Formation | 1959 |
---|---|
Dissolved | 1975 |
Type | Art gallery |
Legal status | defunct |
Purpose | contemporary art exhibitions |
Location |
|
Coordinates | 51°29′36″N0°10′06″W / 51.4934°N 0.1682°W |
Founded by | Mateusz Grabowski |
The Grabowski Gallery was an avant-garde art gallery opened in 1959 in London's Chelsea by Mateusz Grabowski, anticipating the Swinging Sixties. [1] It hosted some of the earliest shows of the rising pop art movement and was the first venue in London to bring op art to the public. [2] It launched the careers of some of Britain's and the British Commonwealth's leading exponents of two- and three-dimensional art [3] [4] and fostered émigré artists from Europe, the Caribbean and the Commonwealth. [5] By the time it closed its doors in 1975 it had mounted around two hundred shows. When the gallery closed Mateusz Grabowski donated his collection of works from the gallery to the Museum of Art in Łódź and the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland. [6]
Founded in 1959, the gallery started as a sideline of the Polish émigré pharmacist, Mateusz Grabowski (1904-1976), who had arrived in the United Kingdom as an officer of the Polish Armed Forces in 1940. [7] After demobilisation in the late 1940s following the Second World War, Grabowski formed a pharmaceutical business, having worked as a pharmacist in Warsaw before the war. [8] His innovation in London was to create a mail order chemist to enable Polish and other resettled Central Europeans in Britain and in other parts of the Free World during the Cold War to send badly needed medicines and medical supplies to their families and friends in countries under Soviet occupation where there were persistent shortages of many everyday goods. His successful business allowed him eventually to indulge his youthful passion for art, first as a collector and subsequently as a patron, by opening a gallery next to one of his chemist outlets at 84 Sloane Avenue in Chelsea. It was an avowedly non-commercial venture. He reputedly mounted exhibitions in exchange for an artwork by the artist. [9] One of its earliest shows was a group exhibition of established Polish artists. [10]
The gallery became known as a pioneer of group and solo shows of recent art school graduates, including graduates of the nearby Royal College of Art, as well as artists from the British Commonwealth and established Polish émigré artists. [11] Grabowski was aided by art specialists from Poland, including the leading British Polish-born curator and critic Jasia Reichardt and the artist Stanisław Frenkiel. [12] [13] Exhibition themes and titles included Image in Progress, Image in Revolt, Inner Image to MAD - Conroy Maddox and Tomorrow's Artists. Among the exhibitors were:
Several of the gallery's exhibition catalogues from 1959 onwards are in the Special Collections of Leeds University Library, including catalogues for exhibitions by Ivor Abrahams, Michael Sandle and Michael Rothenstein. [18] The Grabowski was one of several noted contemporary art exhibition spaces initiated by émigré Poles in London. Others were Halima Nałęcz's Drian Galleries in Bayswater, Jan Wieliczko's Centaur Gallery and, longest established, Feliks Topolski's studio and exhibition in Waterloo.
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Tess Jaray is a British painter and printmaker. She taught at The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL from 1968 until 1999. Over the last twenty years Jaray has completed a succession of major public art projects. She was made an Honorary Fellow of RIBA in 1995 and a Royal Academician in 2010. Tess Jaray is represented by Karsten Schubert, London.
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Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, from 2 August to 20 October 1968, and then toured across the United States. Two stops in the United States were the Corcoran Annex, Washington, D.C., from 16 July to 31 August 1969, and the newly opened Exploratorium in San Francisco, from 1 November to 18 December 1969.
Jasia Reichardt is a British art critic, curator, art gallery director, teacher and prolific writer, specialist in the emergence of computer art. In 1968 she was curator of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is generally known for her work on experimental art. After the deaths of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson she catalogued their archive and looks after their legacy.
Oliver Bevan is an English artist, who was born in Peterborough and educated at Eton College. After leaving school he spent a year in 1959–60 working for Voluntary Service Overseas in British North Borneo before returning to London to study painting at the Royal College of Art, where he became strongly influenced by Op Art and in particular the work of Victor Vasarely. Bevan graduated from the RCA in 1964 and had his first exhibition of Op Art-inspired paintings the following year. Optical, geometric and kinetic art then served him well until the late 1970s when he moved to the Canadian prairies for a two-year teaching post at the University of Saskatchewan. By the time he returned to London in 1979 he had abandoned abstract art in favour of figurative art and urban realism.
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Mateusz Bronisław Grabowski, known as Grabowski or M.B. Grabowski, was a Polish-British pharmacist, art collector, and philanthropist known for owning the Grabowski Gallery in Chelsea, London. His M.B. Grabowski Foundation has endowed Polish Migration and Polish Cultural History studies at University College London, the University of Stirling, the University of Cambridge, and Trinity College, Oxford. He donated his pharmaceutical and art collections to several museums in Poland.
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