MAY 20 – JUNE 30, 2022

Opening Reception with the Artist
Friday, May 20, 4 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Cold-Eyed and Mean, a solo exhibition by artist Alison Hall. The gallery will host a public opening reception with the artist on Friday, May 20 from 4 - 7 PM at 75 E. Broadway (Unit #203C), New York, NY. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Cold-Eyed and Mean will present a new suite of small scale blue paintings and several small to midsize black paintings made in the artist's Southwest Virginia studio. The colors and patterns are sourced from opposing planes, the ceiling and the floor of The Arena Chapel, where Giotto painted. 

The works are made on chalk grounds, laboriously prepared. From a distance, her paintings are one solid color—just blue or black. Approach them and the intricate and subtle fields of pattern become illuminated. The once simple all-over color becomes a gesture made by hand, a shape that ever so softly wobbles. The paintings are an expanse of accumulating marks, where decisions are made one at a time, at a slow pace. Light plays an important role in the experience of these paintings, as does the viewer’s body and its relationship to the paintings. 

In 2017 John Yau (Hyperallergic) aptly wrote, “Despite the uniformity of concept, materials, colors, and drawing instruments, the paintings are never the same, and that is part of their meaning. The other part of their meaning comes from the fact that the paintings are impossible to photograph, and in that they share something with the work of Ad Reinhardt and Robert Ryman. In the age of digital images and selfies, Hall’s paintings are an admirable anomaly for their insistence on the primacy of direct experience.”

Hall returned to Virginia in mid-2020, the landscape and history of place have permeated her work even more than before. The exhibition title is a nod to country music, the sound of her upbringing in Southside Virginia, where her family worked in textile mills, sharecropping, and bootlegging. Her paintings are imbued with the same ritual and repetition a generation later—the paintings are held by wood sourced and made by craftsmen from her hometown and they seem to sing you a sad old love song. Here we meet another set of opposing planes, how these seemingly minimal works that derive from religious spaces in Italy confront being home, in the rural South. 

Alison Hall (American, B. 1980)

Alison Hall (b. 1980, American) received her BFA in Studio Art at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia and Todi, Italy. The artist then received her MFA in Painting at American University in Washington, D.C. and Corciano, Italy. Hall's paintings are strategically arranged compositions that allude to her ancestral heritage, poetry, and patterns from masterworks by Giotto—which she visits annually in Italy. Hall’s work has been exhibited in New York, Germany, and the United Kingdom, among other places. 

Alison Hall's work is in prominent permanent collections including the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation, the Hall Art Foundation, and the Collection of Pam and Bill Royall. The artist divides her time between Virginia and New York, and currently lives and works in Virginia.