At the still point of the turning world: Ally Fallon
Current exhibition
Overview
Ally Fallon, The Night Smelt of Moss, 2026
Opening Reception: Sunday 7 June, 12 – 3pm
Hales is delighted to announce At the still point of the turning world, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ally Fallon. This marks the artist’s debut solo show with the gallery, following on from his inclusion in Hales group show A Room for Keepsakes (2025-2026).Fallon was named the winner of the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize, becoming the youngest artist to win the prestigious award. This year he will have a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery and is featured in New Contemporaries which tours from South London Gallery to MIMA.
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, while introducing a contemporary sensitivity rooted in lived environments and psychological space. Central to his practice is the process of painting: an exploratory approach to colour, line, and material that allows each work to reveal itself through its physical components.
The exhibition takes its title, At the still point of the turning world, from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on temporal existence, where consciousness resides in the ‘still point’ of the present. Fallon’s paintings similarly engage with time as an abstract and elastic condition. The works appear to suspend duration, holding moments in a state of quiet tension. The artist conceives of his paintings as portals — simultaneously occupying the physical space of the viewer and an internal, pictorial space. The painted surface operates as the threshold between these two realms.
Ideas and motifs generate from one work to another, reworked and reconsidered in a palimpsest of marks. Often beginning with quick preparatory drawings, Fallon develops compositions through a two-part process. The first involves the labour-intensive rendering of densely patterned floors drawn from his immediate surroundings and travels, which ground the paintings in a recognisable world. This repetitive activity, in turn, frees the subconscious, allowing atmosphere, intuition, and unexpected gestures to emerge. A sense of anticipation permeates the works, as controlled structures give way to moments of improvisation.
Fallon’s paintings balance precision and unpredictability. Subtle disruptions—an unexpected density of paint or a shift in surface destabilise the viewer’s initial reading, encouraging a slower, more contemplative mode of looking. In this way, the works evolve through a continual process of transformation, where forms dissolve and reconfigure over time.
In this new body of work, Fallon introduces a shift in format, orientating several canvases horizontally. This adjustment establishes a broader, more expansive spatial field, creating a sense of staging in which marks and forms can unfold. As with all of Fallon’s paintings, the compositions operate within carefully developed parameters that are continually tested and redefined, maintaining a delicate equilibrium between control and openness.
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.
In 2025 and 2026 Fallon was featured in Apollo Painting School group shows at Alice Amati, London, and is included in an Apollo group exhibition at The Grundy Museum and Gallery, Blackpool, UK (28th March – 28th June 2026). In 2025 Fallon had a 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.
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