London gallery Project Native Informant closes after 12 years, citing ‘volatile and unsustainable environment’ – The Art Newspaper

Project Native Informant, the east London gallery whose wide-ranging and adventurous programme has included the post-internet art collective DIS, the Turner Prize nominee Sin Wai Kin, the musician Juliana Huxtable and the photographer and art critic Hal Fischer, will close after 12 years.

“The decision to wind down did not come lightly,” its founder Stephan Tanbin Sastrawidjaja wrote in an Instagram post today (31 October) announcing the closure. “The current global economic, political and social environment has shaped into an extremely volatile and unsustainable environment for a gallery such as ours.” He added that “personal factors” contributed to the decision, too.

Project Native Informant had not staged an exhibition across its neighbouring Bethnal Green spaces since July, when it closed separate shows by Sean Steadman and Anna Jung Seo.

In April of last year, Sastrawidjaja emailed a public statement acknowledging the departure of Joseph Yaeger, one of Project Native Informant’s most commercially viable artists, from the gallery’s roster. Jaeger signed to both Modern Art and Gladstone later that year.

The American painter began working with Project Native Informant after graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2019. His solo shows of cinematically composed and psychologically charged paintings at the gallery helped position him as one of London’s most coveted emerging artists. Yaeger’s auction record was set at Phillip’s in London last October, at £203,200 for the 2021 painting Sphinx without a secret.

“While the conclusion of such an intimate relationship must be viewed with great sadness, we are immensely proud of everything we have collaborated with Joseph: his first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery, his first solo institutional show, his first institutional acquisition, his first solo presentation at an art fair and his first comprehensive catalogue,” Sastrawidjaja wrote last year.

Project Native Informant was founded in 2013 by Sastrawidjaja in a windowless garage in Mayfair before moving to a larger space in Bethnal Green in east London, nearby the galleries Maureen Paley, Rose Easton and Herald Street. It regularly took part in leading art fairs, including Frieze London, Art Basel and Art Basel Hong Kong, as well as the gallery swap initiative Condo.

News of gallery closures amid a prolonged downturn in the art market has come regularly this year. Earlier this month, the well-regarded dealer Nir Altman announced the end of his Munich space, which will be taken over by Paulina Caspari gallery.