A_Place Gallery is delighted to present This moment is not important but it’s all there is, a solo exhibition by Maggie Hills.
Maggie Hills’ paintings call attention to the weight of time. “This moment is not important but it’s all there is” suggests the present is both fleeting and overwhelmingly laden with meaning. This feeling is evoked in Hills’ work by the process of sifting through an extensive personal archive of images, a treasure trove of pictures, layering these into the paintings as a series of increasingly elusive compositions. These images are often related between paintings, repeated forms such as bandstands, balconies, hazy figures and emergent, ghost-like faces. Each painting is primed with the history of innumerable moment-by-moments, the painter like an archaeologist dusting off strange objects with a brush, searching for meaning from a different time.
Hills’ paintings can also be seen as related to collage, sometimes more or less literally - canvases are often reworked, re-stretched or cut up to create new works - but also in the handling of the paint; marks forming a silhouette, a block of colour implying a distant landscape seen through an aperture, motifs ‘pasted in’ that could read as pictures within a picture. The paintings carry the same ephemeral quality of bits of collaged paper but with all the stickiness of painting.
In her 1934 essay on Walter Sickert, Virginia Woolf wrote “…we have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her way into the silent land.”* Teasing out the differences between the mediums of poetry, literature and painting, Woolf posits that paintings leave the realm of words and enter into a “silent land”. Maggie Hills’ paintings occupy this same territory. A world of silent, frozen moments as intangible but as real as the present.
* Virginia Woolf, Walter Sickert: A Conversation, 1934

Maggie Hills (b.1968 Democratic Republic of Congo) lives and works in Glasgow. She received an MA in Fine Art from University of Edinburgh (1992) and an MA in Drawing and Painting from Edinburgh College of Art (1994).
Selected solo exhibitions include: Maggie Hills: Used Paintings, Bill’s Junk, Houston, US (2019); Blunderland, Optical Project, Houston (2008); dream as if your life depends on it, Vardy Gallery, University of Sunderland, (2004); Island View, Durham City Art Gallery, Durham (2004); Maggie Hills, Galerie Garanin, Berlin (2003)
Selected group exhibitions include: Opening, A_Place Gallery, Glasgow, (2023); Art School, Gallery 46, Whitechapel, London (2023); History of Painting Revisited, The Function Room, London (2015); Autocatalyctic Future Games, no format, London (2015); Learning by Doing, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2008); Horizont, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin (2006).
Residences/Fellowships/Selected awards: VACMA Award, Glasgow Life / Creative Scotland (2019); British Council Travel Award (2008 & 2006); ACME Fire Station Residency, London (2005–10); Artist in Residence, Durham Cathedral, (2004); Painting Fellowship, Cheltenham School of Art (1995–96)

24 November - 8 December
Private View Friday 24 November, 6 - 9PM

Opening hours: Tues & Thurs 11 - 2, Sun 2 - 4 & by appointment
A_Place, 209 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4HZ

Small Prayer, 20 x 30 cm, oil on canvas, 2022

Singer, 30.5 x 41cm, oil on canvas, 2023

Insiders, 25.5 x 20.5cm, oil on canvas, 2023

Ghost Dancer, 25.5 x 30.5cm, oil on canvas 2023

Gazebo, 30 x 30 cm, oil on canvas, 2020

Last Cigarello, 35.5 x 25.5 cm, oil on canvas, 2023

Boat Rockers, 30 x 24 cm, oil on canvas, 2023

↑Back to Top