Two London Galleries to Close as Beers and Sid Motion Shut Their Doors
Two independent London galleries — Beers Gallery and Sid Motion Gallery — have announced they are closing within months of each other, removing two small but active players from the city's commercial art scene.
Beers Gallery, located near the Barbican in central London, will shut at the end of August 2026 after 14 years in business. Founder and director Kurt Beers pointed to economic pressures, market shifts and the rise of new digital platforms, and said it was the right moment to turn attention to the future, according to Artnet News. The gallery's final solo show was Andrew Salgado's Glory!, and a farewell group exhibition titled So This Is Goodbye opened on 20 August and ran through the end of the month.
Founded in 2012 near Farringdon, Beers built a roster of more than a dozen artists, including Sabrina Bockler and Tang Shuo. Recent exhibitions included Mexican artist Myrna Quiñonez's debut London solo show, The Horizon Pulled Me Close (November 2024–January 2025), and HOME by Hyangmok Baik (March–April 2025).
Sid Motion Gallery, meanwhile, will close at the end of October 2026 after a decade. Motion began in 2015 by converting a disused betting shop in King's Cross into a gallery space, opening officially the following year. The gallery later moved to South Bermondsey, where it helped build the South Bermondsey Art Trail — the next edition of which runs 4–5 September.
Motion described the closure as a "positive and conscious" decision, saying she is "stopping while we are ahead," and that the gallery was not in a financial position to fully support her artists, according to Artnet News. She told The Art Newspaper's Anny Shaw that she was winding up the business "while the programme and finances are still intact" (The Art Newspaper).
The gallery represents five artists. Its 85th and final show, That Which Appears, featuring works by Olivia Bax and James Fisher, runs from 18 September to 31 October.
For the artists on both rosters, closure means finding new representation — the process of moving to another gallery that will show, promote and sell their work. For the neighbourhoods each gallery leaves behind, it means one fewer reason to walk down the street and look at art.
Two closures do not make a crisis. But both founders named the same forces: tightening finances, a shifting market and platforms that are changing how art is seen and sold. Small galleries have always operated on thin margins, and when those margins shrink, the decision to stop can be deliberate rather than forced.
