Frieze London | Booth A24 | 11 - 13 October 2024

For the 2024 edition of Frieze London, Hales is delighted to present a selection of works by artists Martyn Cross, Sarah Faux, Carole Gibbons, Haroun Hayward, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Ken Kiff, Hew Locke, Rob Lyon, Richard Slee and Lucy Stein. The presentation features a selection of historic and contemporary works, reflecting the programming and vision of the gallery.

Martyn Cross (b. 1975, Yate, UK) lives and works in Bristol, UK. Cross is primarily a painter, creating works that speak to ancient and mythic lands. Applying thin layers of dry-brush pigment, the paintings are reminiscent of unearthed artefacts. Drawing on a myriad of concepts from mythology and the medieval, Cross’ works personify the landscape. Figures, eyes and solitary limbs emerge from clouds and rivers, speaking to an alternate fiction. Ambiguous narratives are formed in reoccurring scenes and motifs, creating an immersive world. In 2022, Cross had a solo exhibition at Hales London, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY. Cross’ first solo institutional exhibition was held at Flatland Projects, Bexhill, UK in 2023, and his work featured in the John Moores Painting Prize exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, for which it was shortlisted. His second solo exhibition at Hales London will opening in November 2024.

Sarah Faux (b. 1986 Boston, MA, USA) received her MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2015. She gained a joint BA and BFA from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in 2009. Faux lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Faux is a painter whose somatic work lies at the threshold of figuration and abstraction. Her paintings embrace unabashed sensuality, autonomy and pleasure. Faux's fluid compositions teeter on the edge of reality, revealing how much of our emotional and sensory lives take place beneath the surface. Faux is a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee for 2023-2024.

Carole Gibbons (b. 1935 Glasgow, UK) studied at Glasgow School of Art and was a member of The Young Glasgow Group alongside her peers Alan Fletcher and Douglas Abercrombie.After her studies she travelled to Europe, living in Spain for a time which deeply impacted her work, before returning to Glasgow, where she lives and works today. Receiving early career success between the 1960s-1980s, she was the first living woman to have a solo exhibition at Glasgow's Third Eye Centre in 1975. However, it has not been until recently that she has gained more widespread recognition. Gibbons has long been championed by artists Lucy Stein, Andrew Cranston, poet JF Hendry and writer Alasdair Gray. Gibbons' first exhibition in the US opened at White Columns in 2024. Her work is currently featured in Tate Britain's critically acclaimed touring exhibition Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990.

Haroun Hayward (b. 1983, London, UK) received a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting from University of Brighton and an MA in Fine Art Practice from Goldsmiths University, London. Hayward's paintings are a celebration of hybridity, harmoniously converging art historical and musical references with distinct modes of making. The paintings honour what informs Hayward's personal and artistic narrative — rave culture, abstract expressionism, post war British landscape painting and his mother's textile collection. Repetition and remixing, to borrow from music terminology, are key to the artist's painting process. Hayward's debut solo exhibition at Hales London opened in 2023, and Hales New York in 2024. His work is included in the collections of the Gujral Foundation, India; Kiran Nadar Collection, India and Arun Nayar Collection, UK among others.

Anwar Jalal Shemza (b.1928 - d.1985) was born in Simla, India to Kashmiri and Punjabi parents. Shemza attended Mayo School of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, graduating in 1947. In 1956, already an established artist and writer in his homeland, he relocated to England to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. His diasporic perspective allowed him to explore modernism through the double prism of Islamic and Western aesthetics. Throughout his career, Shemza's visual vocabulary drew on an array of deeply studied and lived experience, from carpet patterns and calligraphic forms to the environments around him: Mughal architecture from Lahore and the rural landscapes of Stafford, England. His work was recently included in Tate Liverpool's Radical Landscapes as well as in Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965 at the Barbican Centre, London, and currently features in The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain at Pallant House Gallery.

Ken Kiff RA (b. 1935, Dagenham, Essex — d. 2001, London, UK) is a celebrated British artist known for his visionary and distinct painting practice. He trained at the Hornsey School of Art (1955-61) and went on to teach at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art, where over thirty years he influenced generations of artists. Primarily a painter, Kiff pursued the formal qualities of painting - of shape, line, texture, transparency and colour. His practice was driven by an exploration of the material and emotional properties of colour, viewing colour as image, and image as colour. Recently The Sequence was the focus of a major solo exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (2018-2019). Kiff's first solo exhibition at Hales will open in London in April 2025.

Hew Locke RA OBE (b. 1959, Edinburgh, UK) spent his formative years (1966-80) in Guyana before returning to the UK to complete an MA in sculpture at the Royal College of Art (1994) and was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2022. Locke explores the languages of colonial and post-colonial power, how different cultures fashion their identities through visual symbols of authority, and how these representations are altered by the passage of time. These explorations have led Locke to a wide range of subject matters, imagery and media, assembling sources across time and space in his deeply layered artworks. In 2022/3, Locke's breath-taking Duveen Galleries commission The Procession was on view at Tate Britain, London and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. The artist's work Gilt, for the Met Museum Façade Commission was on view through May 2023 in NY, USA. Locke's groundbreaking exhibition what have we here? at the British Museum opens in October 2024. He will open a solo exhibition at Hales London in September.

Rob Lyon (b. 1982 Lancashire, UK) lives and works in Sussex, UK. A self-taught painter, Lyon has developed his own visual lexicon of mark making and motifs, composing landscapes from dots, dashes, triangles, and crosses to more referential repetitions of clouds, birds, and tree shapes. Expanding on Paul Nash's concept of 'genius loci' - the spirit of place - Lyon considers how we as visitors activate the landscape and how the landscape activates us. Walking, looking, and recalling this 'activation' are key to the process of making each painting. Pockets of light and airy space evoke an absence, omission, or clearing - Lyon has come to see these spaces as representations of portals that combine as a measure of consecrated land, giving form to the notion that the landscape is a temple of sorts. Lyon has had exhibitions at Warwick Arts Center, UK; Alzueta Gallery, Barcelona Spain; Adams and Ollman, Portland, Oregon, USA: Wondering People, London, UK; Gallery 94, Glyndebourne, UK; Blakefest 2020 and 2017, Bognor Regis, UK; the Warbling Collective, London, UK.

Richard Slee (1946, Cumbria, UK) studied ceramics at the Central School of Art & Design (1965-1970). He graduated with an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1988. Slee lives and works in London. As one of Britain's most important contemporary ceramic artists, Slee's work attempts to challenge every conventional notion in ceramic art, transcending its utilitarian roots, whilst also sidestepping the self-indulgent aspects of the studio tradition that became ubiquitous in the late twentieth century. His works lie in contemporary debate and reference the current positioning of material specialisations within visual creativity. Slee's work features in numerous public collections including the Stedelijik Museum, Amsterdam, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Lucy Stein (b. 1979, Oxford, UK) lives and works in St Just, West Cornwall, UK. Stein studied at The Glasgow School of Art, and De Ateliers, in Amsterdam. Her recent solo exhibition Wet Room toured from Spike Island, Bristol to De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill UK (2021/22). Her work has been shown at Futura, Prague, Czech Republic (2020); Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK (2019); Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Tate St Ives, UK (both 2018); NICC Brussels; TULCA festival, Galway; Newlyn Gallery, Penzance, UK (all 2017); Migros Museum, Zurich (2014); Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; and ICA London (both 2006). Lucy Stein's solo exhibition at Museo Casa Rusca, Locarno, Switzerland opens in August 2024.