On a recent afternoon, in a ground-floor retail unit in one of London’s many vacant office buildings, a pair of flame-red platform heel boots with what looked like tentacles growing out of them and a multimedia sculpture of a coffin-like object circled by plastic shark fins were on show.

“I’m against empty space,” said Camilla Cole, the founder of Hypha Studios, a London-based nonprofit that persuades commercial landlords to let artists work and exhibit for free in unoccupied stores and offices. Cole had organized MELT, a group exhibition showcasing works by 32 recognition-hungry artists who work with Hypha and a fellow studio provider, Creative Land Trust. The show opened in Euston Tower, an empty 1970s high-rise in the city center, on the same day as the V.I.P. preview of the nearby Frieze London fair.

Founded in 2021, Hypha Studios provides free working space for more than 300 artists at nine sites across Britain. “I’ve found a loophole,” said Cole, 38, a curator who dropped out of Goldsmiths College, in London, without completing her degree. She noted that British businesses can pay lower property taxes if they allow nonprofits to be tenants. “Landlords save money by me being in their space,” she said.

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, online shopping and remote working have created a blight of shuttered storefronts and empty office buildings in towns and cities across the world. Allowing artists to infuse life into these vacant commercial spaces, even on a temporary basis, has become one way landlords can address the issue. (They can also burnish their corporate responsibility credentials.)