A London shopping mall is being launched this week by a new face with a familiar last name. The new space, called Incubator, is run by Angelica Jopling, daughter of White Cube founder Jay Jopling, one of the UK’s most successful art dealers. Opening April 5 in Marylebone, the gallery will focus on emerging artists and a program of performance and temporal art.
“It started from a failed grant proposal I submitted during my BA at Stanford University in California,” Jopling said. The arts journal of its momentum to launch Incubator. “I forgot about it until I returned to London during the pandemic and felt isolated and without a sense of the artistic community.”
Although this is Incubator’s first permanent space, it is the third iteration of the project, having taken the form of a six-week series of pop-up solo exhibitions in Soho. , first in 2021 and then in 2022. Incubator will now operate “seasonally”, Jopling explains, with the upcoming spring and fall seasons devoted to a rapid succession of solo exhibitions, each lasting two weeks. . The spring performance season will run from April 5 to June 26 and will feature a number of young artists, including Emily Wilcock, Kesewa Aboah and Graham Silveria Martin. The winter and summer seasons, for their part, will be made up of longer collective exhibitions.
At the heart of Incubator will be a twice-weekly program of performances, in which poets, dancers and musicians will be invited, often, but not always, to react to the exhibition presented. Jopling says the gallery’s only source of income will come from the sale of art. A graduate of Courtauld University’s Curating the Museum MA program, she considers herself “both curator and merchant”, adding that “the commercial side of things is not my ultimate focus and motivation”.
The incubator is located in a two story space on Chiltern Street
About the location of the incubator, Jopling says she chose the two-story space, a former clothing store in a Victorian building on Chiltern Street, after a larger one in Hackney, Illinois. east London, either fell through – “a lucky accident”. The space is just a few doors down from the Chiltern Firehouse Restaurant, where White Cube hosts its annual busy Frieze Week party. But that’s pure coincidence, says Jopling, insisting that the two companies will be “completely siled” and that working with his father is “not his goal”. She further submits that the client lists of the two galleries are distinct and that the typical clientele of each gallery is “different”.
Still, being a legacy gallerist has undeniable advantages, and Jopling acknowledges that her ability to learn the ropes of the commercial art world has been unparalleled. “It was less about direct lessons and business advice and more about the opportunity to grow with artists and feel comfortable in these spaces, which has been a huge joy. But most of the practical things that I learned through my mastery and made mistakes during the first iterations of Incubator.”
Rather, Jopling looks less to her father’s business model and more to her peers involved in what she describes as “a very exciting time for London’s emerging art scene”. She cites the young commercial galleries Rose Easton and Ginny on Frederick as examples of spaces whose philosophy and program she wishes to emulate: “These two spaces are doing very exciting things. I love how Ginny works with the small space and the artists that Rose shows. Likewise, I want to contribute to the scene and also offer something new, challenging and unexpected.
