10 x 10 at Saul Hay Gallery
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10 x 10
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10cm by 10cm isn’t very big. For artists like Mandy Payne – who casts concrete canvases and builds up surfaces through layers of spray paint and oil – or Iain Andrews, whose paintings accumulate slowly through decisions made and unmade over weeks, it’s a constraint that demands something different.
10 x 10 is both the name and the logic behind Saul Hay Gallery’s 10th anniversary exhibition. 100 artists, 100 pieces, each not much larger than a Post-it note. 50 of those artists are established gallery names; each was invited to nominate one artist who has never shown at Saul Hay before, making this as much a portrait of a decade’s relationships as a collection of works.
Saul Hay opened in 2016, the project of collectors-turned-curators Catherine and Ian Hay, in a Victorian former industrial building beside the Rochdale Canal in Castlefield. Its roster spans painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture and photography, but a few threads run consistently through it: the built environment, layered surfaces, the relationship between material and meaning.
Jen Orpin paints motorway bridges as emotional landmarks. Steven Heaton lets nature reclaim post-industrial structures through heavily textured surfaces of paint and metal. Deborah Grice inserts geometric disruptions into otherwise Romantic landscapes. What unites them isn’t style but a shared instinct for what surfaces carry and what the overlooked reveals.
The new names invited in are significant. Ghislaine Howard – the Eccles-born figurative painter whose emotionally raw canvases hang in The Royal Collection and Manchester Art Gallery, and who was the only living artist included in the British Museum’s landmark Ice Age Art exhibition – makes her Saul Hay debut. So does Anne Desmet RA, only the third artist ever elected to the Royal Academy as a wood engraver, whose layered collages and prints are held by the V&A, the British Museum and the Fitzwilliam.
At 10cm by 10cm, every mark is a decision and every decision is visible. What each artist reaches for when given almost no room feels like a more revealing question than most anniversaries think to ask.
