until 12 March) Fellowes says: “She's an artist who, along with Gordon Cheung, Marcin Dudek, Jodie Carey and Dale Lewis, has been part of the gallery's programme from the very beginning. I don't think there's an artist whose own career and its progression is as inextricably linked to the progression and evolution of the gallery—she graduated from the Royal College the year that we opened.” Epstein adds: “She’s also on the cusp of a very big institutional wave of exhibitions, which all come under the umbrella of this title of Post Atlantica.”
Goudal conceived the works in this show for the new gallery space, with a large-scale installation, Phoenix, greeting visitors in the seven-metre-high main gallery as they enter, a film playing downstairs and a series of ceramic sculptures (produced during the artist’s ongoing residency at Manufacture Nationale de Sèvres in France) in the smaller Mortimer Street gallery. Goudal’s works explore the field of paleoclimatology, looking at the history of climate and geology through the idea of “deep time”—a counterpoint to the human concept of time, measured in millions or hundreds of millions of years rather than a human lifespan—which is, Epstein says, “a hot button issue right now”.
Talking of humans, the opening of the new space comes at a time when both Epstein and Fellowes are expecting new additions to their own families—Fellowes’s wife gave birth to their first baby just two weeks ago, just as the gallery launch was imminent, while Epstein’s second child is due in April. “Jeremy has been absolutely great while I took ten days off after the birth,” Fellowes says. “I owe him big time come April!”