Zoé Whitley is to step down as director of Chisenhale Gallery, the London art space that has nurtured adventurous emerging artists into bona fide stars.
Whitley’s last day there will be March 1, 2025. Chisenhal Gallery did not specify her next steps when announcing her departure.
During her five-year tenure at Chisenhale Gallery, she organized space exhibitions for artists including Lotus L. Kang and Nikita Gale. Both artists appear in this year’s Whitney Biennial after first exhibiting there.
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Further signs of Chisenhal Gallery’s influence came at this year’s Venice Biennale, which featured works by Rindon Johnson that were first shown at the London art space three years ago. Collector Bob Rennie and the MUDAM Museum in Luxembourg acquired Johnson’s commissioned work from the 2021 Chisenhale exhibition.
Alia Farid, Benoît Pieron and Rachel Jones also exhibited at Chisenhal Gallery under Wheatley.
“I can’t think of a more exciting place to experience true artistic innovation first-hand than at Chisenhal Gallery, where newly commissioned works are reverberating around the world,” Wheatley said in a statement. “I am proud to be involved in the consistently era-defining programming of one of London’s leading contemporary arts incubators and, most importantly, in its truly inspiring approach to social practice.”
Before becoming director of Chisenhal in 2020, Wheatley had already received acclaim for curating exhibitions such as “The Soul of a Nation: Art in the Black Power Era,” which she co-organized with Mark Godfrey. The exhibition debuted in 2017 at the Tate Modern in London, where Wheatley was the international art curator at the time, and continued to receive positive reviews as it toured across the United States in subsequent years.
In 2019, the same year that Wheatley organized the Cathy Wilkes British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Wheatley became senior curator at the Hayward Gallery.
Chisenhal Gallery said Thursday that it will begin a search for a new director early next year.
