Hales Gallery

Tea Building
7 Bethnal Green Road
London E1 6LA
T 44 (0)20 7033 1938
F 44 (0)20 7033 1939

2012 has been the year in which Hales Gallery has been celebrating its twenty years as an influential contemporary gallery on the London (and international) scene. As with all key dates, our anniversary has engendered an engagement with not only the past but the future. Hales now has a young new gallery director in Stuart Morrison as well as several additions to our dynamic staff team (Sasha Gomeniuk, Charles Robinson) who are helping shape our future based on the foundation of the solid legacy we have already created.

Hales Gallery's Stuart Morrison (left) and Paul hedge (right) with Omar Ba (centre)  during a recent visit to his studio in Geneva

Hales has often used the SEVEN project in Miami as an opportunity to present elements of the London gallery programme in microcosm. Our recent preoccupation with the post-war legacy of Britain’s pioneering black artists will take centre stage this year.

Frank Bowling, Jack, 1978, acrylic in canvas, 203 x 130 cm 

Last year, Hales gallery presented two large and dramatic paintings by the 79 year old Guyanese painter Frank Bowling who is still a key figure of influence.  This proved to be the beginning of a very busy year for Bowling including his solo presentation (Drop, Roll, Slide, Drip. Poured Paintings from 1973 to 1978) at The Tate Gallery in London. This year, Hales will reflect this in a presentation of six works from the late 1970s at SEVEN. Bowlings breakthrough map paintings from the late 60s/early 70s will be shown at Hales Gallery in September 2013.

Frank Bowling in his studio (2012)

We have recently spent some time researching the career of the painter Aubrey Williams (1926-1990) who was also originally from Guyana and also settled in London in the 1950s. Hales gallery will be showing four works from a series made in the 1970s where William’s interest in ancient Meso-American deities including Quetzalcoatl (a feathered serpent) are evident. Works from the early 80s (Shostakovich series) by Aubrey Williams will be shown at Hales in June 2013.

Aubrey Williams, September, 1977, oil on canvas, 114.5 x 127.5 cm

Of course, Hales gallery is well known for its forward looking programme. This year, Hew Locke (the third of our pioneering trio) has made a series of brand new works especially to be shown at SEVEN. Locke arrived in London from Guyana in the early 1980s and has worked a rich seam of post colonial rhetoric producing fantastic works that we have regularly shown at SEVEN. 
It has recentrly been announced the Hew Locke has been commissioned to create work for the Miami Art Museum re-opening in December 2013. He will be giving a talk about his rt and his upcoming commission on November 17th, at the Miami Art Museum.  
A new show of Locke’s work will be on show in April/May 2013 at Hales Gallery in London.

Hew Locke, HMS Belfast, 2012, painted photograph, 127 x 188 cm

We are very excited to be showing the work of Senegalese painter, Omar Ba and African American performance/mixed media artist Derrick Adams this year for the first time. Both of these artists are new to the Hales Gallery programme. Ba studied at the L’ecole Nationale des Beaux-arts in Dakar and now lives and works in Geneva and was recently included in an important survey show of young artists living in Switzerland at Aarguaer Kunsthaus, Aarau. He showed a series of four spectacular works painted onto Corrugated Cardboard along with a giant sized wall figure. His magic real paintings of creepy despots and tin pot dictators combined with tribal imagery and everyday artifacts are both fascinating and compelling. 

Derrick Adams, Elevation Section #9, 2012, mized media collage on paper,  106 x  69 cm

Adams received an MFA from Columbia University and lives and works in Brooklyn NY, he recently showed at Boston Center for the arts and made a series of performances at BAM’S new Fisher Theater. The works we will show are two collages on paper from Adams’ recent Deconstruction Worker series. Adams compression of architectural languages and facsimile materiality adapted to suit a hip hop generation are impressive.

Sebastiaan Bremer, Klärchens Lied, Unique hand-painted chromogenic print with mixed media, 63,5 x 63 cm  

Also featuring this year are a series of portrait heads from Sebastiaan Bremer’s Egmont revisited series of 2011/12. Bremer is Dutch (living in NY) and has been a frequent part of the recent Hales programme. His exploration into the nature and history of Romantic art, national identity and the nuclear family come together in these painted photographs.

Adam Dant, Manhattan Dissected, (detail),  2012, ink on paper, 132.5 x 163 cm  

Adam Dant’s (another Hales regular) ongoing series From the Library of Dr. London rendered in ink and watercolour were highly regarded and reviewed during their showing at Hales in September 2012. The drawings depict major world cities as living beings contained in the annals of a fictional historic library. Dant’s renditions of Jerusalem, Manhattan and Monaco (shown as a Picasso nude) will all feature at Seven.