The Wine Gallery is a popular restaurant/wine bar that has a long history of exhibiting and selling art. Each Exhibition lasts between 4 to 6 weeks, and opens with an Artist's preview on the first Monday of the show. The exhibition programme contains a mixture of one/two/three person shows together with strongly themed group shows. The range of work shown includes Painting; Drawings, handmade prints, watercolours and other wall based media. Typically the works range in price between £100 and £1000 with the bulk being between £200-£500. Also most exhibitions feature works on paper in a browser, some are available for under £100.
Since October 2001, the exhibitions at the Wine Gallery have been professionally
selected, curated and organised under the umbrella 'Art 3', which originally
included Jane Stothert, Jonet Harley - Peters and Pete Mountford. Jonet
left this venture at the end of 2002, due to the demands of her own work,
but we decided to keep the name anyway. Actually she still will be involved
occasionally, but 'Art 21/2' sounds silly. Collectively The Wine Gallery
and Art 3 charge a commission on sales of 35% and there will also be a
base administration charge for artists starting in 2004.More information
on this is available.
THE GRIPES OF NAILS
It
so happened that we had been here before, in order to get to the Wine
Gallery, we need to really look at 'The Vines' first. Back in 1997 Jane
Stothert and Pamela Belsham moved into a studio at the Battersea Business
Centre on Lavender Hill (although Pamela didn't stay there too long, Jane
is still there). Next door was a newly opened fish restaurant called 'The
Vines' and the owners Janet and Malcolm were into the idea of putting
art work on the walls and so began 'Art at the Vines'. Over the next two
years a series of exhibitions were put on, mainly work of artists that
Jane and Pamela knew in the south-west London area, changing over the
shows around once every 2-3 months, with private views held on Sunday
afternoons. I started becoming involved with this project in 1998 (mid
way through my hiatus from my own practice) at the same time as another
artist Jonet Harley-Peters. It was the combination of the Jane, Jonet
and myself (Pamela by now had decided to become less involved) that set
up a more focused programme of exhibitions go ing into 1999. These included
'Food for thought', where all the artists had to produce works and a specially
designed plate related to the ritual of eating, and 'Spring Fever' which
was a general group show that was titled thus because took place in the
erm! Spring of 99.
In fact 'Spring Fever' caused more than a few temperatures to rise, mostly
for reasons that had nothing to do with the work on show. It proved to
be the swan song of The Vines. As a business, the restaurant couldn't
claim to be packing them in, and despite being lovely people, Janet &
Malcolm weren't exactly Gordon Ramsey when it came to the entrepreneurial
spirit in these matters, (put it this way, the alarm bells had started
ringing the day Malcolm confided in me, that - despite being a fish restaurant-
they would not be able to open the following day on account of them having
no fish to cook). Anyway, it came to pass that the bailiffs were called
in and closed the place down. From Janet & Malcom's point of view
all their tools and equipment were still inside, from ours so was all
the artwork in 'Spring Fever'. Despite a lot of very 'pissed off' artists,
unreasonably giving us grief in the meantime, we were able to eventually
get all of the work out of the Vines a few weeks later. It was a shame,
because things had just really started moving forwards, we had some good
shows planned for the following 12 months, we had literally just put a
website together, forging links with the local arts office, and so on.
There were a few attempts to find another venue, but eventually that didn't
really lead anywhere. And so everyone just got on with his or her own
projects.
However, the spirit of 'The Vines', wasn't quite dead. Two years later
the 'Wine Gallery' dropped into our lap. Yes! we are aware of the irony
of progressing from the Vines to the wine gallery, it's got to be the
'Champagne bar' next, and we only wished we had started off in some back
street pub called the 'Bunch of grapes'. I'd expressed an interest to
Hazel Boundy - who organised the exhibitions- in showing at The Wine Gallery
myself, and through subsequent conversations Hazel told me that she was
quitting this role to go to College, and was offered the chance to take
the venture over. Despite Initial scepticism, Jonet & Jane agreed
to come in with me, and so Art 3 was born. We had a bunch of ideas, too
many to list here, but what we didn't want was just to create a Vines
mark 2, things had of course moved on since then. We were helped by the
fact that we were walking into an already established structure, which
included private views, put up by the Restaurant themselves,a timetable for shows and hanging them, commission rates and so on.
We wanted to create high standards, therefore the artists who we exhibited must be practising professionals whose work is, in our opinion, suitable for the venue and of the appropriate professional standard in both content and presentation (i: e we go to great lengths to discourage the 'cliche ridden' "Sunday Artist"). The artists we select tend to fall into 3 categories-: local professionals, Young artists starting out on their careers or artists who fit a particular theme for a Curated group exhibition.
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Invitation card - 3 forms of colour- Wine Gallery October - November 2001 |
To start the ball rolling we had '3
forms of colour' in October 2001, featuring the work of the 3 of us.
Part of the terms of the hand over from Hazel was that we had to oversee
3 one-person shows already booked in. The first two Liz Shewan and Marie
Powell-Blanche sold well, but that is about all I really want to say about
them. The 3rd of this trio of shows by Bulgarian artist Plamen Kapitanski
featured his paintings of mythological icons. Surprisingly none of these
sold.
