Hales is delighted to announce At the still point of the turning world, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ally Fallon. This marks the artist’s debut solo show with the gallery, following on from his inclusion in Hales group show A Room for Keepsakes (2025-2026).Fallon was named the winner of the 2025 John Moores Painting Prize, becoming the youngest artist to win the prestigious award. This year he will have a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery and is featured in New Contemporaries which tours from South London Gallery to MIMA.
The exhibition takes its title, At the still point of the turning world, from a line in T. S. Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, a meditation on temporal existence, where consciousness resides in the ‘still point’ of the present. Fallon’s paintings similarly engage with time as an abstract and elastic condition. The works appear to suspend duration, holding moments in a state of quiet tension. The artist conceives of his paintings as portals — simultaneously occupying the physical space of the viewer and an internal, pictorial space. The painted surface operates as the threshold between these two realms.
In this new body of work, Fallon introduces a shift in format, orientating several canvases horizontally. This adjustment establishes a broader, more expansive spatial field, creating a sense of staging in which marks and forms can unfold. As with all of Fallon’s paintings, the compositions operate within carefully developed parameters that are continually tested and redefined, maintaining a delicate equilibrium between control and openness.
