Art Market
Maxwell Rabb
Portrait of Jonny Burt and Joe Kennedy. Courtesy of Unit London.
Known for its packed openings and prime location on Mayfair’s Hanover Square (around the corner from Sotheby’s and opposite Pace Gallery), Unit’s 6,000-square-foot flagship operates in the heart of London’s most famous gallery district. Spread over two floors, the space is a testament to the graft of founders Jonny Burt and Joe Kennedy, who, when they initiated the gallery in 2013, felt somewhat out of place in the art world.
“We felt like maybe the art world wasn’t for us at that particular moment,” Kennedy recalled. “I never really felt part of the industry.…We were probably outsiders to some degree: people who loved art, practicing art ourselves, but never really felt like part of the art world or the art market.”
Best friends Burt and Kennedy have known each other since the age of 11 (they met in art class at London’s Latymer Upper School), where they recall playing together in bands and spending extra hours working together in the studio. Returning to London after university—Burt at Warwick and Kennedy at Manchester—the pair, then aged 23, came up with the idea of starting a gallery. A location was found in a modest 300-square-foot former charity shop in Chiswick, a leafy West London suburb, and the pair’s ambitions were clear from the outset, pooling together around 16 artists for their debut exhibition “Looking for U.”
“We were excited and inspired simply by the opportunity to share the story of why we existed as a gallery, our beliefs and vision, and why we were exhibiting the artists we had on display—to anyone who we could drag into the space,” said Burt. “If that led to a sale, then it was a bonus—albeit a miracle.”
The show included artists such as Ryan Hewett and Jake Wood-Evans, who remain integral to Unit’s roster more than 10 years later. As well as building on its roster of in-demand artists, the gallery founders are today reevaluating what they hope to achieve in the art world, opening a temporary space in Venice and launching their first artist residency program in partnership with Art Review, the Dragon Hill Residency. For Burt and Kennedy, the gallery’s position is a monument to a decade of resilience and drive—but the pair are far from done.
From laptops to pop-ups
Burt and Kennedy started their journey at the Chiswick-based former charity shop and developed a hands-first business model that emerged from a mutual desire to make art accessible on the outskirts of the mainstream. They handed out leaflets, stood outside the gallery space every day, and spent their nights preparing for their makeshift exhibitions. “People were going off to festivals in the summer, and it’d be me and Jonny at 2:00 in the morning scrubbing the floors of this charity shop to get paint off the floor to make sure it’s ready for the opening night,” said Kennedy.
About four months after moving into the charity shop, they were forced to hop from space to space, hosting pop-ups across London. During this time, the gallerists relied on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook to cultivate a younger, more digitally savvy audience. Formative shows included artists such as Wood-Evans, who gave the duo three paintings for one of their first exhibitions in 2013, and Zhuang Hong Yi, who presented a solo show in 2015, helping the nascent gallery build a loyal following. By 2015, the gallery had found a 4,000-square-foot space in Soho before briefly moving to a spot on Langley Street in Covent Garden for three months in 2018.
Banking on Mayfair
Exterior view of Unit in Mayfair, London. Courtesy of Unit.
After five years of bouncing around London, the duo were ready for a permanent space. “We often felt a massive sense of responsibility because we were consigning works from artists internationally, with no reputation, no infrastructure, not even a guaranteed place where we’d be able to show the work,” said Kennedy. Then, a collector told the gallerists about a space coming on the market in the heart of Mayfair: a 6,000-square-foot former Citibank building.
Not yet aged 30, the gallerists pulled together all their resources and signed the lease in 2018. Money was short at the time, Kennedy recalled, but the opportunity to anchor themselves in the city’s most influential art district was too good to pass up.
Miguel Angel Payano Jr, installation view of “Limbguistics” at Unit in London, 2023. Courtesy of Unit.
To inaugurate their new space, the gallerists revived their first exhibition with “Looking for U,” inviting eight international artists, including Tom Price, Michael Staniak, Philip Colbert, and André Hemer, to explore the impact of technology on contemporary art. This nostalgic yet forward-thinking exhibition ushered in a new era for the two young gallerists.
“That space moving into Mayfair felt like a real coming of age,” Kennedy said. “We still have this burning desire to really make a change in the industry. We feel a responsibility to be able to platform artists and give artists a voice to the widest possible audience.”
The risk paid off. According to Forbes’s 2019 “30 under 30” feature, which named the two young gallerists, the gallery made over $9 million in revenue by the end of the year.
Pushing the gallery forward
Exterior view of Dragon Hill Residency in France, 2024. Photo by 3MILLE. Courtesy of Unit.
Today, Unit is more than comfortable in its Mayfair home where it hosts a packed calendar of events and openings. The gallery now boasts almost 570,000 Instagram followers, and its program continues to evolve: Recent buzzy artists at the gallery include English painter Jess Allen, who wrapped up a solo show in April, and Dutch artist Bobbi Essers, who will have her second solo show with the gallery later this year.
Kennedy and Burt are also continuing to push the gallery forward, highlighted by two projects launched this year.
In April, they opened a major exhibition during the 60th Venice Biennale, titled “In Praise of Black Erranty,” featuring 19 modern and contemporary Afro-diasporic artists at the Palazzo Pisani. In March, in partnership with Art Review, Unit debuted its residency program, a 10-year dream come true for Burt and Kennedy. The Dragon Hill Residency, hosted in a 1960s landscape house designed by French architect Jacques Couëlle near Mougins in the South of France, invites artists and writers to a six-week program with fully equipped studios and culminates in an annual summer exhibition at the historic Château de Castellaras.
“The residency came as a result of the desire to build more meaningful relationships with artists and to give artists a break from the norm, to give artists who need studio space a place to work, a privileged environment where they can actually be inspired to create something without the pressures of having a deadline for a show, or to make something for a collector, or to have a fair booth coming up that they need to strive for,” Kennedy said.
Artists Rex Southwick and Christy Chan were the first to attend this program and now share a studio space in London.
Like the gallerists’ lifelong friendship, nurtured among the arts, the residency is emblematic of the gallery’s mission, Burt explained: “Dragon Hill is a reminder of why we do what we do—it’s the beauty of art and the beauty of creation that can exist,” he said. “It’s not necessarily about having to fulfill these deadlines and meet these targets. It’s the magic of art, the magic of creation.”
Maxwell Rabb
Maxwell Rabb is Artsy’s Staff Writer.
