What is Really Going on In Our World

In 2016 Hall was commissioned by House Biennale and Outside In to make a solo exhibition for Brighton Arts Festival. Titled Home Away From Home, it included a series of paintings responding to the idea of home. The series of works takes us from the elegant exterior of a row of houses to their interiors, employing the bright colours and graphic forms that have become signatures of Hall's work. A neatly depicted bedroom (My Bedroom, 2016) with a single bed, colourful rug and pictures on the walls painted from the perspective of its inhabitant is reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (1888), while a kitchen scene, of washing machine, counters and appliances, speaks to the works of Maureen Scott or Luchita Hurtado, whose depictions of the domestic have a claustrophobic mood that highlights the feeling of mental entrapment which spaces of labour can invoke.

Also included was a series of ‘monster paintings’: interiors that were dislocated, ruptured by spider- or squid-like forms crawling through windows, doorways and fireplaces, consuming and altering the spaces around them, the rippling colours of the room’s walls in Monster Painting (2016) becoming pulsing, psychedelic shapes. Hall has spoken about these works as being a response to the dehumanising experience of a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment, the notorious assessments introduced in 2016 to replace Disability Living Allowance. The process insists on claimants having assessments not with NHS staff but with members of a private company called Capita (it was recently reported that 69% of claimants who have the payments denied later have them reinstated in court if they have the stamina to pursue them that far).¹

In 2017 – 18 Hall completed a body of work called My Life in London as part of an Unlimited emerging artist commission, spending time exploring his home city, where he chose to focus on the museums and galleries that have so long inspired him. Paintings include depictions of the Royal Academy of Arts, the British Museum and Tate Britain. The paintings are flat, stylised compositions, rendered in bright colour with rhythmic patterns. They look on the surface to be decorative representations of much-loved institutions, but Hall has spoken about his desire to make visible the complexity of these spaces where power is so often in the hands of the elite. The painting British Museum (2018) has a row of Primark shopping bags along its bottom edge and the pattern around Tate Britain (2018) bears a resemblance to an inverted Brooks slave ship diagram. Indeed, Hall has commented in interview that his relationship to these institutions is one mediated through his lived experience as a man of colour of African heritage and that, for him, Tate exists in the shadow of its relationship to the sugar trade and slavery.

Although the use of bold, energetic colour means Hall’s works appear playful, always at their core is an engagement with urgent societal issues around class and race. In confronting powerful institutions head on, Hall makes a highly visible space for those who are so often ignored. As he says: ‘We live by rules and regulations that say you can’t do this and you can’t do that. In my paintings I am trying to tell people how this makes me feel’.

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¹ 'Appeals Backlog Rises as Success Rates Fall for All but PIP', 12 March 2023, https://benefitsandwork.co.uk/news/appeals-backlog-rises-as-success-rates-fall-for-all-but-pip