Maureen Paley

About the Gallery
The gallery programme began in 1984 in a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End. Initially named Interim Art, the gallery changed its name to Maureen Paley in 2004 as a celebration of its 20th anniversary. Since September 1999 the gallery has been situated in industrial spaces in Bethnal Green. In July 2017 Maureen Paley opened a second space Morena di Luna in Hove. In October 2020 a third space, Studio M was opened in the Rochelle School in Shoreditch. From its inception, the gallery’s aim has remained consistent: to promote great and innovative artists in all media.

Maureen Paley was one of the first to present contemporary art in London’s East End and has been a pioneer of the current scene, promoting and showing a diverse range of international artists. Gallery artists include Turner Prize winners Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2019; Wolfgang Tillmans, 2000 and Gillian Wearing, 1997 as well as Turner Prize nominees Rebecca Warren, 2006; Liam Gillick, 2002; Jane and Louise Wilson, 1999 and Hannah Collins, 1993. Represented artists also include Felipe Baeza, Tom Burr, Chioma Ebinama, Michaela Eichwald, Morgan Fisher, Anne Hardy, Peter Hujar, Behrang Karimi, Michael Krebber, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Olivia Plender, Stephen Prina, Maaike Schoorel, Hannah Starkey, Oscar Tuazon, James Welling, AA Bronson and General Idea.

Maureen Paley, the gallery’s founder and director, was born in New York, studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Brown University before coming to the UK in 1977 where she completed her Masters at The Royal College of Art from 1978–80.

Together with running the gallery, Maureen Paley has also curated a number of large-scale public exhibitions. In 1994 she organised an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzales Torres, Joseph Kosuth and Ad Reinhardt at the Camden Arts Centre. In 1995 Wall to Wall was presented for the Arts Council GB National Touring Exhibitions and appeared at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Southampton City Art Gallery and Leeds City Art Gallery showing wall drawings by international artists including Daniel Buren, Michael Craig-Martin, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Lawrence Weiner.

About the Presentation
Maureen Paley’s presentation at Independent 2025 brings together examples of new and recent work by Paulo Nimer Pjota, Studio K.O.S., Reverend Joyce McDonald, Maureen Dougherty and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Central to the presentation will be a large format canvas by Brazilian artist Paulo Nimer Pjota titled Casca de árvore (2025). His work remixes and obscures historical genres of painting by combining various subjects into still-life arrangements. In May, Paulo Nimer Pjota will open a major solo show surveying twenty years of his work titled The Moon and I at Kunstinstitut Melly, Rotterdam.

Collages from Studio K.O.S.’s 2022 series, The Fire Next Time, will be exhibited alongside glazed ceramic wall-based sculptures by the Reverend Joyce McDonald. Through sculpture, Reverend Joyce McDonald crafts personal testimonies to themes from her life: including living with HIV since 1985 and wider cultural experiences of loss, healing, and transformation. In July, the Bronx Museum in New York will open Ministry, the first museum exhibition dedicated to McDonald and it will present works drawn from her decades of exhibiting art as a member of Visual AIDS.

Studio K.O.S.' collages are produced through educational outreach projects and this series began with Baldwin’s 1963 text, The Fire Next Time, a collection of two essays which examine the role of race in American history and religion. During collaborative workshops, participants cut directly from the book to create poetry via collage, subtraction, and addition. August 2024 marked the centenary of Baldwin’s birth, underscoring the continued potential contained within his writing. Works from the series have been acquired by the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, and the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, New Haven.

Accompanying these works will be new figurative paintings by Maureen Dougherty and examples of Wolfgang Tillmans' photography. The figures in Dougherty's paintings recall the tensions that arise from image manipulation and personal desire as platformed through contemporary virtual spaces. Tillmans' image James's Spine (2016) asks the viewer to look candidly at the human form as rendered through the lens of the camera, whilst Peach Alive (2016) captures an arrangement of fruit resting on a sun-bleached wooden table. Wolfgang Tillmans’ work will be the subject of a solo exhibition this June at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, titled Rien ne nous y préparait − Tout nous y préparait / Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us.