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In 1990, Paul Hedge and Paul Maslin joined forces and converted a derelict building on Depfort High Street, into an art gallery. Halles Gallery was opened in 1992 as a basement space with a Cafè upstairs. The Cafè provided a much-needed meeting place for the creative community living in South West London and a cultural context for exhibiting exciting contemporary works. “We were both interested in urban regeneration and providing a cultural context for art”. Rather than opting for an already designated artist sector of London, the Gallery has chosen a busy market street that forms the focus of a multicultural community. The Gallery has provided a platform for many young British artists, including the Chapman brothers, Sarah Jones, John Frankland and Tomoko Takahashi.
Tomoko Takahashi featured in the Neurotic Realism show at the Saatchi Gallery and has recently been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize. Jonathan Callan features in the permanent collaction of the Henry Moore Institute, the British Museum and the British Arts Council and is experiencing great success in America. Sarah Beddington, Andrew Bick and Claude Heath all have been previously shortlisted for the John Moore’s Painting Prize and the Natwest Painting Prize. Hales Gallery has the reputation for showing and promoting a very distinct genre of work. The artists and the work are the antithesis of Saatchi’s Media star artists, they are generally ambivalent about the media, being more concerned about the integrity of the work. The work they make displays an obsessive physicality and a preoccupation with the hand made object or Painting, rather than the idea.
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