Mathew Hale

Mathew Hale was born in 1962 in Wiltshire and lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles. He studied art in Winchester and at Goldsmiths College, London. In 1988 he received the Whitechapel Young Artists Award and had a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Hale makes paintings, sculptures, installations, collages and drawings, as well as photographic slide-dissolve works with sound. He has a particular interest in "free drawing" as Marion Milner described it, and he worked as Milner's assistant for the last eight years of her life. For the series Love is a silver dollar / Bright as a church bell's chime, he painted on strung yellow paper price tags and photographed each one at the mausoleum where Marilyn Monroe is buried; the photographs are part of each work. Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, showed works from the series in 2017.

His solo exhibitions include shows at Wentrup in Berlin, P! in New York, Ratio 3 in San Francisco and CCA Kitakyushu in Japan, where he held a residency in 2014. He took part in Utopia Station at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and in 2011 MoMA, New York, screened his tape/slide work Die Münze. His work is in the Arts Council Collection. Hale also writes and curates: he has published essays on Rodney Graham, Ceal Floyer, Julie Mehretu and Matt Saunders, and in 2021 he curated The Youngest Day at carlier | gebauer, Berlin.

His work was included in A Day's Work, selected by Susan Morris for Raum Schroth at the Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst, Soest (27 January to 13 April 2019). At Bartha Contemporary he showed in The Gorgeous Nothings, a group exhibition curated by Susan Morris (7 October to 2 November 2022).