Moments from White Cube

Jay Jopling opened White Cube in London in 1993 as a small project space above a Duke Street tailor's shop, and built it over the following decades into one of the galleries most closely associated with the Young British Artists movement, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin above all, the generation that turned 1990s British art into an internationally provocative, tabloid-baiting phenomenon. The gallery's very name became something of an art-world shorthand, "white cube" is also the generic architectural term for the neutral, windowless gallery space that became the default modern exhibition format, a coincidence Jopling leaned into rather than avoided.

White Cube has since expanded well beyond its original single small room into multiple large London spaces plus international galleries, but it's worth knowing the project-space origins when you visit one of its now-substantial exhibition halls, this began as a genuinely small, scrappy operation before growing into one of the handful of galleries with real influence over which contemporary British artists achieve international visibility. As with any commercial gallery, entry is free and browsing without buying is entirely normal.