PIN Riflemaker Contemporary Art

The Coolest Art Space In Town

Riflemaker is a contemporary art space in London co-founded in 2004 by Virginia Damtsa and Tot Taylor. The gallery exhibits and represents emerging artists as well as the historical artists who may have inspired them. It has been widely praised for its innovative programme.

Housed within an historic gunmaker`s workshop off Regent Street (built 1712 - the oldest public building in the west end) the gallery has worked closely with English Heritage to preserve this unique architectural building.

Music and film events, talks/discussions and performance are held on Monday evenings. our Grade 1 Listed building in Beak Street W1, a former gunmaker`s this superb gallery shows work by upcoming artists and is very much a part of London`s current creative landscape. It`s an understatedly cool place.

It is no wonder that artists are currently clamouring to hold shows in the modest domestic settings in Soho in barely converted Georgian buildings patinated by age, and where art is embedded in the domestic and the everyday.

History

From 2011-2017 Riflemaker's represented artists featured in museum exhibitions at MoMA New York, Tate London, National Portrait Gallery London, Venice Biennale, the LACMA Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, Baltic UK, Nottingham Contemporary, MiMA and the ICA London.

Recent exhibitions have included Judy Chicago, William S. Burroughs, Alice Anderson, Penelope Slinger, Josephine King, Stuart Pearson Wright, Leah Gordon, Juan Fontanive and John Maeda.

Current news includes the United Nations decision to select Josephine King's painting 'Uncontrollable' for a United Nations postage stamp in the US, Liliane Lijn's nomination for the shortlist for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, Judy Chicago's upcoming retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum in April 2014 following her exhibition at Frieze Masters (2013), Alice Anderson's upcoming exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London in April 2014 and Penelope Slinger's solo presentation at Paris Photo, Los Angeles April 2014.

Damtsa and Taylor have curated exhibitions by Jaime Gili, Marta Marcé, Gavin Turk, Francesca Lowe and Christopher Bucklow. Riflemaker presented the first London retrospective of Martin Kippenberger (in 2004), Turk's Warhol Fright Wig exhibition 'Me as Him' (2008), Andrey Bartenev's Venice Biennale 'Disco-Nexxion' (2008) and Liliane Lijn's NASA-inspired 'Stardust' (2010) as well as exhibitions by the writer William Burroughs and MIT/RISD guru Maeda, who created two 'live' week long performances: 'Maeda/MySpace' and 'John Maeda is the Fortune-Cookie'. The novelist Alasdair Gray and painter Francesca Lowe made a wall-to-wall narrative 'Terminus' and our 2008 themed exhibition was an investigation of 'Voodoo: Hoochie-Coochie and the Creative Spirit'. Jaime Gili created a six mile long installation 'Ruta Rota' (broken route) for London Architecture Week. Julie Verhoeven built a 'virtual garden' at the Economist Plaza. Marta Marcé asked visitors to 'design' her paintings at Camden Arts Centre. William S. Burroughs shot sherriffs series. Yoko Ono gave a rare Bagism performance as part of our Indica celebrations.

Recent exhibitions have included Judy Chicago solo presentation at Frieze Masters 2013. The portraitist Stuart Pearson Wright in a dual painting and film exhibition featuring the actress Keira Knightley in her debut art-film performance, and Haitian photographs by Leah Gordon (co-curator Venice Biennale Haitian Pavilion 2011) as well as a themed exhibition on the disappearance of the ANALOG world - particularly with regard to print photography and recorded music.

In 2006, the gallery stopped being Riflemaker for four months and transformed itself into the seminal London art space Indica (active from November '65 - November '66), with a changing exhibition of work actually shown at Indica and a series of performances including Peter Whitehead and Yoko Ono.

What they said

'Riflemaker has changed the cultural landscape of the capital' (Time Out)

'Innovative exhibitions' (The Times)

'A consistently innovative gallery' (The Sunday Times)

'The coolest art space in London' (Vogue)

Owner

Lucy TripTide

Lucy is a TripTide stalwart and has been with the company since inception. She is a font of knowledge of all things in our metropolis but she has a special penchant for London's historical past. She says:"London is a multi-layered confection of hi...