36-608: Piano Nobile is a commercial art gallery in London, England, specialising in twentieth-century British art. It was established by Dr Robert Travers at premises in Richmond in 1985. In 2000, the gallery moved to its current address at 129 Portland Road, London. In 2019, an additional gallery space was acquired at 96 Portland Road. Between 2008 and 2019, the gallery also had an exhibition space at Kings Place in King’s Cross. The gallery
72-516: A dozen concert halls. The aim was to differentiate very precisely between a variety of modern concert halls and to examine what solution would best meet the requirements of Kings Place. Next a computer model of the proposed Kings Place auditorium was made. This was tested against computer models of the Concertgebouw , the Wigmore and several other halls. In this way it was possible to optimise
108-426: A local urban architecture which is not uniform in scale. The building has wavy glass runs along the west-facing York Way frontage; this three-layered glass façade is a free-standing transparent surface made up of hundreds of very slightly curved sheets of glass. As well as reducing heat gain from the afternoon sun and increasing wind resistance, the glass wall provides Kings Place with a distinctive facade. Hall One,
144-568: A room. Joe had just come out of the RAF, Leon had just come out of the Jewish Brigade, I’d just come, more or less, from school. It seemed totally impossible for people with no support and no background to become painters – it was hopeless. And there we were, 70 years later, all in the same room. We actually lived our dream. All of us very old, but we’d actually, against all odds, become painters." Since 1994, Piano Nobile has published books under
180-620: Is a member of the Society of London Art Dealers . Piano Nobile is the registered company name of Robert Travers (Works of Art) Ltd. . The company has also previously traded as Piano Nobile Fine Paintings. Piano Nobile has sold and loaned works to public collections in the UK and abroad. In 2018, Charleston Farmhouse purchased from Piano Nobile the Famous Women Dinner Service by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant . The service
216-667: Is an art gallery in Southampton , southern England . It is located in the Civic Centre on Commercial Road. The gallery opened in 1939 with much of the initial funding from the gallery coming from two bequests, one from Robert Chipperfield (1817–1911) and another from Frederick William Smith. The gallery was damaged during World War II and repairing this damage delayed its reopening until 1946. The gallery's art collection covers six centuries of European art history, with over 5,300 works in its fine art collection. It
252-561: Is home to Aurora Orchestra as its resident orchestra, and also regularly hosts a number of other artistic associates including the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and London Sinfonietta . The opera company OperaUpClose announced that it would move from its present Islington pub location, the King's Head, to Kings Place in 2015. Kings Place Music Foundation is the charity set up to run
288-748: Is housed in an example of 1930s municipal architecture. The gallery holds a Designated Collection , considered of national importance. Highlights of the permanent collection include a 14th-century altarpiece by Allegretto Nuzi , of the Italian Giambattista Pittoni ; the Perseus series by Burne-Jones ; paintings by the Camden Town Group and The London Group ; sculpture by Jacob Epstein , Auguste Rodin , Edgar Degas , Henri Gaudier Brzeska , Richard Deacon and Tony Cragg ; and Richard Long photographs. In October 2024
324-497: Is still owned by Ruth Borchard’s descendants, while Piano Nobile is responsible for storing, promoting, exhibiting and loaning out the collection on the family’s behalf. A catalogue of the collection, Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century , was written by Philip Vann and published in 2004. The collection does not have a permanent exhibition space. Since 2011, a biennial exhibition of paintings from
360-449: Is the former headquarters of Network Rail and CGI . Kings Place was a commercial development providing 26,000 sq. m of office space. Construction on the site began in 2005 and was completed in summer 2008; the opening festival started on 1 October 2008. In late 2008 the building became the home for The Guardian and The Observer newspapers. Kings Place houses the first public concert hall to be newly built in central London since
396-689: The British Council Collection, Southampton City Art Gallery and Pallant House Gallery . Piano Nobile's exhibitions have been reviewed by art critics including Martin Gayford, Jackie Wullschlager, and Jonathan Jones . The 2019 exhibition Leon Kossoff: A London Life , the last dedicated exhibition of Kossoff’s work in his lifetime, was covered in The Spectator , The Daily Telegraph , and The Financial Times . Writing in The Spectator on 20 April 2019, Martin Gayford said that
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#1732771923159432-676: The Courtauld Institute of Art , ArtUK , Manx National Heritage, the charity Outside In, the Jerwood Foundation , Pallant House Gallery and The Lightbox , Woking. Paintings from the collection are frequently loaned out to museum exhibitions. The self-portrait by William Gear was on loan to the Towner Gallery , Eastbourne, in 2015-16. The self-portrait by Ithell Colquhoun was on loan to Penlee House Museum and Gallery in 2016. The self-portrait by Euan Uglow
468-676: The University of Bristol , presented original research about recent sale prices at auction for work by Walter Sickert , David Bomberg , L.S. Lowry , Stanley Spencer , Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud . In 2020, Leon Kossoff: A London Life was long-listed for the William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History. Shortly after Ruth Borchard ’s death in 2000, her collection of self-portraiture came to be managed by Piano Nobile. The collection includes one-hundred paintings by British and British-based artists, executed between 1958 and 1971. It
504-661: The Art Fund and "donations from a circle remarkable women". In 2012, the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) acquired from Piano Nobile Flanders Fields (1962) by William Crozier . (Piano Nobile represents work from the Crozier Estate up to 1979.) This painting was one of 150 works which the NGI acquired during an extended closure between 2011 and 2017, when the gallery underwent an extensive refurbishment. In 2018,
540-636: The London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration. 51°32′3.63″N 0°7′19.04″W / 51.5343417°N 0.1219556°W / 51.5343417; -0.1219556 Southampton City Art Gallery The Southampton City Art Gallery
576-473: The National Gallery of Ireland also purchased thirty-five works on paper by Crozier. Piano Nobile regularly loans works to museum exhibitions. In 2018, Tate Britain ’s All Too Human exhibition included Walter Sickert ’s painting The Studio: The Painting of a Nude , loaned by Piano Nobile. In 2018, a BP Spotlight display at Tate Britain about Mark Gertler included The Pond, Garsington (1916),
612-519: The area of the building facing Regent's Canal and Battlebridge Basin. The Rotunda Bar features a curved bar that mirrors the shape of the building. The Green & Fortune Café is housed in the central atrium of the building on the ground floor level. Green & Fortune is responsible for all food, drink, and hospitality at Kings Place. All seven levels above ground at Kings Place are commercial office space. From some angles Kings Place can be seen as four joined but separate structures. This breaking down of
648-498: The collection has been held at Piano Nobile’s Kings Place gallery and at various UK museums, including Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, in 2014, and Manx National Heritage , Isle of Man, in 2020-21. This biennial exhibition alternates with the Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize, which encourages contemporary artists to practice self-portraiture. The Prize's institutional partners to date have included
684-489: The completion of the Barbican Centre concert hall in 1982. ( Cadogan Hall and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period.) It has a range of facilities for performance, exhibition and education. The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central hub to the building. The arts facilities include free access to a range of commercial art galleries. Kings Place
720-556: The curators Chris Stephens and Sarah MacDougall, and the art writer David Boyd Haycock . In 2018, the large-scale monograph From Omega to Charleston: The Art of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant was published by Piano Nobile Publications in partnership with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. The imprint has occasionally sponsored academic research. The Nobile Index Series, published in association with
756-489: The design for Hall One before construction began. The oak veneer inside Hall One has come from the same 500-year-old German oak tree named Contessa . After felling the wood was cut into 5-metre lengths and boiled at 80 °C for one week, then sliced. The tree produced an acre of wood veneer. It has been used in Hall One to cover the panels, columns, roof coffers, the back of seats, and doors. The Rotunda Restaurant spans
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#1732771923159792-626: The dinner service in British Art Studies, the online journal of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art . In May 2018, the gallery's director Dr Robert Travers spoke about the plates on BBC Radio 4's programme Front Row with novelist Ali Smith and Charleston curator Darren Clarke. The acquisition of the dinner service was funded by grants from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and
828-612: The east side of York Way , 150 metres from King's Cross / St Pancras train stations. On its eastern side the building overlooks Battlebridge Basin on the Regent's Canal which is also home to many residential boats and the London Canal Museum . Central St Martins , one of the art colleges within the University of the Arts London , brought a major visual arts community into the area from mid-2011, when it moved into
864-510: The exhibition was "especially welcome" and "highly recommended". The private view of Leon Kossoff: A London Life was attended by the artist himself, as well as his peers the painters Frank Auerbach and Joe Tilson. Auerbach recounted the event in an interview with Alma Zevi in May 2019. "It was a moving opening for me, because if you’d have gone to St Martin’s School of Art in 1948-1949, you would have seen Leon Kossoff, Joe Tilson and myself working in
900-450: The imprint Piano Nobile Publications. This is an in-house publishing operation which mainly publishes the gallery’s exhibition catalogues. The publisher’s distributor is Casemate . Piano Nobile Publications has published work by various different authors. Its books have included essays by the culinary writer Susan Campbell , the former editor of The Burlington Magazine Richard Shone , the art historians Frances Spalding and Lee Beard,
936-665: The lifts break down and reduces the green impact of the building. The two common staircases have been designed so as only to be available in case of fire. Kings Place promotes discovery of the arts in its surrounding boroughs of Islington and Camden . The Kings Place outreach programme works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family. Music and arts organisations resident and performing at Kings Place offer educational classes, workshops, opportunities for participation in performances as well as family events. Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with
972-508: The loan of which was facilitated by Piano Nobile. Also in 2018, the touring exhibition Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by her Writings included a work by Gluck , Portrait of Miss E.M. Craig , which was loaned through Piano Nobile. In 2019, the National Gallery of Modern Art’s exhibition Cut and Paste included Duncan Grant’s Still Life with Fruit and Coffee-pot (1916) and Vanessa Bell ’s collage portrait of Molly MacCarthy (1914), both of which were loaned through Piano Nobile. Since
1008-466: The local community and to the wider public. Activities began before the construction of the building finished and are growing steadily year by year. KPMF offers access to creative spaces and activities for both new and established audiences with affordable prices for all. The KMPF music programme is funded entirely by revenue from ticket sales and income generated through event and conference hire, and without reliance on public funding. Kings Place sits on
1044-407: The main concert hall, is a separate structure within the building, it is a box that sits on rubber springs to give it complete acoustic separation from the rest of the building. It is built to a regular geometry, a double cube, that is considered most successful for small concert halls. Structural columns around the hall are set away from the walls to allow curtains to be drawn between the columns and
1080-435: The mass of the building was critical to the planners and has allowed light and a sense of openness to penetrate to basement level. Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate. For the office users no staircase was provided for general use so the only way to access above ground floors is via the lifts. This makes for inconvenience when
1116-544: The mid-2010s, Piano Nobile has held around two monographic loan exhibitions a year. Examples include exhibitions of work by Mark Gertler (2012), Paul Nash (2014), John Armstrong (2015), William Coldstream and Euan Uglow (2016), Peter Coker (2017), David Bomberg and Leslie Marr (2017), Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (2018), Leon Kossoff (2019), Craigie Aitchison (2019), and Ben Nicholson (2020). These exhibitions have sometimes included museum loans. The exhibition Ben Nicholson: Distant Planes included works from
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1152-483: The music spaces at Kings Place. Gifted with the performing and back-of-house spaces on a long lease for a peppercorn rent, KPMF aims to deliver a very rich and busy music programme financed by ticket sales and the hire of the Kings Place facilities for rehearsals, recordings and conferences. The charity works in partnership with music and arts organisations to offer a range of learning and participation activities to
1188-504: The nearby Argent's 67-acre (270,000 m ) King's Cross Central development. Following a limited architectural competition, Dixon Jones was appointed as the architect for Kings Place. The brief was for it to be a large building of far higher quality than the normal spec office development. The building was to be durable, not only in terms of quality of the build materials, but in its design. It had to be spatially generous and environmentally impeccable. Most importantly, it had to fit into
1224-430: The walls to modify the acoustics for speech or amplified music. It won the "Commercial and Public Access" award and the overall "Gold Award" in the 2009 Wood Awards . The architecture of Hall One emerged from a collaboration between Dixon Jones and Arup's acousticians. As part of the research that preceded the design, the developer, the architects, the engineers and the project manager visited Japan to look in detail at
1260-464: Was commissioned by Kenneth Clark , late director of the National Gallery and presenter of the 1969 television series Civilisation . Depicting famous women from history and contemporary life, the set includes portraits of queens, writers, performers, and other known figures including two plates featuring the artists themselves. Re-discovery of the plates received interest from the academic community. The art historian Hana Leaper published an article about
1296-470: Was on loan to Museum MORE , Gorssel, in 2019. 51°30′36″N 0°12′38″W / 51.5100°N 0.2105°W / 51.5100; -0.2105 Kings Place Kings Place is a building in London 's King's Cross area, providing music and visual arts venues combined with seven floors of office space. It has housed the editorial offices of The Guardian newspaper since December 2008 and
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