Serpentine Gallery

British contemporary art gallery; established in 1970 and located at two nearby venues in Central London. Notable artists exhibited at Serpentine Gallery over the years include Man Ray, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Richard Prince, Henry Moore (3), Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Marina Abramović, Maria Lassnig and numerous others. In 2013, the Serpentine Gallery expanded to a second building, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery — inaugurated in honor of the patrons and major donators, the Sackler family. Sacklers are notorious as primary beneficiaries of Purdue Pharma, a US drug manufacturer that directly caused deadly overdose epidemics of its opioid painkiller, OxyContin. During her exhibition's opening speech, German filmmaker and visual artist Hito Steyerl condemned Serpentine Gallery for this association. Subsequently, the organization rebranded as Serpentine, designating two locations as Serpentine North and South, respectively. (It also published a press release stating that "donations [...] from the Sackler Trust are historic, and we have no future plans to accept funding.") Since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery has been commissioning an annual Summer Pavilion from the world's leading architects. Each structure is completed within six months and remains open to the public for three months. Notable highlights are Zaha Hadid (2000), Oscar Niemeyer (2003), Rem Koolhaas (06), Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen (2007), Frank Gehry (08), Jean Nouvel (2010), Peter Zumthor and Piet Oudolf (11), Ai Weiwei with Swiss-based bureau Herzog & de Meuron (12) and, most recently, Theaster Gates (2022).