The Berkeley Square Hotel

The Square occupies the ground and basement floors as well as the Berkeley Suites of the Berkeley Square Hotel in Bristol, an eclectic yet elegant art-hotel recently ranked fifth in The Guardian’s top 100 UK boutique hotels for under £100. The gallery space incorporates the Square Club which is the region's leading members' club for the arts and creative industries. Open Gallery was asked to provide art programming for the Hotel, Club and Suites, setting up seven permanent video art installations therein.

Open Gallery provided two installations for the Square Gallery and Berkeley Suites to permanently complement its schedule of challenging and varied temporary exhibitions, as well as its edgy interior design and furnishings. These are situated in the main lounge on the ground floor and in the basement bar. Sharing space with the private members club, which itself provides the public spaces for the Hotel above, creates one of the most unusual exhibition venues in Bristol. Rather than contemplating sparsely hung works in cavernous white silences, the Square Gallery hopes to offer a new way of experiencing art for its visitors which builds upon the day-to-day happenings of the space to promote a lively stage for discourse and enjoyment.

Open Gallery also provided an installation into the open plan living rooms for five newly refurbished deluxe apart-hotels - Berkeley Suites.

The material exhibited at the Berkeley Square is regularly changed. However, in keeping with the fact that is was the very first permanent installation completed by Open Gallery, the curated collection is dominated by natural imagery of the gallery’s early Elements series.

Images were projected directly onto the matte surfaces of the walls. Both projectors for the Square Club, although exposed, were installed discretely using ceiling mounts in the lounge on the ground floor and wall mounts at the left rear of the bar in the basement. As for the Berkeley Suites, we provided them with a group series for each of the suites (5 in total), creating an ambient experience for guests from the outset, alongside the unique opportunity to encouter and experience video art in a more intimate setting.

Open Gallery has upgraded all projectors to high end laser projectors to meet the new 4K footage of our video art, which provides a brighter and crisper video art image.