LONDON — David Zwirner London is about to add an extra strand to its program. The blue chip gallery’s British outpost — which opened last October with a Luc Tuymans show — will inaugurate an additional exhibition space tomorrow night. Starting with three shows a year, the gallery's Upper Room will operate separately from the its main exhibition schedule and function as a testing ground for new ideas, showcasing artists ranging from emerging to historical figures.

“I don’t think of it as a project space,” partner Angela Choon told ARTINFO UK. “It’s a program of experimental and exciting exhibitions we want to do. We want it to be distinctive but just as rigorous in its concept.”

The first exhibition, “Days in Lieu,” is loosely articulated around the notion of work and leisure, creativity and idleness within artistic practices. It opens on Roger Hiorns’s so-called “foam sculptures” (all “untitled,” 2008), oozing frothy shapes from hanging ceramic structures. Associate director and curator of the exhibition Rodolphe von Hofmannsthal sees these pieces as “self-portraits” — entities obstinately producing new material, even if most of it ends up in bubbly puddles on the floor.

Echoing the watery ephemerality of Hiorns’s proposition, “Taker” (2012-2013), by Royal Academy student Prem Sahib consists of a sheet of aluminum dripping with what looks like condensation. A couple of traces in the middle suggest a hand has wiped off the vapor. Yet each translucent drop is made of resin and has been meticulous applied to the surface. The result is confounding, a canny trompe-l’oeil gorged with the sensuality of an illicit steam room.

The eroticism turns crudely festive in Jason Rhoades’s “Chandelier 5” (2006), with its neon words evoking female genitalia, flashing among a miscellaneous assemblage of wires, ropes, a goat heads, and a whip.

Zwirner's Upper Room also allows a slight bending of the rules. The gallery represents Rhoades and Isa Genzken in New York but not in London (where they are taken care of by Hauser & Wirth), yet both artists are presented in the show — Genzken with a garment soaked in paint (“Untitled (shirt),” ca. 1998), compressing fashion, sculpture, and painting in one striking gesture.

Martin Kippenberger’s painting collaged with actual beer cans, “Alkoholfolter” (1982) — “alcohol hell” — is a conflicted statement on the equally productive and destructive potential of altered consciousness. Occupying the main wall, Alexandra Bircken’s mural of knitted metal, “Uknit” (2012), reinvents a traditionally female craft to create a coat of mail for the gallery. It acts as a background, adding formal coherence to the artists’ multifarious sculptural interventions.

Project space or not, the drive by galleries to include a more open-ended component to their program is gathering momentum. White Cube Bermondsey’s showcase of new artists in their “Inside the White Cube” series, and Sadie Coles HQ’s Situation (curated by Sarah Lucas, who is also the main exhibitor) are only two other high-profile examples. Zwirner’s Upper Room is inscribed in this dynamic. Like these initiatives, it brings a welcome lightness and sense of serendipity in the gallery’s sleek operations. 

“Days in Lieu,” January 17 - February 16, The Upper Room, David Zwirner, London