Berlin's Loss, London's Gain: Why a Young Gallery Moved to Maddox Street

Galleries open branches abroad all the time. It is much rarer for one to pack up entirely and start again in another city. So when Heidi, one of the most talked-about young galleries in Berlin, reopened this week in a small third-floor room on Maddox Street in Mayfair, it said something about both cities. It also says something about how small galleries survive now, which matters to anyone who buys from them or simply likes visiting them.

From Potsdamer Strasse to Mayfair

Heidi was founded in 2021 by Pauline Seguin, who had previously worked in New York for the dealer Gavin Brown. Her Berlin space, near the gallery cluster on Potsdamer Strasse, was the classic Berlin set-up: a large, rough, street-level room showing difficult, cerebral work to a crowd of artists, critics and curators. The roster is small, just seven artists, and leans towards the United States. It includes Kandis Williams, whose research-based work takes apart theories of race, and the filmmaker Jordan Strafer, whose unsettling send-up of American daytime television made her one of the breakout names of this year’s Whitney Biennial.

The London space could hardly be more different. Seguin has signed a five-year lease on a tiny walk-up near Hauser & Wirth and the Bond Street fashion flagships. She told The Art Newspaper that she wanted to be central and close to London’s density of collectors. The opening show, which runs until 7 November, is a painting exhibition by the New York- and Wyoming-based artist Brook Hsu. It takes a postcard of Courbet’s The Trout as its starting point. Next month Heidi will also show at Frieze London, in the Focus section for younger galleries.

The push: what has gone wrong in Berlin

For twenty years Berlin sold itself to young dealers on cheap space and a dense community of artists. That offer is disappearing. Seguin points to shrinking culture budgets and a real-estate crisis, which she says mean less experimental work is being shown in the city. She also cites a tense political climate that has made some artists and curators wary of working there.

She is not alone. Writing in The Berliner last week, the magazine’s art editor, Duncan Ballantyne-Way, listed a run of departures and closures. The young gallery Sweetwater has left for New York, and the Julia Stoschek Foundation is closing its Berlin space at the end of October. He also described walking into SAVVY Contemporary, one of the city’s best-known independent art spaces, and finding it almost empty because it could not afford a summer show. His sharpest line was that Berlin now looks less like a place to build a gallery and more like a gap year for young dealers before they move somewhere more serious.

The pull: why London

The more interesting part of the story, for British readers, is why London won. Seguin considered Paris, the city everyone has spent the past four years calling Europe’s new art capital, and turned it down. She described Parisian taste as still a little conservative, and said London has an appetite for the experimental and the subcultural.

That is a striking vote of confidence. Since the 2016 referendum, the story about London has mostly been one of decline: higher costs for moving art across borders, European galleries staying away, and the big international dealers shrinking their London operations or closing them altogether. Seguin’s answer is blunt: London was supposed to collapse after Brexit, but nowhere else did especially well either. The market is tough everywhere, so a city’s other strengths start to count for more.

Why being near collectors matters now

Behind the move is a hard commercial point. Seguin said buyers turning up in person matters much more than it used to, and that few collectors actually travel to Berlin. When the market was booming, a gallery could sell from PDFs and art fairs and put its space wherever the rent was cheapest. In a quieter market, sales depend on relationships, and relationships depend on people walking through the door.

This is where London’s advantage lies. It has a huge concentration of collectors, advisers and institutions in a few square miles, a strong October season built around Frieze, and a network of young galleries in Fitzrovia, south and east London and, increasingly, Mayfair’s upper floors. That density helps everyone. A collector visiting Heidi on Maddox Street is a short walk from dozens of other small spaces, and each gallery that arrives makes the walk more worthwhile.

What it means for gallery-goers

One relocation does not make a trend, and London has real problems of its own, starting with rents that push emerging galleries further from the centre every year.

Still, for anyone who follows independent galleries in Britain, this is encouraging. The small, ambitious spaces that most visitors never hear about are what keeps a city’s art scene alive, and London is still attracting them. The best response is also the easiest: go and see the show. Third-floor walk-ups can feel intimidating, but they are free, and the people running them want visitors. With Frieze week coming up, this is the ideal time to climb a few staircases and find out who has just arrived.