Dear friends, colleagues, and supporters,

After eight formative years between Athens and London, we share, with a full and grateful heart, that Hot Wheels (Projects, 2017; Athens, 2019; London, 2023) will come to close at the end of 2025. The exhibitions currently on view in Athens and London will be our last, with their final days on December 20th and December 13th, respectively.

Hot Wheels Projects began in 2017 in a neoclassical Athenian apartment, shortly after documenta 14—a significant exhibition and a moment in the city that set our pace and shaped our activities, unfolding alongside the artists and curators working in Athens at the time. Housed on Patision, opposite the Polytechnio and only steps from the Archaeological Museum, the project space lived inside our shared home—improvised, generous, full of firsts and unruly events, often with Gigi, our infamous gallery dog, trotting at our heels.

Hot Wheels Athens—initially still housed on Patision, and later in a 1960s polykatoikia in Patisia and a restored 1840s townhouse in Exarcheia—marked our shift toward a more traditional gallery structure. Many of the artists we first showed in the project space became our roster, as the new format enabled us to formalize long-standing relationships and create alliances with peers abroad who were consolidating networks in their own cities. With widening ambition and rigor, and a steady dedication to conceptual practices, we pushed at our own limits and emerged as the first commercial gallery of our generation in the city. Hot Wheels Athens also became—and remained—a space for hosting: a place to welcome artists, curators, and friends from elsewhere, and to introduce them to the scene from which we emerged. It was also a time when our instinct for collaboration gathered shape, resonant with the spirit around us: through co-founding ECHO in Cologne, joining Condo in London and Constellations in Warsaw, and the many informal ways we found to work together in between.

Hot Wheels London arrived fortuitously, in step with other galleries in the city, and into a renewed, forward-leaning chapter in London—one that echoed the momentum we felt in Athens in our earliest years. Within this atmosphere, we found our place in Bloomsbury, among a constellation of new galleries opening, gathering, and supporting one another. The expansion beyond Athens also strengthened our focus on artists from the wider Southeastern Mediterranean and Balkan region, allowing us to represent these practices beyond their borders. We are appreciative of the embrace we received—from peers, from Camden Art Centre, from Frieze—and for the sense of possibility the city offered us. Our building on Great Russell Street felt strangely destined too: an architectural echo of our first Athens space, with its mirrored entrances, distinct height, and stucco details; another museum at our doorstep (this time the British); and, improbably, another fig tree outside our office window.

This project, in all its iterations, has been our most steadfast commitment. Above all else, we have endless respect, appreciation, and love for the artists and their practices. It has been a privilege to realize their shows, support their ideas, and share and place their works. Thank you for your trust, Delia, Anastasia, Pierre, Sem, Jesper, Yorgos, Maria, Marina, Kyriakos, and Aris. The gallery’s story remained indebted to your ideas, and we remain committed to championing them beyond the years of our programme. We are also deeply grateful for the many team members who worked alongside us through these years, among them Chloe, Kons, Dinos, Lotte, and Van.

It feels fitting to close both spaces with the exhibitions currently on view. In Athens, Mutlu Çerkez’s posthumous show, The Year 2025 Will Not Take Place, brings into focus a conceptual practice that has preoccupied us for much of the past year, defined by an undeterred approach that resisted familiar narratives of progress and the assumption that work must move toward a resolution. In London, Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis’ I guess I’m not so special in the end centers early memories and the shifting, reflexive ways a life is narrated around them.

If green, wide-eyed beginnings come with their own generosity—full of risk, instinct, and a kind of productive naivety—then endings offer the clarity of looking back, and the assured sense that something was worth doing. We are proud of what Hot Wheels became, of the choice to conclude its activities on our own terms, and of where we leave it. The ability to maintain its legacy—to shape the narrative of its years and to consciously bring the gallery to a close at a moment that reflects the integrity of its work—was a meaningful motivation behind this decision. And while it did not arrive by way of overreach, a forced hand, or the current climate, we want to affirm that supporting the ecosystem of culture—artists, galleries, curators, writers—continues to rely on both public and private commitment, and on our shared willingness to sustain it.

Happy holidays, and happy new year.

With love always,
με αγάπη,
Hugo and Julia