Window of opportunity - the new Ingleby Gallery

Published on Friday 11 July 2008 16:44

With their new venture set to become the largest private contemporary art gallery outside London, Richard and Florence Ingleby tell Chitra Ramaswamy why a former nightclub prompted a move they couldn't resist

IT'S hard to believe we're standing in what used to be Edinburgh's Venue, the nightclub and gig venue where Coldplay famously played one week before they were signed. Gone are the cement floors and the dark walls. The pungent cocktail of booze and body odour has been replaced by the much sweeter scent of fresh paint. It's all white walls, reconditioned windows, pillars and solid oak floors. This is now the home of the UK's largest private contemporary art gallery outside London.

At least it will be come August. For the moment the construction work continues and the gallery owners, Richard and Florence Ingleby, and I are all wearing hard hats, and gingerly stepping around an enormous hole through which works will be hoisted from the basement storage to the gallery spaces.

"We've never built a gallery before," says Richard, as Florence goes to check whether the toilet has "a good flush". "It's like going back to year one."

When we walk up to the first floor they look at me anxiously for a response. This is the main space where six exhibitions will be shown throughout each year: the first is American artist Kay Rosen, the second British artist Richard Forster. It is also the room that sold the Calton Road building to Richard. As soon as he stepped into it he knew that after four years of searching he had found his gallery. "The critical thing we said the building had to do was give you a physical feeling – that rush of excitement," he says. "The first-floor space is so surprising, basically because of the quality of the light coming from the south and west. It's this weird combination of being at the grimy back door of Waverley station, but with these glimpses of overblown period architecture."

He's right. It's an astonishing room, a long rectangular space lined entirely on one side with windows. Richard tells me the artists he has brought in here, from Alison Watt to Callum Innes, have been blown away. "I could tell Alison (Watt] was looking at it from a technical point of view and thinking how good the work would look in it. I think some of the artists would like it as their studio space."

"When Richard said to me he was looking at this building I was all set to put my big thumb down," admits Florence. "But then I walked into this room and just thought: 'It's fabulous.'"

This vast 1870s building over three floors is a far cry from the Georgian townhouse that the Ingleby Gallery – and the Inglebys for that matter – have occupied for the past decade, showing contemporary art in two rooms of the ground floor of their home. The duo, who moved to Scotland from London a decade ago (he was the director of the Fine Art Society, she the head of publicity at Bloomsbury), have since become renowned for their curatorial creativity and their skill at showing cutting-edge, international art in a pared-down and intimate domestic setting. They represent artists including Alison Watt, Howard Hodgkin and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay and their reputation has simply grown and grown.

So too, however, has their work in storage, their ambition and their frustration at not being able to realise it. "In our first five years we were trying to stay afloat and not go bust," says Richard when we meet at the original Ingleby Gallery, where the last show, Richard Wright and Samuel Beckett, has just been taken down. "Then in the second five years we began to think about what the scale of our ambition might be."

It is ambition on a grand scale indeed. When the Ingleby Gallery opened in 1998, one critic announced that "a nation gets the art it deserves". "I'd forgotten that," laughs Richard. "If we'd gone out of business after two years that would have been a rather hollow comment."

The new Ingleby will show 12 exhibitions a year, two at a time, mixing emerging and established artists. In the basement will be its library, offices and private storage, and on the ground floor there is room to show its huge print collection, with prices starting from as little as 20. "We've got a massive print arm," says Florence, "but we've never had the opportunity to show it."

Ingleby represents the archive of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Wild Hawthorn Press, and much of this space will be devoted to his work. There are also plans for a monthly club showing films chosen by exhibiting artists, and the gallery will open late on Thursday nights for talks, performances, tours and more. Then we come to the ingenious plan to use the building's billboard as a space for public art. The idea is to get people to subscribe to limited edition prints of the billboard created by different artists, so the project will be self-funding – literally public art made possible by the public. The first artist to take part is Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, followed by Rachel Whiteread, Bob and Roberta Smith, and Cerith Wyn Evans. Richard was inspired by the Hamilton Finlay notion of the best ideas being communicated regardless of scale and medium, and how his work would so often begin on a folding card or the back of an envelope and end up as a monumental sculpture.

Interestingly, Alison Goldfrapp also played a part. "That Goldfrapp poster has been on the outside of the building for years," says Richard. "It's amazing how many people call it the Goldfrapp building because of it. That's why I thought it would make a perfect piece of public art."

Edinburgh's contemporary art scene has been transformed in the decade the Inglebys have been in Scotland. They reel off a list of names when I ask them about the changes, praising Fiona Bradley at the Fruitmarket Gallery and Pat Fisher at Talbot Rice as well as the appointment of Simon Groom as director of modern and contemporary art at the National Galleries. Still, they say they are taking a big risk, just as they were a decade ago. "It's a huge scale-up," says Richard. "Financial suicide, possibly," adds Florence. "We're at exactly the same point again. The sensible thing would have been to have something between this space and that one."

Richard nods, but neither of them seems put off. "Look at the wider financial picture. You wouldn't choose this moment to be doing what we're doing," he says. "But we've done what we've done and we've proved that it can work. So if we're going to do it again, we figured we should try and do it as big and as well as possible."

• The new Ingleby Gallery opens August 1, 15 Calton Road, Edinburgh

• www.inglebygallery.com