Talk Art

#AD - Cork Street Galleries special episode!

We meet art critic Louisa Buck to explore 100 years of Cork Street!

Cork Street Galleries this year celebrates its centenary as a pioneering force in the art world, 

with 2025 marking 100 years as the iconic London art destination. A specially curated programme honours its rich legacy as the historic and enduring home of modern and 

contemporary art in London.

In tribute to the centennial year, a first-of-its-kind initiative, a group exhibition entitled Fear Gives Wings to Courage was staged across all 15 galleries on Cork Street in the Summer, with each gallery presenting a response to a central theme conceived by Tarini Malik, curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Fear Gives Wings to Courage has been commissioned in three parts as a response to the curatorial theme conceived by Malik. This is comprised of Fear Gives Wings to Courage Part I; a new edition of the Cork Street Galleries Banners Commission forming an outdoor element of the 

exhibition on view until the end of 2025; Fear Gives Wings to Courage Part II; a presentation 

of works within each participating gallery space, on view from 11 to 25 July 2025; and Fear 

Gives Wings to Courage Part III; CATALOGUE Issue 8:0, guest-edited by Malik, which coincided with Frieze London 2025.

Taking its title from Jean Cocteau’s seminal 1938 work La peur donnant des ailes au courage

(Fear Giving Wings to Courage), the exhibition celebrates 100 years of Cork Street and the 

transformative potential of artists' voices both within gallery spaces and outside of them. 

Gesturing to the street's long-established cultural history, the exhibition's theme recalls Cork 

Street’s pioneering role in transforming London into a hub for international art practices in 

the twentieth century, while also making it one of the key platforms in Europe for the 

expansion of Surrealist and Dadaist movements.

13 years after Freddy Mayor established the first gallery on Cork Street in 1925, Peggy 

Guggenheim opened her 'Guggenheim Jeune' gallery in 1938. While hosting her first show 

with the famed polymath Jean Cocteau, the gallery stirred up significant controversy due to 

his painting La peur donnant des ailes au courage (Fear Giving Wings to Courage), which was 

confiscated by British customs authorities upon arrival in the United Kingdom. Similarly, this 

exhibition nods to the necessity of the gallery ecosystem in encouraging, upholding and 

presenting artists' practices that are assertions of agency in the face of societal and political 

pressures. The galleries on Cork Street were asked to respond to the theme with artists’ work 

that can be thought of as emblematic of Cocteau’s unabashed vigour and Guggenheim’s 

abiding belief in supporting artists. The galleries were also encouraged to profile artists who 

continue to draw from the legacies of Surrealism, not as a mere style or movement within the 

Western canon, but rather as a state of mind; a fluid, boundless approach of navigating 

notions of the self and society that transgress borders and temporalities. 

Follow @CorkStreetGalleries and Visit http://CorkStGalleries.com to discover more about this history of Cork Street as well as current exhibitions! Follow Louisa Buck on her Instagram @LouBuck01