In The Gallery with Freddie Powell

“I never read the book,” Freddie Powell says. It’s just after nine am on a grey morning and we’re sitting in the small back room of his gallery, Ginny on Frederick. On the northern edge of the City of London, a short walk west of the Barbican estate, the space sits behind an industrial concertina door looking over Smithfield Market. In 2023, he moved here from a small ex-sandwich shop a few doors down. Its sign, which read “Sunset II Sandwich Bar”, stayed in place and became part of the gallery’s early identity. The incongruity of these spaces reflects Powell’s lack of interest in orthodoxies about what an art gallery should be. “Different ways of existing make things interesting,” he says. “A lot of my favourite galleries have existed in the margins or in different forms.”

It’s rare for a gallerist to agree to meet before lunchtime, but Powell’s been rising early lately. “It’s not always been like that,” he says, but he has a lot on his plate when we speak. Immediate plans involve a trip to New York for a show he has organised at LOMEX gallery in Chinatown and hosting a launch for the performance magazine operformancef at the gallery. Next month, he’ll open his first show with Hannah Murray, an American painter of woozy, allegorical portraits. “We’re now at max capacity,” he says. He pauses before confirming: “Which is good.”

“Those messy beginning years were where really meaningful relationships with artists, friends and supporters of the gallery were made. We were all figuring it out together.”

The early days of Ginny on Frederick, which opened in earnest in late 2021 after a number of short-lived, experimental iterations, were mythologised by the art press almost immediately. Powell was canonised as part of a generation of young gallerists credited with breathing new life into London after a year lost to pandemic lockdowns. “Is an old sandwich shop the future of London’s art scene?” asked a Financial Times headline. Visiting the gallery’s seven by twelve foot tiled space, visitors were forced into close quarters with tactile installations by Jack O’Brien, Charlotte Edey and other artists who continue to show with Powell today. Now, they are internationally known names; then, they felt like something brand new.

This version of the gallery owed more to Powell’s personality and intuition than to any kind of grand design. “The shows were really organic and they were happening in real time; there wasn’t a strategy,” he says. He was running the programme alongside a job managing the bookshop at White Cube, he says, “missing a lot of work because I was going to the “dentist’.”

The compactness and affordability of the space afforded him a luxury that few gallerists experience, which was the opportunity to make it up as he went along, not needing to professionalise too early. “Those messy beginning years were where really meaningful relationships with artists, friends and supporters of the gallery were made. We were all figuring it out together,” Freddie says.

“Having a dogma about art dealing is insane to me. It’s kind of a magical, mythical job. Anyone who has rules about it, I don’t know if we’re on the same page.”

Today, Ginny on Frederick has outgrown the ‘baby gallery’ label. The space remains intimate, and there are no plans for international expansion (“my parents are 30 minutes away on the train, this is home,” he says), but the gallery’s cultural footprint feels on par with one multiple times its age and scale. When I suggest that he’s climbing the ladder, he agrees: “A bit quick. It’s become something that I’m really proud of, that is changing and moving. It’s good,” he says, “hopefully it stays good.”

On the preview day of Frieze London last October, the gallery’s booth was crowded with people milling around a sculpture by Alex Margo Arden comprising a gaggle of human-scale mannequins loosely tied together with a thick rope. By the end of the day, the booth – also including a large-scale painting – had been acquired by Arts Council England and secured the £10,000 Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize. “It was overwhelming, it was amazing, but Alex and I had been working towards that moment for a really long time. It’s really nice when something pays off and works,” Powell says. He seems to have a knack for orchestrating such moments, wherein conceptually ambitious projects become exciting, vital inflection points in the broader art world.

“Being an art dealer is this funny caricature of a male character. I think that’s horrible and I think it’s super amazing. Wearing a suit, feeling like a man, feels good, and hilarious at the same time.”

Art fairs are prime spots for people watching and, especially for would-be collectors, the dealers are just as much on display as the art is. It strikes me, as Powell shows me the two large, fluffy bag-charms that hang from his Art Basel branded boat and tote (“they’re seasonal: this is Valentine’s and this is Year of the Horse”), that his style doesn’t match the standard gallerist’s uniform. But he knows how to play the game and relishes it.

“Being an art dealer is this funny caricature of a male character in a way. I think that’s horrible and I think it’s super amazing,” Powell says. “Wearing a suit, feeling like a man, feels good” – he pauses – “and hilarious at the same time.” But when I suggest that there’s some insincerity in his performance of the besuited art dealer, he pushes back. “I find a humour in all of it, but I’d find a humour in anything,” he says. “There is ultimate sincerity.”

Powell hasn’t been dealing art for long – though no longer a baby, Ginny on Frederick is surely still in its early years – but he’s already developed a unique approach to his role as gallerist, shaped by his experimental beginnings. “I really credit a lot of Ginny to the fact that it was allowed to be this mad space in a sandwich shop at the beginning,” he says.

As Freddie says, he never read the book. He learnt by doing, and the spirit of those early shows for which he’d install friends’ work in his gallery at a few weeks notice still echoes in his programme today. Had he learned the rules of art dealing before he started, it’s unlikely that Ginny on Frederick would have grown to have the unique voice and acclaim that it does today. “Having a dogma about art dealing is insane to me,” he says. “It’s kind of a magical, mythical job. Anyone who has rules about it, I don’t know if we’re on the same page.”