Southwark News have an interview with local resident and Artdog founder Pippa Graber. She talks about how she got started twenty years ago, and more recently the aspirations to setup her own gallery in Honor Oak, which we’ve noticed here before :
Twenty years ago Pippa Graber knew that she wanted to be an art dealer so set herself a project that incorporated all the aspects of learning how to be an art dealer,’ writes Michael Holland.
Jump forward twenty years and Pippa is about to launch her own gallery, but I wanted to know more about the woman who now represents artists on several continents: ‘I had been doing some local theatre set designing, and making and selling pottery, and doing some writing for a parenting magazine, and was looking for a job in the arts, so when an artist friend asked me to represent her it just seemed to encapsulate all the things I wanted to do.’ Which is when Ms Graber set out on her life plan. ’I got some funding and the whole thing took on a life of its own,’ she recalls, ‘and after a year I ended up with a gallery space in a large restaurant in East Dulwich, so pretty much invented my own job’
After three years at East Dulwich, Pippa began working from her Honor Oak Park home, where she held exhibitions and participated in the global art fair schedule, mainly with the Affordable Art Fair. From the beginning it sounded like an incredible journey towards opening her own space. I was curious about the highlights, and she had highlights aplenty.
‘The best thing about this career is I get to do my favourite things, which are meeting new people and being around art. It provides an interesting and diverse social life and experience. I also run an intern programme and I am thrilled that my past interns have gone on to do amazing things in the art world… I can not think of one specific highlight from the past but opening the new gallery is definitely the apex of my career – I have a new intern starting at the gallery in June.’
On the question of Covid, she says:
'‘While art did sell during the lockdown, there were no art fairs and I had no base to sell from except for my website. I missed the art fairs and not seeing my other gallery friends, and it forced me to embrace social media on a higher level… I have a base now but due to Covid we will not be having the big opening party that I was hoping for. The opening will be a soft one and I just plan on being open for more hours to begin with… The gallery is Contemporary, and we specialise in abstract and photo-realistic still-life but we are not limited to it. Plus, we offer bespoke framing.’
For the opening, Pippa is putting up the work of Kate Felton-Hall, Darren Lynde-Mann, and Lisa Henshall. She will be following this up with a show of still life works from the UK and Spain.
There are also plans for art classes three mornings a week.
All these events and exhibitions will be announced on the website: https://www.artdoglondon.co.uk/ and via the newsletter which you can sign up for:
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ARTDOG GALLERY
23 Brockley Rise, Honor Oak Park, London, SE23 1JG
