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Public Gallery Built Its Reputation by Letting Artists Take the Lead

Ahead of Frieze London, co-directors Alex Harrison, Harry Dougall and Nicole Estilo Kaiser discuss how an experimental east London project grew into an ambitious gallery without ever losing sight of its artist-first approach.

Located in east London, Public Gallery has established itself as one of the city’s most dynamic experimental labs and one of its most compelling observatories for ambitious emerging practices that tackle the defining questions of a generation living through this historical conjuncture. The gallery was founded by Alex Harrison, whose background is in design, and Harry Dougall, who worked at Phillips after postgraduate study. What began as an independent project mixing residencies, exhibitions and other initiatives, with a particular focus on international artists who had little exposure in London, went on to institutionalize relatively quickly. The names they showed, mostly unknown at the time but now boasting institutional CVs and established gallery representation, including Vojtěch Kovařík, Charlotte Edey and Elizabeth Glaessner, partly explain why.

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It was 2020 when Harrison and Dougall took a lease in the Brutalist Middlesex Street Estate near Petticoat Lane, where the City’s financial district gives way to the East End. COVID delayed construction, but they opened that summer with a Mevlana Lipp solo show and a group exhibition curated by artists Saelia Aparicio and Harminder Judge. It was neither the first nor the last time the founders would disrupt the usual rules of the gallery business by blurring roles. They never wanted to be dealers, exactly, which led them from the start toward a more fluid, responsive structure shaped by the needs of artists.

Today, the gallery is run by Harrison, Dougall and Nicole Estilo Kaiser and has become a fixture at major international fairs such as Frieze and Art Basel. Observer caught up with them ahead of London’s busiest art week to find out more about the gallery’s experimental program—and how they’ve managed to thrive not only through a pandemic but through recent market shifts that have led to many high-profile gallery closures.

Asked to look back on their rise, Dougall reflected on the word journey. “It’s interesting because it........

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