Even as workmen toil to complete the building, one thing is clear: the new gallery that White Cube is about to add to its empire is vast. When contemporary-art dealer Jay Jopling's latest venture opens on 12 October, at 5,400 sq metres, it will be the largest commercial art gallery in Britain: the Tate Modern of the for-profit art world.
White Cube Bermondsey – a stone's throw from Tate Modern and Renzo Piano's Shard building – will be Jopling's third outpost in London, adding a branch south of the river to galleries in the West End and Hackney. A fourth, in Hong Kong, is planned for early next year. What began in 1993 as one of the smallest galleries in London now employs more than 100 people.
The new gallery, converted from a 1970s warehouse once used as a distribution centre for the Radio Times, contains an array of new spaces for showing White Cube's roster of artists, who range from Damien Hirst and Gilbert and George to Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo. The West End gallery has 464 sq metres to play with, the Hackney outpost 903 sq metres. Jopling's first gallery was just four sq metres.
The main "south galleries" in Bermondsey have the scale of of a respectable-size public museum and will, according to White Cube's director of exhibitions, Tim Marlow, provide the area for the main shows. But there are also three smaller galleries that will host one-off exhibitions by emerging artists not normally represented by White Cube, and a further, cube-shaped space measuring 9 x 9 x 9 metres.
"You should never keep things static," said Marlow. "The more interesting and the more varied spaces we can provide, the more excited artists get about working in them." He laughed off suggestions that such a hefty expansion could prove unsustainable. "It's definitely sustainable. London is a city where artists always want to be shown, to have representation. It is the equal of New York in terms of the art market. And we're not scrabbling around for shows. It's still going to be a struggle for our artists to have major exhibitions at White Cube more than once every three years."
Its current expansion presents an intriguing commentary on the vagaries of the art market. While smaller galleries, and those outside London, have suffered in the recession, with Glasgow's Sorcha Dallas the latest to bite the dust, White Cube appears to have withstood the downturn. Marlow says: "At the top end, the art market is a global market, and we have therefore been less affected than other people. It's also the case that when economic conditions are the toughest it is sometimes good to think about expansion."
