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The Pentonville Gallery

London, United Kingdom

No longer functioning - funded by GLAA (Greater London Arts Association) and Camden Council. Pentonville Gallery was established by Geoff Evans and was located at a series of different spaces across London, one of its last locations being 4 Whitfield Street, London.

That particular location was where A Fashionable Marriage, a solo exhibition by Lubaina Himid took place (27 November - 20 December 1986). The exhibition was a late 20th century reworking of Hogarth’s fourth painting in his celebrated mid 18th century series, Marriage a La Mode. The painting in question The Toilette (the name on its frame), was called The countess’s morning levee. The painting had recently (in 1985) been used on the cover of David Dabydeen’s Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Dangaroo Press). The poster for Himid’s exhibition doubled as the exhibition’s brochure, with information on the reverse. The four sections of the brochure text began with a sentence or two about Hogarth with references to publications on the artist. The second section was a visual guide to how Himid’s re-imagined characters could be read. The third section was a summary of the exhibition, and the fourth section was a brief Himid CV, though her name was twice misspelt as ‘Lubainia’.

Pentonville Gallery, Whitfield Street was also the venue where [Keith] Piper & [Donald] Rodney held their collaborative exhibition, Adventures Close to Home (6 August - 5 September 1987).

An obituary on Geoff Evans (who died aged 66 in 2011) appeared online in Camden New Journal. Currrently online at archive.islingtontribune.com/geoff-evans-%E2%80%93-gallery-founder-who-believed-power-art (accessed 18 October 2017)