Frieze-New-York-Public-Gallery-2025.-Courtesy-the-artist-and-Public-Gallery-London.-Courtesy-the-artist-and-Public-Gallery-London.jpeg?quality=80&w=970″ alt=”n immersive installation combines a glowing video screen, gaming chair, graphic wall imagery and confrontational text addressing identity, safety and trans experience.” width=”970″ height=”645″ data-caption=’Installation view: Public Gallery presenting “Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley” at Frieze New York, 2025. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy the artist and Public Gallery</span>’>
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.
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 implies there’s a destination to be reached,” he explained. “Even after a number of years, it still feels like we’re right at the beginning, and I hope it will continue to feel that way for a lot longer.” In that spirit, the trio is constantly reevaluating and refining their approach to better serve their artists and audience.
“The program has become more confident, expansive and ambitious as we’ve grown,” Harrison said. Physical growth has been a big part of that—expanding from three floors to five across two spaces has given them more room to test ideas, build exhibitions across different environments and think curatorially about how spaces themselves can shape a show. “That expansion has given us room to push the program much further,” he added.
In the past year or so, Public Gallery has added new names to a stellar roster, including Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Xin Liu, Russell Perkins and Reika Takebayashi, all of whom are drawing growing institutional attention. The gallery has also organized solo exhibitions with established artists such as Dotty Attie and has a John Miller solo show lined up for next year.
“We’re not only thinking about emerging artists, but who is influencing this generation,” Estilo Kaiser said. “I’m often asking myself: what are our artists reading, thinking about and looking at, and how might our program gesture to global concerns and broader cultural shifts?” The gallery’s vision is very much a three-way partnership. “This is our biggest strength as a team. Our program is reflective of three people with very different interests.”
While several galleries have joined forces over the past year to survive the economic slump, she credits the team’s ability to weather this period in part to the very different strengths each partner brings to the table. Three distinct perspectives and backgrounds let them test strategies against multiple points of view. “The push and pull, and inevitable compromises, have led to productive growth for the gallery and are fundamental to how we organize the business and program. We’re very lucky to have each other,” she added.
Dialogue is key, both among the partners and with anyone they collaborate with to bring ideas to life. “A big part of our vision is how we partner with institutions to support our artists, and how those different contexts can build on each other over time,” Dougall said, citing the gallery’s recent work with Steph Huang, supporting her Art Now exhibition at Tate Britain in 2024. This year, Public Gallery is presenting a solo booth of her work at Frieze London. Those efforts, according to the co-directors, are not separate but rather complementary—building a solid, healthy career and an institutional framework of support around it. “It’s part of thinking carefully about how an artist’s work is seen, how their practice develops, and what the right next context might be,” Dougall said.
But “we always need to balance and compromise, and remember that, at the end of the day, we are a commercial business sustained entirely by our sales,” Harrison admitted, acknowledging that they must always be realistic with themselves and with their artists. A willingness to adapt is essential. “There are always a million ways to do something, so we really enjoy thinking creatively about how to best achieve the artist’s vision within the restrictions we have… some of the most original exhibitions I’ve seen have been based around simple, effective ideas and didn’t cost the earth to produce.”
“I think the important thing is making sure the practical realities don’t flatten the ambition of the project,” Dougall added, explaining that Harrison’s talent for handling the practical side of mounting an exhibition—fabrication, shipping, finding ways to make difficult things happen—has become another of the gallery’s strengths. “The aim is always to protect the core of the idea, and then be inventive about how we realize it.”
Their exhibition during Frieze, “scores & scripts,” is the kind of project only a Kunsthalle or an independent space could typically afford. Estilo Kaiser has been developing it for well over a year; it brings together 14 international artists, composers, scientists and documentary filmmakers spanning six decades of practice, broadly considering communication, governance, digital sovereignty and the “rehearsal spaces” that code social behavior. Many of the artists turn to sound and lyricism to reimagine our relationship with technology. “It’s definitely one that has required careful planning, coordination and creative thinking to make it possible,” she said.
Public Gallery approaches fairs strategically. “Right now we don’t participate in the main section at any fairs, so we have a degree of flexibility and can explore different opportunities year by year,” Dougall said, noting that their fair presentations are often tailored to a specific artist, either to put the work before a new audience or to push the practice forward in a specific way. Last year, ahead of Taylor Simmons’s residency at the Studio Museum, they presented his work in a solo booth at Expo Chicago to broaden his audience and make new institutional introductions in the U.S. Huang’s presentation at Frieze follows her Tate show, while Xin Liu’s solo booth last year preceded her solo show at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and her participation in the Venice Biennale as part of the Uzbekistan pavilion.
“In the industry, there’s a strong desire to fit in and follow along, and oftentimes that includes fairs. It’s important to remember that there is no ‘one size fits all.’ Just as every business has its own vision, financial considerations, and so on, each artist has their own unique ambitions and hopes and dreams,” Estilo Kaiser said. “We let those ambitions guide our goals as a gallery.” When they began working with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley in 2025, she recalled, they knew the artist wanted to aim a critical voice at the political climate in the U.S., particularly with visibility around her work growing as “T H E D E L U S I O N” prepared to open at Serpentine later that year. “Our Focus presentation together at Frieze New York forwarded that agenda, leading to a profile in the Financial Times where Danielle directly addressed censorship in the U.S., and an acquisition by the Arts Council Collection of a video game work that explicitly interrogates Britain’s colonial history.”
Frieze London was the first major fair the gallery took part in, in 2023, with a solo presentation by Adam Farah-Saad. “It was a real turning point for us,” Dougall said. “Tate acquired four works from the booth through the Frieze Tate Fund, and the presentation won the Focus Stand Prize. Since then, we’ve become much more conscious of what a fair can do beyond sales… how it can position an artist, bring institutional attention, and create relationships that continue long after the week itself.”