Maureen Paley has been a pioneer of showing contemporary art ever since she opened her gallery in the East End of London in 1984—a time when the area did not house any other contemporary art galleries. Then called Interim Art, Paley’s gallery took on its current name in 2004.
Read MoreMaureen Paley moved to its current location on Herald Street, Bethnal Green, in 1999, and opened a project space called Morena di Luna in Hove in 2017.
From its inception, Maureen Paley has promoted international contemporary art with a focus on artists from Europe, America, and the United Kingdom. While working across diverse practices, many gallery artists share a common interest in social concerns. These include German artist Wolfgang Tillmans, whose has presented subjects such as pride parades and Black Lives Matter rallies in intimate photographs and moving image works; Dutch artist Erik van Lieshout and his deeply personal installation and collages; and Gillian Wearing, a Young British Artist with a penchant for tackling public and private spheres in her photographs and videos. These artists are represented alongside General Idea, an artist group known for its role in the development of discourses on queer identity and AIDS activism in art; Liam Gillick, whose sculptures and films interrogate socio-political and economic systems of the constructed world; and Daria Martin, who engages with the idea of empathy in films inspired by dreams.
Over the years, Maureen Paley has recruited young artists such as Paulo Nimer Pjota, hailing from Brazil, whose large, un-stretched canvases, pottery, and sheets of found metals address history, philosophy, and criminal symbology, amongst other concerns; Jordan-born Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who deploys performance, installation, photographs, essays, lectures, and visual and audio investigations to throw light on the significance of the act of listening in political environments; and Felipe Baeza, who engages with the themes of migration and queerness, among others, in his collages and prints.
Maureen Paley participates in Condo—a collaborative exhibition in which hosting galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries—and major international art fairs including Art Basel, Frieze New York, Frieze London, and Independent Brussels.
Wolfgang Tillmans, The State We’re In, A (2015). Exhibition view: Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Paley, London (9 June–7 August 2016). © Wolfgang Tillmans. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London.
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