White cube

Arguably the most important contemporary commercial art gallery in England, possibly even in Europe, with an artist list that reads like a Who´s Who of the art scene now, White Cube is celebrating its tenth birthday this year. Set up by Jay Jopling in 1993 as a project room, perhaps the smallest exhibition space in Europe, White Cube quickly became one of the most influential galleries of the past decade. Situated at 44 Duke Street, St. James´s, on London´s most traditional art-dealing street, surrounded by Christie´s, Old Master galleries and specialist art bookshops, the gallery space was quite literally an ethereal white cube, designed by the architect Claudio Silvestrin. The central concern when establishing the program was to create an intimate space in which an artist could present a single important work of art or a coherent body of work within a focused environment. Exhibited artists included Franz Ackermann, Sophie Calle, Chuck Close, Fischli and Weiss, Katharina Fritsch, Anna Gaskell, Nan Goldin, Gary Hill, Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Prince, Doris Salcedo, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Luc Tuymans and Jeff Wall. Punctuating this international roster were a series of exhibitions by British artists such as Darren Almond, Dinos and Jake Chapman, Tracey Emin, Lucian Freud, Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Marc Quinn, Sam Taylor-Wood and Gavin Turk. This book records the gallery´s ten-year history, illustrating each and every one of the 75 exhibitions mounted at the Duke Street space, along with all related ephemera and individual essays on each show.