Koppe Astner

Tucked away on Dixon Street mere metres from the Clyde is Koppe Astner (formerly Kendall Koppe) gallery. Bar some white paintwork, little has been done to neutralize the living room-sized space. The cracked concrete and unfinished cornices left over from the building's previous incarnations integrate wonderfully with the otherwise intimate space, adding gravity and a spaciousness that might have been lost had the whole place been white-cubed – an acknowledgement to the past, rather than an attempt to sterilise it.

Previously operating under the moniker of Washington Garcia, Kendall Koppe himself opened the space in late 2010. The six independently sub-let studios behind the gallery create a natural flow of artists and others in and around the building, a flow that is conducive to the organic, developmental setting that you might encounter inside. The gallery itself plays host to a unique type of residence in which it will have artists physically occupy the exhibition space for the summer months, during which time they will research and develop pieces for an exhibition in the September of that year. What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that little separates the gallery from the office space from which the operation is run, and thus little separates the artist from the gallery-as-unit, lending a further organic air to proceedings. See website for details on exhibitions, fairs, and other projects.