Graduates of Goldsmiths, University of London who have become household names in contemporary art, including Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Sarah Lucas, Yinka Shonibare and Michael Craig-Martin, are donating works to raise funds for a new art gallery at their old art school. Sam Taylor-Johnson, Julian Opie and Steve McQueen, whose Twelve Years a Slave won an Oscar last year, have also given pieces.
The works, including a spot painting and a swirl painting by Hirst, a bronze by Lucas, and one of Gormley’s cast iron standing men, are expected to raise most of the £2.8m cost of the gallery at a Christie’s auction next month.
The gallery, which will become a public contemporary art space in south London, will be created in the shell of the Laurie Grove Baths, formerly a public bath house built in 1898 for the south London poor. It also held a swimming pool where generations of local people learned to swim – and danced when the main pool was boarded over to form a dance floor – until the complex finally closed in 1991.
The winning design by Assemble, a London-based architecture collective, will incorporate the giant black steel tanks which originally held the water supply for the baths.
Goldsmiths alumni include 30 Turner Prize nominees, and seven winners. The Young British Artists movement of the late 1980s grew out of the art school when Hirst launched an exhibition called Freeze while a second year student there. Hirst, like many of the other young artists, was taught by Michael Craig-Martin.
Gormley said the gallery would become a resource for the university and London. “Goldsmiths remains one of the liveliest, most challenging and ambitious of Britain’s universities. Its art department is blessed by being part of a university campus with many allied disciplines engaged in research that has direct relevance for the evolution of the visual culture of our time.”
- This article was amended on 16 January 2015. The article originally stated that Goldsmiths need to raise £1.8m for their art gallery. They need to raise £2.8m.