The bigger picture - spotlight on London's supergalleries

The room is hushed, the atmosphere reverential. On high white walls hang seven paintings by Mark Rothko completed in 1969, just a year before the artist’s suicide. With their sombre shades of black and burnt melan-cholic browns, these paintings are carefully juxtaposed with a series of startlingly similar photographs of seas and lakes by the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. This exhibition could be in one of the finest art museums in the world, except that this is not a museum but the latest and most lavish example of a growing trend on the London art scene — the supergallery.

Where once London’s commercial galleries were modest affairs, secreted away upstairs on smart Mayfair streets or behind locked doors through which only an elite were admitted, the supergallery is like a museum in miniature. Often huge in scale, architect designed, staffed by directors and curators, producers of landmark exhibitions and catalogues, these supergalleries are admired by critics and open to everyone from rich collectors to penniless students. Embryonic examples include White Cube’s three monumental branches, Victoria Miro’s tastefully converted warehouse in Shoreditch, and now Marlborough Fine Art in Mayfair, with its recently opened space dedicated to contemporary work.

But Pace London, where the Rothko paintings are on show, is one of three new supergalleries to open in London this autumn that raise the bar for what constitutes a world-class art business. All three — Pace, David Zwirner and Michael Werner — are well established in New York and have come to London representing rosters of artists including the estates of legends such as Calder, Flavin, Miró and De Kooning, which read like a roll call of star names from modern art history. Their owners are almost as legendary: Arne Glimcher, 74, founded Pace gallery in Boston in 1960 and has brokered many remarkable deals, including the sale of Jasper Johns’ 1958 painting of three American flags to the Whitney Museum; David Zwirner, 48, has risen in fewer than 20 years since he started his gallery to become number two on Forbes’ 2012 survey of America’s 10 Most Powerful Art Dealers. Meanwhile, Michael Werner, who started his gallery in Berlin in 1963, recently made headlines when he donated 130 modern masterpieces from his own collection — including work by distinguished post-war German painters such as Immendorff and Lüpertz — to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Their arrival marks London’s indisputable rise to the position of art capital of the world.

According to Melanie Gerlis, art market editor of The Art Newspaper, several factors are at play. ‘The money in the art market is moving from West to East and these galleries want to attract buyers from Russia, China and the Middle East,’ she says. ‘Because of the time zone and the political situation, these collectors don’t tend to buy in America. And many of them have homes in London because it’s accessible and has a relatively good tax system.’

Supergalleries may look like museums, but they differ in one crucial aspect — they must sell work in order to fund their increasingly costly activities. According to The Art Newspaper, a business such as Gagosian — the largest dealer in the world with galleries on four continents, around 150 staff and a total floor space larger than Tate Modern — faces estimated costs of £7 million a year in rental bills alone.

With seven galleries — four in New York, two in London and one in Beijing — Pace may not have such large overheads, but it must still maintain its growing empire. The new gallery, a 9,000sq ft space inside an imposing wing of the Royal Academy of Arts on Burlington Gardens, has been remodelled by Stirling Prize-winning architect David Chipperfield, designer of several world-class museums. If selling art can be done from a small upstairs room, or even a dealer’s home — which is how Jay Jopling started White Cube — why open on such a grand scale?

This, explains Gerlis, is another result of the increasingly global art market. Galleries must offer their artists the best spaces, the right locations and connections if they are to hold on to their talent. ‘If you are a big artist with an American gallery, you want that gallery to have a space in London, too, or you will move to one that does,’ she says. ‘Collectors and artists also want to deal with galleries that have museum connections as involvement in museum shows validates their work.’ Supergalleries often lend key works to museum shows, as well as brokering deals for loans by its collectors. It raises the profile and value of the art, flatters the collector’s vanity and helps the museum complete its display.

Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, the executive director of Pace London, worked previously as a director of Gagosian’s London operation and for three years as advisor to Garage, the Moscow art space of Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend Dasha Zhukova. The size and quality of the new Pace space, she agrees, is partly about satisfying the artists and estates it represents. ‘Having a gallery with a high footfall doesn’t benefit us economically,’ she says. ‘But in the view of the artist it is important. At the Royal Academy we are lucky because of the high traffic in the building and the area.’

In the case of the Rothko paintings, four of these have been lent by the artist’s son Christopher, ostensibly to show the connections between his father’s work and that of Sugimoto, and are not officially for sale. The Rothkos also allow the Sugimoto works to bask in their reflected glory and thus be more attractive to buyers (the record high at auction for a work by Sugimoto is £1,167,000, a figure that was realised at Christie’s in New York in 2007). ‘We are in a unique position to do this kind of show,’ explains Dent-Brocklehurst, referring to Pace’s 34-year relationship with the Rothko estate, ‘whereas a museum wouldn’t be interested in the commercial angle, which is selling the newer works.’

Ordinary gallery-goers naturally benefit from this state of affairs. Just around the corner from Pace is the newly opened branch of the David Zwirner Gallery, a smart 10,000sq ft conversion of a five-storey Georgian townhouse by the New York architect Annabelle Selldorf. Here, recent paintings by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans are currently on show, a rare treat since his work has not been seen in the capital since his Tate Modern retrospective in 2004. Tuymans, whose record price at auction is £711,200, for a painting sold at Christie’s in New York last year, has been represented by David Zwirner since 1994 and dealer and artist have risen together. Zwirner’s London director Angela Choon says this is the ideal way for a gallery to foster talent. ‘The main thing for a young gallerist to remember is that you’re growing in terms of a business but the artist is growing, too. So as long as the gallerist is able to provide for that potential, then they should be able to keep existing together.’