Hales Gallery, 7 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA
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Hales Gallery was founded in Deptford in 1992 by two Pauls, Hedge and Maslin (wouldn’t it be easier if everyone was called Paul?). The affable Hedge is the Paul one sees in the space, which moved to the Tea Building, Shoreditch, in 2004. Ironically, perhaps, there was a café attached to the gallery in Deptford, but not in the Tea Building. Since 2016, Hales has also had a presence in New York, with a full-scale gallery in Chelsea since 2018. The 32 represented practises are a good mix of estates that the gallery has sought to develop (John Hoyland, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ken Kiff…), established artists supported long-term (Hew Locke, Richard Slee, Sunil Gupta…), older artists who deserve more recognition than they have received (Laetitia Yhap, Mary Webb, Virginia Jaramillo…) and younger artists such as Haroun Hayward, Anthony Cudahy and Jordan Ann Craig.
My personal favourites are probably Andrew Bick’s systematic disruptions and Rachel Champion’s installations at the intersection of biology, geology, and architecture. As is the nature of such a long-running enterprise, some artists have moved on: I recall excellent shows by Tomoko Takahashi, Danny Rolph, and the late Carolee Schneemann and Jane Harris. Come to that, Jake & Dinos Chapman first exhibited at Hales in 1992. Of course, there are group shows too, and the current one, ‘Regions’, is particularly good: 18 works by 9 artists that act as landscapes without actually showing a landscape. You’ll need to visit to see what I mean.
London’s gallery scene is varied, from small artist-run spaces to major institutions and everything in between. Each week, art writer and curator Paul Carey-Kent gives a personal view of a space worth visiting.
