Nigel Hall: My Choice is an exhibition featuring work selected by the artist to highlight key stages and developments in his career, spanning from the mid 1960s through to present day. This marks his thirteenth solo show with Annely Juda Fine Art, his first exhibition with the gallery being in 1978. We are excited to present Nigel Hall’s works in our new Hanover Square space.
Hall’s original subject was landscape and continues to be a frequent source of inspiration. His interest is not in portraying a recognisable place but evoking the remembered sensations of being in a physical space, where sculptural forms represent the essential and elemental. Hall has said "My work has always been about place…. I am fascinated by the way geometry can be discerned in landscape." His images and motifs may be essentially abstract and geometric but are inspired and informed by the natural world.
The works, both two dimensional and three dimensional explore the relationship of mass to void, and of the seen and the implied. What is omitted is as important as what is retained. His sculptures, fabricated in steel, aluminium, bronze and birch plywood give as much emphasis to the way in which they encircle and enclose ‘empty’ space as they do to the constructed material parts.
Drawings are of equal importance to sculpture in Hall’s practice and are usually developed in colour and charcoal. Images emerge slowly and the preliminary stages are retained in the faint charcoal lines and dust that ground the image on the paper. The intensity of the black is achieved through multiple layers of charcoal. Colour is essentially the result of mood and experiment.
Central to Hall’s work is the way in which his sculptural forms alter the viewers perception of space and volume as the viewer moves around the work. This awareness with the human relation to form and scale - to distance and to our sense of the vertical and horizontal in landscape - is central and runs throughout his work.
Nigel Hall: My Choice begins with an early, figurative work (dating from Hall’s time at the Royal College in London) “Lone Figure with Balloon” 1965. The wavy form of the figure mirrored by the sway of the tethered balloon captures a palpable energy in the space between the two elements, showing an early example of an interest in duality that became a constant. By the 1970s, works become increasingly abstract and geometrically defined - wall sculptures which articulate both the surface of the wall and the spatial forms the painted aluminium rods define. A 1982 grid-like work “Black Shoal” changing direction and hinting at the observed origins of the work, the movement of shoals of fish.
By the mid 1990s, Hall also began making wall and floor-standing sculptures constructed in birch plywood, introducing more curvilinear forms. There re-emerged an interest in the ellipse, first included in a work from 1968, titled “Soda Lake”. Rounded, paired and doubled forms suggesting complementaries: emptiness and solidity, stillness and movement - contrasted but contained within one unified whole. Works from successive decades continue these core interests introducing new materials and processes; colour and material taking on an increasing significance in terms of the intrinsic qualities of each form.
In the larger gallery stand Hall’s two newest sculptures: “Concavities” 2025 in bright yellow painted aluminium, an exploration of concentric ellipses, and a two-metre high Corten steel piece “String Section II” 2026 with undulating forms echoing across its volume.
Nigel Hall has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. Exhibitions include major solo exhibitions at the Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, a retrospective at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Royal Academy, London and international shows with Galerie Andres Thalmann in Paris and Zurich, Galerie Scheffel and Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany and Galeria Álvaro Alcázar in Madrid.
This exhibition is Nigel Hall’s thirteenth solo exhibition with Annely Juda Fine Art, and his works have also featured in many joint and mixed gallery exhibitions. Hall is widely represented in major public collections worldwide including Tate Gallery, London, MoMA, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum in London, the Los Angeles County Museum, Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Galerie Berlin, Kunsthalle Mannheim and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
Born in 1943 in Bristol, Nigel Hall studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol from 1960-64 and the Royal College of Art, London form 1964-67. A Harkness fellowship took him to America from 1967-69. Amongst awards received, the Pollock Krasner Award in 1995 and the Jack Goldhill Sculpture Prize at the Royal Academy of Art in 2002. He was head of MA Sculpture at Chelsea School of Art and served on the committee of the British School at Rome. In 2003 he was elected a Royal Academician and awarded an Honorary Doctorate form University of the Arts, London in 2017.
Annely Juda Fine Art
Annely Juda Fine Art presents a programme of contemporary artists alongside historical works from the C20th avant-garde. Known for representing world-leading artists such as David Hockney, David Nash and Suzanne Treister, alongside the estates of Anthony Caro, Naum Gabo and Leon Kossoff and the gallery recently added new artists including Nicola Turner and Sammi Lynch to the stable. Based in new premises at 16 Hanover Square – a Georgian townhouse – the gallery has operated since 1968.
For further information and images, please contact ajfa@annelyjudafineart.co.uk
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Opening Times: 10am - 5.30pm Tuesday - Friday. 11am - 5pm Saturdays. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
No booking required. Last entrance 5pm Tuesday- Friday. 4.30pm Saturdays.
