Gordon Hall

Hesse Flatow is delighted to present End of Day, a solo exhibition of sixteen sculptures by Gordon Hall to be presented across all three rooms of the gallery.

"The installation of End of Day suggests a kind of after, perhaps after-hours, or the static, dreamy space of the afterlife. Just a few objects occupy each room, as if a meeting had been held and not everything had been put away, or as if someone were in the process of cleaning out an apartment. The generous distance between pieces reminds occupants that these objects are less furniture than sculptures. The most functional-seeming pieces rewrite their invitations for use and reintroduce themselves as abstracted and scrambled combinations of colors, textures, patterns, shapes, surfaces, and materials—relatives of the more elusive objects whose capacities remain unknown, or not yet knowable. Take the closed box: Nothing is more reticent, nor more full of possibilities."

—Mira Dayal

On the occasion of Hall’s exhibition, sixteen artists, writers, curators, and friends of the artist have each been invited to select one of the sixteen sculptures as a point of departure for writing from, to, with, or because of the objects in this exhibition. What do these sculptures propose? These texts will be read aloud during the public online event “Circling the Square: Words from End of Day.” The responses will also be compiled into a digital publication that will be available after the event at hesseflatow.com.

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures and performances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, and Socrates Sculpture Park, among many other venues. Hall’s writing and interviews have been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art in America, and Bomb, as well as in Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press,) and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge). A volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews, and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Hall will be a 2022 resident faculty member at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.