Ahead of the second exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery's newly opened Viewing Room, Tom Jeffreys talks to the gallery's Director of Exhibitions, Emma Dexter, about all things arty.
Mayfair's commercial art galleries can occasionally seem like intimidating places – all those Anderson & Sheppard pinstripes pottering up and down Cork Street, Blakeys clicking carefully on concrete. But appearances can be deceptive, and many of them are consistently putting on intriguing, intelligent and thought-provoking shows. One of the leading lights in this regard is Timothy Taylor Gallery, who've recently opened a new subsidiary space inside their Carlos Place gallery.
With the second exhibition at this new Viewing Room opening at the end of April, I met up with the gallery's Director of Exhibitions, Emma Dexter, to find out more. Prior to her appointment at Timothy Taylor in 2007, Emma was Senior Curator at Tate Modern for seven years, and before that, Director of Exhibitions at the ICA for much of the 1990s. Responsible for introducing the likes of Rachel Whiteread, the Chapman Brothers, Steve McQueen, and, more recently, Mai-Thu Perrett, Emma is clearly someone with a strong artistic vision.
I amble through the main gallery space, currently showing Agnes Martin's calm and tranquil works, and downstairs into Emma's study. It's airy and pleasant and piled high, as you might expect, with art books. So what's the function of the Viewing Room? “My aim,” Emma begins, “is that it's possible to have a gallery with a very mixed program. A lot of New York galleries achieve this very well: they're working with artists of a much older generation, but at the same time working with mid-career and much younger artists. I think it is possible to maintain this very broad church, and that sort of range makes things more intellectually stimulating. The Viewing Room gives me the flexibility to do this sort of programming.”
The forthcoming exhibition sees both figurative etchings and large-scale abstract collages by German artist Volker Hueller. It's his first UK solo show and something that Emma seems particularly enthusiastic about. “I saw his work at a subsidiary fair in Basel about three years ago,” she explains. “I liked it immediately and bought a piece for myself. I then went to Hamburg to meet him that summer, and we used his work in Ventriloquist (a 2009 group show including work by Fiona Rae, Marcus Coates and Marcel Duchamp). Since then other galleries have picked up on him, so it seemed like a good time to do a solo show.”
And what is it about Hueller's work that appeals to Emma? “There's something very dark and very German about it,” she answers. “At the time, all I was looking at were his hand-coloured etchings. He exploits the medium for its viscerality, and manages to convey a particular atmosphere, which is not a particularly pleasant one. There's something rather haunting, bohemian and fin de siècle about his particular style.”
“But I wasn't aware,” Emma admits, “of these collages that he does at the same time. They're quite messy and unwieldy and completely different. So there's quite an interesting tension as to how these two areas of practice interrelate. But they do go together, and I think actually that abstraction is rather useful as a sort of cooling off zone from the heavily figurative work.”
Our conversation covers all manner of other topics – from the massive changes in the London gallery scene since the mid '80s to the major differences between working in the art world's public and commercial sectors. Emma stresses that there are more similarities than you might think, but that both have advantages and disadvantages. As a curator in a public institution, for example, there's time to watch an artist's career develop, but in the commercial sector, as Emma puts it, “you do feel you're in a race – you're chasing after the same artists, so you do need to be quick. That is a downside from an intellectual point of view.”
But on the other hand, working at a somewhere like Tate Modern or the ICA, “there's a kind of sadness in the fact that you'll do a show with somebody, and then you can't really do another show with them in the same institution. You probably have to wait until you move somewhere else, otherwise you'd look like you didn't have any ideas!”
Now that she's made the switch to the commercial sector, the chance to build up a long-lasting relationship with artists is clearly one of the best parts of Emma's job – that, and being able to go round art exhibitions all day: “Artists are fascinating and wonderful people, and, really, they just become your friends.”
Volker Hueller is at The Viewing Room, Timothy Taylor Gallery from 28th April to 21st May 2010.
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