Art without Borders at the London’s Serpentine Gallery

The Serpentine Gallery opened in 1970 and from that moment it started to demonstrate to the world various facets of contemporary art for free. Within its walls, both - works of famous artists, sculptors, architects and “promising” new names are displayed democratically. The gallery consists of two buildings located five-minutes-walks from each other on the opposite sides of Serpentine Lake: the Serpentine Gallery and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Since 2000, in addition to seasonal exhibitions, educational and public programs, the Serpentine also presents to public its annual summer pavilion.

Both the Serpentine Gallery and the Serpentine Sackler Gallery originally were not exhibition spaces, but worked, respectively, as a tea pavilion and a powder warehouse (a legacy of the Napoleonic wars). An architect and laureate of the Pritzker Prize, Zaha Hadid, worked on transforming the latter into a gallery. The space of the former warehouse was not only restored, but also expanded. Working on the contrast of the “old” and “new”, Hadid complemented the neoclassical architecture of the original building with a light and transparent modern building.

After some time, the modern part of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery was transformed from a space for hosting social events into a cafe, and still functions this way until today. In 2015, famous landscape designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd was called to emphasize the beauty of the new gallery, and she created around it a small garden which does not lose its beauty with changing seasons.

 Text: Elizaveta Klepanova

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