Walker solo show for John Moores Prizewinner
John Moores Painting Prize winner Ally Fallon is set to unveil a new solo exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery this November.
Ally Fallon: The Shape of a Room runs from November 14 to May 16, 2027.
Manchester-based Fallon became the youngest ever winner of the prestigious painting competition when – aged 27 - he beat thousands of other entrants to the first prize last year with his work If You Were Certain, What Would you do Then?
The John Moores winner receives £25,000 as well as several other prizes which include the opportunity to stage their own solo exhibition at the William Brown Street gallery.
Fallon says: “To be working towards an institutional show at somewhere like the Walker, at 28, is something I never would have thought I’d achieve. I used to be a teacher, and the prize money has changed my life. I wake up and think, I’m going to go to the studio today, and that’s literally my dream.
“I’m really excited for people to see these works, because they’ve developed a lot since the one that won. Normally the solution to one painting is actually in another painting, so I make them all at the same time and they feed into each other. Once they’re finished, I think carefully about what the room is going to feel like.
“I want it to feel contemplative, a space that’s quiet, where you can look, and hopefully the more you look, the more you’ll see.”
Fallon paints in oil, and his influences include Caravaggio and Rembrandt as well as British abstraction. When a painting isn't working, he paints over it, so earlier layers can show through the finished surface.
The tiled floor in each painting comes from a real place. Most are photographs the artist has taken on doorsteps and in pubs, many of them in Manchester or Italy, and a few come from Renaissance paintings.
The Shape of a Room will feature paintings made in his studio in Salford and finished this autumn, including Unto the Different Dawn! which is one of the largest paintings in the show, Silence in the Floor of My House and Altogether, Elsewhere – the titles all taken from things he has read.
Above: Ally Fallon, The Sensation of Flowering, 2026 © Ally Fallon, c/o Hales Gallery. Photo: Michael Pollard. Top: Ally Fallon in his studio. Photo © Michael Pollard
The John Moores Painting Prize marks its 70th anniversary in 2027 which also sees the 150th anniversary of the Walker Art Gallery.
Charlotte Keenan McDonald, Head of the Walker, says: “Ally’s painting stayed with people long after the Prize was announced, and it has been a real pleasure to watch this new body of work take shape in his studio over the past year. He is doing something quite unusual, holding an ordinary tiled floor and a few seconds of gesture together in the same picture and making both count.
“Tiled floors run all the way through our collection and our buildings, from the interiors in our historic paintings to the floors of County Sessions House next door, so there is something very satisfying about seeing them turn up in the work of a painter at the start of his career.
“Giving the winner a room of their own is one of the best things the John Moores does, and we’re very glad to be doing it for Ally as we head into our 150th year.”
Ally Fallon: The Shape of a Room will be staged in Room 13 at the Walker Art Gallery from November 14 to May 16, 2027.