Frieze London

Hales Gallery

Stand D1

Frieze London

Regent’s Park

London, NW1 4NR

VIP preview: 4 October 2017

Public days: 5 - 8 October 2017

Hales Gallery is proud to announce its participation in Frieze London 2017, with a group presentation of key works by four artists whose significant contributions to art history stretch from the 1960s to today: Frank Bowling, Stuart Brisley, Virginia Jaramillo and Carolee Schneemann. From painting to performance, a sustained engagement with social issues and a boundary-pushing approach to medium characterises the work of each of these artists, reflecting the long-standing focus of the gallery’s programme.

Frank Bowling’s spectacular sculptural relief Jetty (1983) represents a key moment in the legendary painter’s development. Bowling’s sculptural reliefs, initially shown in the artist’s seminal 1986 exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London, received critical acclaim with Tate acquiring one of the works from the series a year after the exhibition. Spreadout Ron Kitaj, acquired in 1987, was the first paintings by a living black British artist to enter the museum’s collection. Bowling’s ‘middle period’ also comprises a key strand of Mappa Mundi, a major solo survey exhibition currently on view at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Works by the artist are also currently included in Tate Modern’s critically acclaimed exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.

Also featured in Tate’s Soul of a Nation, along with the Brooklyn Museum’s We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 1965–85, are works by Virginia Jaramillo, who uses abstraction as a vehicle to express materially our sensory perceptions of space and time. Immersed in New York’s dynamic art scene from the late 1960s, Jaramillo was involved in a number of important exhibitions and publications, including the 1972 Whitney Annual, the now-famous 1971 DeLuxe Show in Houston, and the legendary feminist journal Heresies (1979 and 1982). The confidence and creative energy of this period are channelled in the bold canvas of Green Space (1974), in its masterfully calibrated balance of freedom and structure, colour and form.

At the core of Stuart Brisley’s pioneering multi-media practice is an ongoing commitment to making work that questions social and political structures. Both Louise Bourgeois’ Leg (2002) and Royal Ordure (1996) belong to The Museum of Ordure, a fictional institution curated by Brisley’s alter-ego RY Sirb, developed over the past two decades as a sophisticated mode of institutional critique. The Collection of Ordure was originally debuted at the Freud Museum in London; over the course of his seven-decade career Brisley has participated international exhibitions from the 1977 edition of Documenta to Raven Row’s Gallery House retrospective in London this year, which featured a new live Brisley work. 

Carolee Schneemann’s 1980s Dust Painting series, from her project investigating Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, is a powerful exemplar of the artist’s inimitable ethics and aesthetics. Schneemann has unwaveringly borne witness to the realities of global conflict, whilst remaining committed to her identity as a painter exploring painting’s possibilities. In 2015, the Museum Der Moderne Salzburg held a major retrospective of Schneemann’s work, accompanied by a full-colour catalogue. The exhibition is currently on show at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main, Germany and will travel to MoMA PS1, New York, in late 2017.