Art Market
Maxwell Raab
Exterior view of Mira at Gathering Ibiza bar designed by Tai Shani, 2024. Image courtesy of Gathering.
Located on Ibiza’s quieter north side, Gathering’s new space features a terrace with fluorescent pink bar stools and a breast-shaped chandelier designed by British artist Tai Shani as part of its in-house restaurant, named Mira after founder Alex Flick’s daughter, a fitting calling card for the London gallery’s experimental approach to projects.
Just two years after Gathering opened in London in 2022, Flick has decided to expand to Ibiza, seeing the island’s potential as a hotspot for contemporary art, and the opening of CAN Art Fair this week will provide additional impetus for this development. Last month, the Ibiza gallery opened with the group show “Substance,” featuring geometric abstract works made from fiberglass and resin by Kristian Kragelund, frenetic paintings by Rannva Kunoy, and tulip-based collages and accompanying pressed prints by Jennifer Tee. The show was a testament to Flick’s fondness for experimental artists, a consistent theme of his gallery’s identity.
Installation view of the exhibition “Substance” at Gathering Ibiza 2024. Image courtesy of Gathering.
“I like radical approaches. That’s what I’m all about,” Flick added. Gathering was born out of Flick’s desire to bring more conceptual or experimental art to the forefront. From 2015 to 2019, the gallerist ran a small project space in east London called UNIT9. After London went through a series of COVID lockdowns, Flick was inspired to create a space where people could come together to see radical art.
“The gatherings came out of the lonely lives we were living at the time,” Flick said. “What we missed most was seeing people, so [the] “The ‘gathering’ concept was born during the pandemic.”
Portrait of Alex Flick. Image courtesy of Gathering.
Gathering debuted in the heart of Soho, central London in 2022, with an immediate sensation of Shani’s work on display for the first time. Shani won the 2019 Turner Prize along with three other nominees. Her exhibition ‘Arms Reached Over Head, Encoded with Angels’ featured a hallucinatory CGI film, mausoleum-like sculptures and watercolours, forming part of the gallery’s approach to providing a platform for emerging artistic frontiers.
Flick attributes the gallery’s initial success to the in-demand artists who jumped at the chance to work with him, from Shani to the Native American artist Wendy Red Star, whose solo show, “In the Shadow of Paper Mountain,” is on view at the London gallery until September 1. In 2023, Gathering will dedicate a section of its gallery to a project space, Glasshouse, aimed at nurturing early-career talent alongside its main exhibition programme. This summer, the project space will present Christian Franzen’s first UK exhibition, “Partial Truth.” For Flick, every aspect of his gallery’s evolving programme can be attributed to an overall attitude of openness.
“The work has to resonate with me on an emotional and intellectual level,” he said. “It doesn’t matter where you’re from, what part of the world you are, your gender, these are secondary considerations. What matters is whether the practice is relevant to the contemporary world and whether it is expressed in an extraordinary way.”
Today, the Gathering Gallery’s roster of participating artists includes an impressive list of established artists, such as Portuguese-Canadian artist Emmanuel de Carvalho, Georgian painter Tamara KE, Peruvian artist Wynnie Mynerva, and Parisian performance and multimedia artist Ndayé Kouagou and Shani.
Exterior view of Gathering London. Image courtesy of Gathering.
Now, as Ibiza prepares for CAN Ibiza, which takes place on June 26, Gathering is gearing up for a cross-generational duo exhibition, entitled Paintings Are Not Paintings, featuring work by conceptual artists Stefan Brüggemann, 49, and Bruce Nauman, 82. The exhibition covers the breadth of both artists’ practices, with a range of paintings, sculptures and prints on display across the gallery’s two floors.
The gallery’s expansion also comes at a time when Ibiza’s art scene itself is poised to boom, thanks in part to the CAN Art Fair. “I’m surprised no one has done anything like this before, to be honest,” Flick said of the fair. During the second lockdown in the U.K., Flick spent six weeks in Ibiza with his teenage daughter. While the island has everything you could want — restaurants, beaches, resorts, nightclubs — he felt it lacked an international art scene.
Exterior view of Mira at Gathering Ibiza in 2024. Image courtesy of Gathering.
“I don’t understand why — because in Hauser in Menorca and in the ski resorts in Switzerland — these very small communities — and even slightly larger communities in Palm Springs — they have this service, but not here. [in Ibiza]I think this is also a very strong reaction of people. [said]”Hey, we really need this. This has really been missing,” Flick said. “It actually came about at a similar time to the London party, but we needed to find the right timing.”
Gathering’s expansion into Ibiza exemplifies its talent for discovering and nurturing emerging talent in the art world. The expansion is emblematic of the young gallery’s broader approach to discovering emerging artists whose eclectic practices meet the needs of its growing audience. “I want the audience to have an experience, an immersive experience – practices that I think are most in line with what we need as a society,” Flick said.
Maxwell Raab
Maxwell Rabb is a staff writer at Artsy.
