Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Haroun Hayward at Hales, London: Seventy Years of Abstraction in Conversation

Some exhibitions are arguments; this one is a conversation, and it begins with a single painting hanging in a younger artist’s home. Haroun Hayward owns Lanzarote (1989), a late work by Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. It prompted two new watercolours, Lanzarote (Red Version) and Lanzarote (Blue Version), and now all three hang together in “Dialogues: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham x Haroun Hayward” at Hales Gallery in London, from 5 November to 18 December 2026.

Barns-Graham and Hayward: the Dialogues format

“Dialogues” is Hales’s series pairing artists from different generations, and this is its second edition. The premise is simple and demanding: put a historic body of work beside a living practice and let each change how you see the other. The timing is pointed. The show coincides with Barns-Graham’s retrospective at Tate St Ives, opened in October 2026, and follows Hayward’s solo exhibition “Path through Trees” at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which ran from May to November.

The modernist: Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Born in St Andrews in 1912, Barns-Graham trained at Edinburgh College of Art and moved to St Ives in 1940, where she worked alongside Ben Nicholson and Bernard Leach and became one of the essential voices of British abstraction. Her breakthrough came from looking hard at nature: a 1949 trip to the Grindelwald Glacier produced the Glaciers paintings, in which ice and light are reorganised into crystalline planes. Later series — Things of Kind: Order and Disorder (1963–73), Expanding Forms (1979–83), the Scorpio Series — moved further toward pure geometry and colour without ever quite severing the tie to observation.

She was made a CBE in 2001 and died in 2004. Her work belongs to Tate, the British Museum, the V&A, the Arts Council Collection and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Hales shows works from the 1950s onward, including Red, Brown + White (1954), Night Town (1958), Sea Sound (1979) and Snow Formation 4 (Red) (1979), along with geological and volcanic subjects such as Long White Rock (1953) and the Lanzarote works of 1989–94.

The sampler: Haroun Hayward

Hayward, born in London in 1983, studied painting at the University of Brighton and took an MA at Goldsmiths. His paintings are assembled from fragments: British Modernism, South Asian visual traditions, rave culture and electronic music. Titles make the mix explicit — A Painting for Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Drexciya, No 2 (2026) salutes both the St Ives painter and the Detroit electro duo; A Painting for Paul Nash and 2 Bad Mice (2026) pairs a war artist with a breakbeat act. He works in oil, oil stick and gesso, often on wood panels, building layered colour fields crossed by rhythmic lines. Previous solo shows include “Event on the Downs” at Hales London in 2023 and “Landscape of the Vernal Equinox” at Hales New York in 2024; his work is in the collections of Pallant House Gallery and Arts Council England.

Where the two meet

The gallery frames both artists as treating abstraction not as a style to be defended but as a flexible tool for processing experience. That is the useful insight here. Barns-Graham’s abstraction began with a glacier; Hayward’s begins with a track, a landscape walk, a remembered textile. In each case the abstract surface is a record of something encountered. Colour, rhythm and movement — the three terms Hales uses — work almost like a shared grammar.

Seeing Sea Sound beside a new Hayward panel should sharpen both. Barns-Graham’s late geometry can look cool on its own; next to Hayward’s louder palettes it reveals its own pulse. And Hayward’s sampling, which might read as eclectic in isolation, gains a lineage: he is not borrowing from Modernism so much as continuing a conversation it started.

Why it matters

For collectors, the pairing offers two very different entry points: historic works by a modernist whose institutional standing is being reaffirmed by a Tate retrospective, and new paintings and watercolours by a mid-career artist fresh from a museum solo show. For painters, it is a case study in how to inherit without imitating. Hales, based on Bethnal Green Road at the edge of Shoreditch, has long championed artists whose reputations were under-recognised; this show extends that commitment across generations.

Visiting information

Hales Gallery, 7 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6LA. 5 November – 18 December 2026; opening reception 5 November, 6–8pm. Hours: Wednesday–Friday 11am–6pm, Saturday 11am–4pm, or by appointment. Contact: +44 (0)20 7033 1938, [email protected]. See our Dialogues exhibition listing, the official exhibition page and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.