Artefacts

LONDON'S art world emerges from its seasonal hibernation with a number of gallery moves. Karsten Schubert takes his business upstairs to new premises in Foley Street and Le Chat Noir moves to Albemarle Street, while David Messum, who has returned from the country to take a lease on William Jackson's vacated Cork Street gallery until January, is reported to be on the look-out for a new London venue. Also to Cork Street comes Bath's innovative Beaux-Arts Gallery with Elisabeth Frink, while Damien Hirst's minder Jay Jopling goes public in his own exhibition space in Duke Street, opening with work by Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Artists, too, are on the move as Howard Hodgkin announces his departure from Waddington's stable with a long-awaited show of new paintings at Anthony D'Offay, which promises to be one of the year's most stimulating exhibitions.

Flavour of the month, however, must be Ben Nicholson, with shows at the Tate Gallery, Bernard Jacobson and Marlborough Graphics. These, it is to be hoped, might bestow International Modernist status on an artist hitherto denied it.

Coincidentally, at Nicholson's one-time Cornish home, the new Tate St Ives has just clocked up its 100,000th visitor. In London, the RA continues to draw 1,800 a day to its notoriously selective overview of 20th-century American Art: perhaps this will render ineffectual whatever truth might lie behind the recent (and hotly denied) reports that, despite substantial sponsorship, the grandiose project has exceeded not only its hanging space but its budget. At least the punters' trek to catch Part 2 of the show at north London's Saatchi Gallery is eased by the hourly free bus service which has been spotted on its return journey to the RA depositing satisfied artoholics outside West End stores.