Hackney Stables

Last Saturday I chanced upon a gallery in Hackney while I was checking out the Broadway marked. Standing on the bridge chatting to my friend I noticed a sign saying Hackney stables, clothing shop and gallery. Curious I followed the signs and ended up on the third floor of some scruffy looking flats. On the same floor I could look directly in to a studio or workshop of some sort and on a rooftop close by I could see a man working on a paining, it seemed like a right creative neighborhood.

It is a smallish gallery with a cafe and a clothing store and on their website they confirm that they are genuinely interested in keeping it a ambiguous space. The exhibition that was on "New beginnings and other tales" ended this Sunday, but the artist that interested me the most is putting on solo exhitition “The Object of Painting” by Bryan J. Robinson. The private view is on the 4th of November and the exhibition will be running until the 5th of December, open every weekend from 10am until 6pm.

Other woks that interested me was (sadly I'm still so clutsy that I forgot to note down the names, but I will investigate) a house built out of record covers, it looked like a club or something and there were rows of miniature people walking towards it.
Another sculpture was a chair where the fourth leg was a cast iron man leaning in to support it, it had a brick on it that might have been the backrest or maybe only symbolized the weight of what was on the chair.

But back to Bryan, it was really his painting that got most/all of my attention while I was there, so full of intricate little figures in a chaotic but still strangely harmonious pattern, so full of colors and vague texture. Like a bustling city and like my own mind when I'm thinking about too many things at once.

After checking out his webpage (which is sadly partly down due to construction) I'm eager to see his solo show this week. I'm hoping I'll be able to see some of those pictures in grader scale, or maybe something completely new in the same style.

A little warning about the staff in the gallery to other Norwegians that might like to go there though, some of them understand Norwegian language quite well.