Looking at our secluded and peaceful neighbourhood on New Quebec St that our surrounding area would play host to some of the world’s most esteemed galleries and art collections. This week for our second instalment of our Neighbourhood Focus, we are shining a light on some of these incredible institutions which exhibit the best of British art and are such an integral part of our culture and history. As a core aspect of our brand values at PAOLITA, we value the arts above all else, we hope you enjoy this edit of our favourite cultural hotspots and implore you to support and visit these institutions wherever you can.
NEIGHBOURHOOD FOCUS: New Quebec St Part 2
Here's our edit of the best local galleries in and around our New Quebec St Neighbourhood...
The Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection is a stunning internationally renowned gallery, and previously private residence of the Wallace family, which houses one of the most extensive collections of armour, and notable medieval and Roccoco style paintings in Britain.
In 1900, it was opened to the public as a national museum that houses the art collections amassed by the first four marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, the 4th Marquess’s likely illegitimate son. Lady Wallace, Sir Richard’s widow, gave it to the British people in 1897.
Previously the primary London residence of the marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, Hertford House was first associated with the Hertford family in 1797 when the 2nd Marquess of Hertford moved there. The 2nd Marchioness was a renowned hostess, and the house was frequently visited by elegant London society in the early nineteenth century.
Though other members of the family preferred to live at other London residences, such as Dorchester House and St Dunstan’s Villa, the 4th Marquess, who lived most of his life in Paris, used the building largely as a store for his ever-expanding art collection. His enormous wealth (gained largely from estates in England and in particular Ireland) enabled him to indulge that taste to the full.
Among the Collection’s contents is a remarkable collection of eighteenth-century French art, several significant seventeenth and nineteenth-century paintings, mediaeval and Renaissance works of art, and one of Britain’s greatest collections of royal weapons and armour. As well as it’s ornately decorated rooms and innumerable baroque fixtures, each room is an eclectic box of delight.
The Pontone Gallery
With a father that started a gallery in North East England in 1979, founder Domenic Pontone had always been around art. After extensively developing his taste from visiting innumerable art fairs, exhibitions and galleries around the world, Pontone founded the first incarnation of the gallery in Mayfair in 2011 and since moved to the affluent neighbourhood of Chelsea in 2016.
Pontone Gallery brings together emerging and inspirational voices on the contemporary art landscape, showcasing work that stands out for its quality, originality, and innovation. Pontone Gallery exhibits at several art fairs around the world, exhibiting its work in a variety of unconstrained methods. Pontone Gallery promotes both young and established artists, including Malcolm Liepke, Matteo Massagrande, Pablo Atchugarry, Yigal Ozeri, and Chris Rivers, as well as South Korean masters such as Lee Jaehyo, Lee Jungwoong, and Lee Leenam.
Currently exhibiting at the Gallery’s Chelsea space is British contemporary artist, Emma Stone Johnson. ‘Elegant Complexity’ marks the artist’s debut exhibition in London and her first at The Pontone Gallery. Stone-Johnson explores abstraction with a delicate, flowing palette of diffuse and tonal colour on canvas using oil, acrylic, pigment, and ink. Her lyrical technique and delicacy of controlled touch result in works that are intricate networks of fluid and dynamically gestural strokes.
The Lisson Gallery, Bell Street
15 minutes from our front door is the internationally renowned Lisson Gallery. With spaces dotted across the globe from London, New York and Singapore, Lisson plays host to some of the most critically acclaimed artists and curated exhibitions there is.
Currently, Lisson Gallery on Bell Street, London is housing an exhibition by a globally renowned sculptor, Anish Kapoor. Kapoor is widely regarded as one of the most influential sculptors of his age. Perhaps most known for public sculptures that are both explorations in form and marvels of engineering traverses between dramatically diverse scales in a numerous series of works.
Kapoor’s current exhibition features a new series of paintings, a rarely exhibited aspect of his practice that explores the personal and ritualistic character of his work. The exhibition, which was created over a year, offers a lyrical picture of the artist’s current preoccupations. While painting has always been a part of Kapoor’s practice, this radical new body of work is both mystical and euphoric, demonstrating Kapoor creating in a more vivid and urgent form than ever before.
Kapoor explores the deep interior universe of our mind and body through painting, from the physical investigation of flesh and blood to psychological notions as basic and nameless as origin and obliteration. Since the 1980s, Kapoor has been primarily recognised as a sculptor, but painting, in its most basic composition, colour, and shape, has been an important part of his oeuvre. The exhibition will include a selection of new and recent paintings painted between 2019 and 2021, the vast majority of which were created at the artist’s London studio during the pandemic. These paintings, like the artist’s larger body of work, are motivated by a desire to comprehend the unknown, awaken consciousness, and experiment.