Indie Spotlight: Twelve Around One
HUCK meets the two artists who turned their living room into their very own gallery.
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Buried in the basement of an unassuming house on Shacklewell Street, a small cobbled road off Bethnal Green Road, sits one of east London's newest galleries, Twelve Around One. But you'd be hard pressed to find it. The only clue to its existence is an A5 flyer for its latest exhibition that is stapled on the wooden gate that leads down to its entrance.
“We’re kind of mysterious enough to be off the beaten track so the people that do make it here value it more,” says Nick Jensen, who founded the gallery with his fellow artist and Central St Martin's College graduate, Gabor Gyory.
“We’re not really interested in a big window on the street somewhere,” adds Gabor. “If we were offered a big spot in the West End, we might turn it down because it’s not really what we want to do. There’s something quite personal about people coming into this space and engaging in a conversation with us.”
Personal is certainly a good word to describe this clean and cosy space committed to exploring the 'collective artistic experience'. You see, prior to its opening in July 2011 it was one half of their own living room. But with plans afoot, they got rid of their table tennis table, installed new MDF walls and gallery-grade lighting, and gave it all a lick of paint – with the pair and their flatmates still living comfortably on the other side of the wall.
“Over the years we’ve see and created a network of artists who we know and who are very good,” explains Gabor of their motivations. “[The gallery] is a chance for us to bring those people together in a certain space and a certain context and in a way that will do them justice and enhance the experience of viewing their work.”
Gabor and Nick.
The gallery officially opened with a show by painter Steven Allan and the second followed in October, [How Looking Gets in the Way of Seeing], curated by Damian Griffiths and featuring photography from a group of artists who met at the Royal College of Art. As they talk of their plans for the gallery, the pair readily discuss the functions, contexts and different languages of art, clearly approaching the gallery from an intellectual stand point. So, bearing that in mind, is this a gallery for the general public or fellow artists?
“We don’t feel that any of this [work] is designed to be specialist,” says Gabor. “This is where we come in as gallerists, which is to phrase in [work] in such a way as to be accessible and also share in the beauty and the potential in an object […] We believe in being quite democratic about this. Standards, yes: exclusive, no.”
This commitment to standards also sees the pair unwilling to cash in on Nick's other career: skateboarding. Many may be familiar Nick for him riding for the likes of Blueprint and Lakai – which he says helped fund the gallery's creation. But while skateboarding and art may have many crossovers, the pair are keen to stress that this isn't part of any 'skate art' venture and don't seem at all interested in trying to push that side. Not that they are totally closed to any involvement of skateboarding in their space.
“It might work but would have to be very considered about how to frame an exhibition about that rather than being too open to invitations,” says Nick. “It’s not only about being democratic but it’s about quality control from mine Gabor’s point of view and about the voice of the gallery. It’s about thinking of ideas that aren’t just about hooking mates up, but also about serious ideas that we’re really interested in.”
Some work from the exhibition [How Looking Gets in the Way of Seeing].
Nick and Brian Dooley's Mirage #2 1/2 print.
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Indie Spotlight: Twelve Around One (text) by Ed Andrews is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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