The Riflemaker spaces in London are all available for Special Event Hire.

Call on: 07792-706-494 for further details

"London's funkiest gallery space"

The Wall St Journal

"In a former gunmaker's this superb gallery shows work by upcoming artists and is very much a part of Londons current creative landscape. It's an understatedly cool place."

TIME OUT

"Aim for the coolest art space in town, in Soho, the art world's hip new location"

The Vogue List, VOGUE magazine


"Iwona Blazwick (Whitechapel Gallery director) also points out that artists are currently clamouring to hold shows in the modest domestic settings of Soho's Riflemaker and the Frith Street, barely converted Georgian buildings patinated by age, "where art is embedded in the domestic and the everyday"

Financial Times, 'Out-there Space'
Interview by Edwin Heathcote


"The London gallery Riflemaker has somehow managed to blow the roof off again"

The Guardian's Laura K. Jones reviews Gavin Turk's 'Me as Him', SAATCHI website

RIFLEMAKER HISTORY

Riflemaker is a contemporary art space in London co-founded by Virginia Damtsa and Tot Taylor. Riflemaker exhibits and represents emerging artists. It has been widely praised for its innovative programme.

Housed on five floors of an historic gunmaker's workshop off Regent Street, W1F 9SU (built 1712 - the oldest public building in the west end) the gallery has worked closely with English Heritage to preserve this unique architectural building. Poetry and music, film shows, talks/discussions and performance events are held each Monday evening.

Damtsa and Taylor have curated exhibitions including Alice Anderson, Jaime Gili, Artists Anonymous, Marta Marcé, Gavin Turk, John Maeda, Francesca Lowe, Christopher Bucklow, Josephine King and Juan Fontanive. Riflemaker presented the first London retrospective of Martin Kippenberger (in 2004), Turk's Warhol Fright Wig exhibition 'Me as Him' (2008), Andrey Bartenev's Venice Biennale 'Disco-Nexxion' (2008) and Liliane Lijn's NASA-inspired 'Stardust' as well as exhibitions by the writer William Burroughs and MIT/RISD guru Maeda, who created two 'live' week long performances: 'Maeda/MySpace' and 'John Maeda is the Fortune-Cookie'. The novelist Alasdair Gray and painter Francesca Lowe made a wall-to-wall narrative 'Terminus' and our 2008 themed exhibition was an investigation of 'Voodoo: Hoochie-Coochie and the Creative Spirit'.

Jaime Gili created a six mile long installation 'Ruta Rota' (broken route) for London Architecture Week. Julie Verhoeven built a 'virtual garden' at the Economist Plaza. Marta Marcé asked visitors to 'design' her paintings at Camden Arts Centre. Yoko Ono gave a rare Bagism performance as part of our Indica celebrations.

Recent exhibitions have included portraitist Stuart Pearson Wright in a dual painting and film exhibition featuring the actress Keira Knightley in her debut art-film performance, and Haitian photographs by Leah Gordon (co-curator Venice Biennale Haitian Pavilion 2011) as well as a themed exhibition on the disappearance of the ANALOG world - particularly with regard to print photography and recorded music. In 2006, the gallery stopped being Riflemaker for four months and transformed itself into the seminal London art space Indica (active from November '65 - November '66), with a changing exhibition of work actually shown at Indica and a series of performances including Peter Whitehead (film) and Yoko Ono (Bagism).

The current programme includes's Berlin collective Artists Anonymous and poem machines by the American kinetic and light pioneer Liliane Lijn (in conjunction with Sir John Soane's Museum), 1970's photo-collages by Penelope Slinger and flipbook films by Juan Fontanive.

'Riflemaker has changed the cultural landscape of the capital' (Time Out)
'Innovative exhibitions' (The Times)
'A consistently innovative gallery' (The Sunday Times)
'The coolest art space in London' (Vogue)

VIRGINIA DAMTSA: CO-FOUNDER OF RIFLEMAKER:

Born Athens, lives and works in London. Damtsa moved to Paris when selected by the Opera National de Paris schools to train for a career in dance. Studied in Paris, Belgium, New York and Cambridge, England before settling in London. Damtsa worked with her family on museum collections and donations whilst at the same time, setting up support structures for contemporary artists using disused buildings for studios and exhibitions. The collection was donated to different museums in Europe.

In 1990, she relocated to London to continue her studies in the Arts, at the same time working on private sales, including Monet and Picasso. In 2000, she opened her own gallery specialising in emerging artists.

In 2004, Damtsa co-founded Riflemaker with Tot Taylor.

TOT TAYLOR: CO-FOUNDER OF RIFLEMAKER:

Born Cambridge, lives and works in London. Taylor has managed parallel careers within the worlds of music, art, film and literature.
He has worked as a composer, songwriter and record producer, writing numerous film soundtracks and music films in-house for the BBC and independently.
With Cambridge graduate Simon Boswell, he founded the conceptual pop group Advertising who were signed by EMI Records. Their plan to write and record 'conceptual pop songs' failed and Taylor began a side career writing and producing songs for other artists under various pseudonyms. His debut solo album 'Playtime' was released (by CBS/GTO) in 1979. His National Theatre Platforms score to Brian McAvera's eight hour play 'Picasso's Women' was issued on CD in 2000 (Sony).

He co-founded the Compact Organization record label, with Paul Kinder (1981-85). He attended Goldsmiths College in London (from 1986-88) to study orchestration and composition (as well as privately with the composer John Gardner) which brought him into contact with the contemporary art world's new wave, that of the yBas at Goldsmiths. He then began working with private collectors to build themed collections specialising in emerging artists. His novel 'The Story of John Nightly' will be published in 2012.

In 2004, he and fellow director/curator Virginia Damtsa, co-founded Riflemaker.

www.johnnightly.com

Riflemaker publishes a hardback book to accompany each exhibition.

For more information click here