About

“Staged as a critical celebration of the contemporary art gallery’s staged elitist hyper-culture, Black Cube sites itself within spitting distance of the art world whilst remaining firmly underground.”

– Harold Rosenbloom Jr

“In challenging the art world’s miasma of confusingly glossy ideals, tropes and mores that so effectively seduce and repel all good artists of soul, Black Cube tacitly side-steps the limitations of the big bad real world, successfully showcasing their artist’s aspirational intent without sacrificing their need for subversive credibility.”

– Harold Rosenbloom Jr

Black Cube: A Short History

Black Cube is a studio complex and contemporary art gallery founded by the Anartist collective STOT21stCplanB and operated by the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop and Private Ladies and Gentlemen’s Club for Art, Leisure and the Disruptive Betterment of Culture.

Sited on Fish Island, off Wick Lane between the used fridge & freezer depot and the Lea River Navigation Canal, the network of large exhibition spaces are built into the subterranean storage tanks of an old petroleum processing plant, while the windowless upper galleries hide in the monumental black cube that looms over the neighbourhood.

The gallery is built on this land as it’s so toxic the authorities would only allow it to be used for showing art.

The space originally opened in the early 1990s with a programme of exhibitions and events that championed the emerging Young Immigrant Artists (The YIA’s) but fell into disuse at the turn of the century. STOT21stCplanB took it over as their HQ in 2004, primarily to use as a studio and storage facility, but also briefly running a programme of exhibitions for artists they felt a kinship with such as Harry Adams, Jimmy Cauty, Billy Childish and Jamie Reid. These events drew great numbers of dysfunctional hipsters, oddballs and creatives to the then derelict area, spurring on the rapid development and gentrification that we see in Hackney Wick today.

Unimpressed with the type of people they were attracting STOT21stCplanB closed the Black Cube as an exhibition space on 24th December 2010 and no one except the artists and their assistants were allowed to enter for the next 13 years.

In a statement issued at the end of 2022, it was pronounced the gallery was once again to open its doors to the public, and in February 2023 a major exhibition of the Fish Island Prophecies by STOT21stCplanB was revealed.

Since then the gallery has operated an occasional programme of exhibitions showcasing work closely related to the founders practice that can only be experienced online through a metaphysical lens.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

General Admittance: Black Cube does not entertain or admit any general visitors in the physical world at any time. It is not possible.

Viewing Exhibitions: It is recommended that all exhibitions are viewed on a large screen with a glass of your favourite beverage in hand. It is important you look at all the pictures and read as much of the text as you can tolerate.

Opening Parties and Private Views: By way of celebrating the opening of exhibitions, a case of warm fizzy alcohol is left at the goods entrance of the gallery at 3 Crown Close the night before an exhibition opens. Sometimes information about the exhibition, catalogues and FREE artworks are also left. These celebrations are FREE to attend and no RSVP is necessary.

Collecting with Black Cube: Even though the exhibitions at Black Cube skirt on the realms of irreality, the work shown is usually real and does exist in the physical world in some form – often at a more manageable scale. Where available these can be viewed at the artist’s studio or at the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop, and bought/collected for those wishing to enhance their lives in a such a way.

Please contact L-13@L-13.org to inquire about work for sale.

Egalitarian Editions: For more slender budgets, reasonably priced prints and other multiples, editions and publications are made for available for all and sold directly via links from the exhibition pages to the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop website.

Black Cube Gallery in Hackney Wick as it stands today.