About the Gallery
Since it was founded in 1987, England & Co has established an independent and individual identity that reflects its eclectic, historically aware, research-based curatorial approach. There is no specific stylistic or generational specialization and from the beginning, the gallery programme has alternated between contemporary art and explorations of relatively recent art history.
The gallery represents a number of contemporary artists; advises and acts for the estates of artists and collectors; and also holds a regularly changing stock of 20th and 21st century art works. From the beginning, the gallery has regularly published exhibition catalogues, and has published editions of prints and multiples by contemporary artists. In recent years the gallery has become known for exploring artists’ use of photography as both medium and method for documentation, particularly in relation to performance.
Solo exhibitions of contemporary artists from Britain and abroad are augmented by themed survey exhibitions that place contemporary work in a specific context and mix established with emerging artists. As an art historian, gallery director/curator Jane England is also committed to working with artists’ archives and researching and curating retrospective exhibitions. These exhibitions often reappraise artists from the British and international avant-garde of the 1930s through to the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; exhibited artists have included abstract pioneer Paule Vézelay; Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña; founder Situationist Ralph Rumney; kinetic sculptor Liliane Lijn; 1950s action-painter William Green; performance and installation artist Stuart Brisley; and influential forerunner in British multi-media art, film-maker Tina Keane . More recent post-war art history has been explored in Signals: 1964-66; The Exploding Galaxy/99 Balls Pond Road; Screen Practice and The Neo Naturists.
The gallery cooperates with many institutions, lending works to numerous exhibitions, including to Tate, London; the Guggenheim, Bilbao; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Wellcome Trust Gallery, London; Hayward Gallery, London; Barbican Gallery, London; PS1 MOMA, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; SF MOMA, San Francisco; Grand Palais, Paris; Documenta and the Venice Biennale. Corporate collections that have acquired works from the Gallery include Deutsche Bank; Barclays Bank, London; and Penguin Books, London. England & Co has sold numerous contemporary and 20th-century works to public collections, including Tate; Imperial War Museum; Victoria and Albert Museum; Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; Museum of London; National Gallery of Australia; Smithsonian Institution, Washington; Guggenheim, New York; the Arts Council of Great Britain; and the British Museum.
England & Co held its initial exhibition in April 1988 in its first gallery space in Notting Hill. In 1999, the gallery expanded and moved around the corner to an architect-designed space on Westbourne Grove until 2012 when the gallery began a three-year residency in Great Portland Street, Central London. This substantial space allowed the gallery to incorporate more film screenings, performance and installation into its programme. The gallery continues to curate exhibitions in other locations, participate in art fairs, and initiate projects, with a particular focus on placing works in museum and institutional collections.
