With her general air of New York cool, Maureen Paley cut a conspicuous dash in the early 1980s London art scene. Her sharp-edged style also extended to the small and perfectly formed gallery she was setting up at this time in a derelict terraced house in Beck Road, in what was then considered the wilder shores of Hackney, East London. Interim Art, as it was first called, began life in two pristine white-walled rooms described by its founder as a project space rather than a gallery. Here, in what was originally her studio, this recent Royal College of Art graduate put on pioneering and often first-time UK shows of Charles Ray, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay, Fischli/Weiss, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S., along with such emerging homegrown radicals as Helen Chadwick, Hannah Collins and Richard Deacon.
Both Robert Mapplethorpe and Claes Oldenburg felt sufficiently confident in this young tyro to lend work to Armed, an early Interim group show in 1984; and I remember my excitement on first seeing Jenny Holzer’s metal plaque Truisms (1978-87) when they made their UK debut at Beck Road, as well as Chadwick’s Meat Abstracts (1989), which presented giant colour photographs of steak and offal combined with gleaming lightbulbs.
Now the gamine punk has evolved into an art world grande dame: Interim Art has become the eponymous Maureen Paley, an esteemed bastion of the international art world that celebrates its 40th birthday this year.
But over four decades, much has also remained the same. The gallery’s 50-artist roster still includes Hannah Collins and Studio K.O.S. (sadly now without Tim Rollins) from the earliest days, while other stalwarts include Wolfgang Tillmans, Rebecca Warren, Gillian Wearing and Liam Gillick, all of whom have been with the gallery for many decades. Paley also works with AA Bronson and General Idea, Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Jane and Louise Wilson. Among the more recent arrivals are Felipe Baeza, Chioma Ebinama and the Reverend Joyce McDonald.
A collaborative ethos
The gallery has long outgrown the small spaces of Beck Road but it is still very much an East London bastion. The Maureen Paley mothership is currently situated in an industrial space in Bethnal Green, while 2020 saw the opening of the smaller Studio M in a former Shoreditch school building, shared with artist studios, creative workplaces and top artworld eaterie the Rochelle Canteen. Once an intrepid outpost, these days Maureen Paley presides over a thriving community of art spaces both public and commercial, and this suits a collaborative spirit that has also been there from the get-go, when she would often share shows with fellow gallerists from home and abroad—most notably the late Karsten Schubert, who was for many years based in London’s West End.
“The artists that I’m interested in have many dimensions which are often better represented by being placed in a number of locations,” she told me when I interviewed her for The Guardian back in 1989. “What’s the point of being antagonistic and competing with the very galleries that you admire?”
Paley still endorses this view. When we spoke recently she confirmed: “I still find collaborations really fascinating—I think it’s just part of my inherent nature.” This month’s joint exhibition of new works by Alexandra Bircken shared across the spaces of both Maureen Paley and Herald St gallery (19 September-2 November) is testament to her enduring collegiality.
Over the years her hairstyle may have changed and her gallery stable expanded, but beneath Paley’s more courtly exterior is still the rebellious free spirit that first drew the young Ivy League graduate across the Atlantic, initially attracted by the lure of punk.
Her RCA tutor was Derek Boshier, the British Pop veteran who had also just also produced a songbook with The Clash, and it’s telling that Interim Art got its first writeup not in the arts press but in NME. Yet she’s also a longterm devotee of hardcore conceptualism declaring, “Lucy Lippard’s Dematerialisation of the Art Object (1968) was my favourite book at college.”
While no longer producing her own films and photographs, Paley’s famously exacting eye for detail, as well as an ability to surprise, has been a constant. “The signature I’ve stamped on the gallery may be my artistic side coming through,” she confessed in that same early Guardian interview. “I have to take a risk and give the artists every opportunity—part of my job is to promote work that can be challenging to collect but deserves to be seen.”
These days Paley is a major art market player, but also one who still talks about art as being “part business, part magic”. This highly distinctive combination of rigour and risk shot through with her abiding faith in forces beyond our control is especially in evidence in Morena di Luna, the third space she opened a few years ago after experiencing a “coup de foudre” when a friend showed her the elegant Regency terrace on the seafront in the south coast town of Hove.
The name comes from Tillmans’s affectionate nickname for his gallerist, and Paley puts on summertime shows in its suite of lofty ground floor rooms, adorned with elaborate neoclassical plasterwork and sparkling views across the English Channel. “For a person who seems so organised, a lot of my life is based on serendipity,” she confesses.
Looking back over 40 years, Paley still wholeheartedly agrees that she feels the same as back in the early days when she insisted to me: “This gallery is not a career, it’s my life’s work. If it doesn’t work then my life is not working.” In 2024 both seem to be doing just fine.