Bankside Gallery has stood on Hopton Street, on the Thames Path beside Tate Modern, since it opened in 1980. It is the shared home of the Royal Watercolour Society and the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, two membership bodies whose combined membership runs to around three hundred working artists. Exhibitions change roughly monthly and focus on watercolour painting and original printmaking, with entry free and most works for sale directly from the gallery. A small bookshop stocks art, literature and poetry titles alongside exhibition catalogues. Staff work for the two societies rather than a commercial dealer, and the gallery also hires its rooms out for outside exhibitions and evening events. Quentin Blake has called it, in a 2025 comment used on the gallery's own site, a sympathetic space for showing new work.
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