About
Over the past two decades, England & Co has established an independent and individual identity that reflects the eclectic, historically aware, research-based curatorial approach of gallery director/curator Jane England. There is no specific stylistic or generational specialization and from the beginning, the gallery programme has alternated between contemporary art and explorations of relatively recent art history.
England & Co was founded in late 1987, holding its first exhibition in April 1988. In 1999, the gallery moved within Notting Hill to a larger space in Westbourne Grove; and in early 2012, relocated to Great Portland Street in Fitzrovia in central London.
The gallery represents a number of emerging and established contemporary artists; advises and acts for the estates of artists and collectors; and also holds a regularly changing stock of 20th and 21st century art. From the beginning, the gallery has regularly published exhibition catalogues, and recently has begun to publish editions of prints and multiples.
Solo exhibitions of contemporary artists from Britain and abroad are augmented by occasional themed survey exhibitions that place contemporary work in specific contexts, and include artists from different generations. Jane England is also committed to researching and curating retrospective exhibitions that reappraise artists from the British and European avant-garde of the 1930s through to the Post War period of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: these have included abstract pioneer Paule Vézelay; the action-painter William Green; founder Situationist Ralph Rumney; kinetic sculptor Liliane Lijn; the veteran performance and installation artist, Stuart Brisley; and Israeli-born conceptual artist and painter, Michael Druks. More recent art history (1980s London), was explored in The Neo Naturists. Video and film from the 1970s featured in Screen Practice in 2012.
The gallery cooperates with many institutions, lending works to numerous exhibitions, including to the Guggenheim, Bilbao; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Wellcome Trust Gallery; the Hayward Gallery, London; the Barbican Gallery, London; PS1 MOMA, New York; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; SF MOMA, San Francisco; the Grand Palais, Paris; and the Venice Biennale. Corporate collections that have acquired works from the Gallery include Deutsche Bank; Barclays Bank, London; and Penguin Books, London.
England & Co has sold numerous contemporary and 20th-century works to public collections, including Tate; the Imperial War Museum; the Victoria & Albert Museum; the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery; the Museum of London; the National Gallery of Australia; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; the Arts Council of Great Britain; and the British Museum.