Zoé Whitley will leave her post as director of the Chisenhale Gallery, a London art space with a record of spinning venturesome emerging artists into bona fide stars.
Whitley’s last day there will be March 1, 2025. The Chisenhale Gallery’s announcement of her departure did not state her next steps.
Her five-year tenure at the Chisenhale Gallery has seen the space mount shows for artists ranging from Lotus L. Kang to Nikita Gale. Both of those artists figured in this year’s Whitney Biennial after having shown there first.
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Further signs of the Chisenhale Gallery’s influence arrived at this year’s Venice Biennale, which featured work by Rindon Johnson that had appeared first at the London art space three years prior. Commissioned works by Johnson were acquired out of the 2021 Chisenhale show by collector Bob Rennie and Luxembourg’s MUDAM museum.
Alia Farid, Benoît Pieron, and Rachel Jones also had shows at the Chisenhale Gallery under Whitley’s leadership.
“I cannot think of a more electrifying place to experience genuine artistic innovation firsthand than at Chisenhale Gallery, where the new commissions produced reverberate worldwide,” Whitley said in a statement. “I’m proud to have played a part in the consistently era-defining programming of one of London’s leading contemporary art incubators and, most importantly, in its truly inspiring Social Practice approach.”
Prior to becoming Chisenhale’s director in 2020, Whitley had already been acclaimed for curating shows such as “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which she organized with Mark Godfrey. That show debuted in 2017 at Tate Modern in London, where Whitley was a curator of international art at the time, and continued to gain positive reviews as it traveled across the US in the years afterward.
In 2019, the same year that Whitley organized Cathy Wilkes’s British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Whitley became senior curator of the Hayward Gallery.
The Chisenhale Gallery said on Thursday that it would begin its search for a new director early next year.