Gallerist Maureen Paley: ‘I want to keep things to a more intimate scale’

Gallerist Maureen Paley planned to work in London for just two years when she brought her native New York edge to an East End art project space in 1984. Forty years later, she has proved an inspirational fixture on the scene and can’t imagine being anywhere else. “London has so much to offer, its museums, theatre, music and restaurants — and its commercial galleries work to such a high standard,” she says.

That certainly wasn’t the case when she started out, with plans so transient after leaving the Royal College of Art that she originally named her space Interim Art. Gallerists in town at the time included Leslie Waddington, Nigel Greenwood and Lisson but the commercial scene for cutting-edge contemporary art was nascent at best, with next to nothing in east London.

“There wasn’t a market, so to speak, it was a challenge to sell anything,” Paley says. Of today’s relatively frenzied scene, she says, “There is no comparison between today and 40 years ago.” But she is resistant to go into detail and shies away from some of the usual criticism of today’s high-octane art business. “Regardless of ups and downs, the changes seem to me overall positive,” she says.

She started out showing artists who were new to the UK, such as the unconventional sculptor Charles Ray, the provocative Swiss duo Fischli/Weiss and the late American artist Mike Kelley, whose first major UK exhibition opened at Tate Modern this week. Paley’s aim, she says, was to bring to London some of the energy she had witnessed emerging in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1980s. 

To make ends meet, she did some broadcasting, teaching and writing, as well as working in a bookshop. “It’s how the space could survive,” she says, adding that the work outside the gallery walls “made me sympathetic to the role of the public sector” in the art ecosystem. 

The rise of contemporary art into the UK mainstream coincided with Paley’s trajectory — the Turner Prize launched in 1984 too — and helped her business to motor from the late 1990s. Success even in the headier days was not a given and seems rooted in Paley’s drive to make projects happen while not stretching herself too far financially. While the international art market boomed around her, Paley resisted the expansion-hungry strategies of many of her peers. Today, she has a staff of 10, while some other galleries boast more than 100, and has not branched out to the usual hotspots of New York, Hong Kong and beyond. “I want to keep things to a certain, more intimate scale, one that is right for concentrating on the art,” she says.

Paley’s disciplined approach is underscored by her carefully chosen words and appearance — nearly always wearing black (“That’s the bit of New York in me”) with a sleek semi-beehive heightening her frame, she is a petite but unmistakable presence among the hundreds of gallerists in an art fair.

She has a collaborative, uncompetitive mindset, describing the younger galleries on the scene as “equals”, and is generous about the so-called “mega” art businesses. “In the same way as a garden has evergreens and seasonal flowers,” she says, “there are different elements: everyone is playing their role and we want them all to survive.” 

Her role has included sticking to London’s East End, an area that grew more popular from the late 1990s then experienced many defections back to Mayfair in the past decade, as London’s art market internationalised. Now, the areas around Bethnal Green, where Paley’s main gallery stands, are coming back into vogue. Other cutting-edge galleries still nearby include Kate MacGarry, Carlos/Ishikawa, The Approach and Project Native Informant, “to name a few”, and have been joined more recently by spaces such as Emalin and Soft Opening. When Emalin opened its second Shoreditch space this year, its founders cited Paley as an inspiration.

This month, during Frieze, Paley’s gallery exhibition reflects some of her art-market history with her first solo show of Alexandra Bircken, the fashion designer turned assemblage artist. (Paley began to co-represent her with Herald Street last year and the exhibition is at both galleries, which are on the same street.) Bircken popped up earlier in Paley’s career because she featured in a powerful photograph of youthful androgyny by Paley’s longtime artist Wolfgang Tillmans, “Lutz and Alex, sitting in the trees” (1992). Paley took this work to Unfair, an early and experimental art fair in Cologne, in the year it was made, and then showed Tillmans for the first time in London in 1993. Another landmark exhibition was Gillian Wearing in 1994, who, like Tillmans, went on to win the Turner Prize, as did Paley’s more recent charge, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, a joint winner in 2019.

Paley resists outlining what the next 40, or even four, years might hold and welcomes the nature of art as “something that you can’t quite quantify”. She has branched out a little, though, albeit in keeping with her careful approach. In 2017, she opened Morena di Luna, a light-filled outpost in Hove where she shows two exhibitions a year. It seems a deserved passion project after her decades of urban activity. In Hove, Paley says, “I sometimes wear colours other than black.” Whatever comes next for her seems likely to remain understated. “Remember,” she says, “a whisper can be as effective as a shout.”

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