When the White Cube gallery has an opening, you tend to trot along. When that opening is for a show by Damien Hirst, of specially created works enjoying their world premiere having been sent to Hong Kong straight from the studio, you do it pretty quick – as was the case last week, when Jay Jopling hosted the opening night and party for Hirst’s new show: Entomology, Cabinets and Paitings, Scalpel Blade Paintings, Cabinets and Colour Charts. The show was extremely impressive, and the party afterwards at our local Soho steakhouse the Blue Butcher oozed just the sort of casual cool that’s possible when you know you’re at the very top of your game.
White Cube is one of the most impressive phenomenons to come across our radar in the last 15 years – art related, or not. Started by Jopling in a small room in London back in 1993, the gallery has worked consistently with a series of artists whose names now exist as institutions in our contemporary art lexicon (Tracey Emin, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, Anselm Keifer, Chuck Close and Hirst himself, for starters.) The gallery is responsible for bringing to public view some of the world’s most attention grabbing art of recent times – and these days, they do that all over the world. Alongside their relatively new Hong Kong outpost, White Cube opened in Sao Paolo last year, their new Bermondsey home in London is the largest private gallery space in Europe (all 60,000 square feet of it,) and should you have been admiring the Tracey Emin’s neon lit odes to Valentines Day adorning Times Square recently, well those would be thanks to White Cube, too. As a standard bearer for the contemporary art scene, as supporters of artists and their works and as a global business to be reckoned with, White Cube is quite simply where it’s at.
Click through our gallery to see some of Hirst’s latest works.
All Photos: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd
Courtesy White Cube
