Ally Fallon, Poppies, 2026
Ally Fallon (b.1998 London, UK) lives and works in Manchester, UK. He received an MA in Painting from Manchester School of Art in 2023 and was part of Louise Giovanelli’s Apollo Painting School programme in 2024. Fallon was named the winner of the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize, becoming the youngest artist to win the prestigious award. He will have a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in 2026 and will be featured in New Contemporaries at South London Gallery and MIMA in 2026.
Fallon’s painting practice deftly combines structure and spontaneity, drawing on personal experience and a sustained engagement with interior spaces. Working within the legacy of British abstraction, his paintings extend a lineage concerned with materiality, spatial tension, and the act of painting itself, while introducing a contemporary sensitivity rooted in lived environments and psychological space.
His compositions often suggest tangible, architectural scenes with a heightened sense of depth and perspective, yet these are disrupted by moments of painterly abstraction. Recurring motifs of rooms with tiled floors function as sites for gestural mark making, where memory is embedded into the surface of the canvas. This interplay produces an atmosphere that is both familiar and disquieting, lending the works an uncanny presence that resists fixed interpretation.
Drawn from Fallon’s everyday life, the paintings are informed by the floors and surfaces of both his locale and travels as well as the palimpsest of marks found on walls. In his willingness for paintings to allude to the wider world, he has developed a distinct visual language in his handling of the spatial qualities and the layering of form in each work. Central to his practice is the process of painting itself: an exploratory approach to colour, line, and material that allows each work to reveal itself through its physical components.
In 2025 and 2026 Fallon was featured in Apollo Painting School group shows at Alice Amati, London, and in 2026 will be included in an Apollo group exhibition at The Grundy Museum and Gallery, Blackpool, UK. In 2025 saw Fallon’s duo show with Jack Ginno, Here or There or Elsewhere at Heaven 11, Manchester. He was the 2023 Artist in Residence at Joya: AiR, in southeastern Spain. Fallon has exhibited in a number of group shows across the UK, including HOME, Manchester; The FG Gallery, Cheshire; and Boomer Gallery, London.