Lagos’s Rele Gallery will soon have spaces across three continents, with a new outpost opening in London next month, it has announced. “People always asked me why Los Angeles and not London?” says gallery owner Adenrele Sonariwo who opened her outpost in Los Angeles in 2021. “Even then, we were already looking at London... it was just a matter of timing.”
So far, the gallery—which celebrates its tenth anniversary next year—has based its decision to expand on finding just the right space or location, Sonariwo says. This was the case for the recent move (on 18 January) from the gallery’s smaller Los Angeles location on Melrose Avenue to its new 3,500 sq ft space on N Western Avenue—a newly anointed gallery district in part popularised by mega-dealer David Zwirne. And there were also similar considerations at play in Lagos when, in 2022, the gallery moved from Onikan—a cultural hub home to museums and institutions—to Ikoyi, where many of the city’s commercial galleries are based.