Biography
What would a painting made by a sculptor look like?
Iain Hales has been toying with this question for the past fifteen years. Texture, material and colour are central concerns of his practice. In his ongoing attempt to collapse the space between painting and sculpture, he explores the slippage between ‘object’ and ‘image’, three-dimensions and flatness, form and surface.
Habitually working in compositions of separately made components, Hales’ work sits in a liminal space between abstraction and figuration. There are a number reference points or motifs that he regularly returns to – the Classical ruin or fragment, architectural space and systems of measurement, notions of (museological) display and dislocation, the grid, layering, piercing, the materiality of colour, the juxtaposition of minimal and expressive forms, and the combination of industrial with more esoteric art materials.
Recent exhibitions include "This and That", Sid Motion Gallery, London | “Floor Show”, EUCA Annex, London, “The Best Leftovers | Subject Platter II” at Corner7, London (solo); “PAINTINGS” at m2 Gallery, London (solo); “Italian Postcard”, Il Bisonte Gallery, Florence; “Thinking is Making”, Crosslane Projects, Kendal; and “The Hidden Horizontal: The Cornice in Art and Architecture” at the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zurich, Switzerland.