Born in New York, Maureen Paley came to London in 1977 to study photography at the Royal College of Art and fell in love with the city. Setting up her first gallery in Hackney in 1984, she was one of the progenitors of east London’s now-thriving art scene, and brought acclaimed artists including Turner Prize winners Wolfgang Tillmans and Gillian Wearing to public attention. NOWNESS caught up with Paley to talk about Donald Urquhart’s upcoming show at Maureen Paley and Herald St.


You initially stayed in London because you were interested in the punk scene, youth culture and nightlife, which is also where Donald is coming from. Is that how you came into contact with him?

As it happens, no. I came across him through two people—one was Wolfgang Tillmans and the other was Cerith Wyn Evans. Both of them thought that I might get on with Donald and should be aware of what he was doing. He came to an opening I had and Wolfgang introduced us. And then I went out wandering with Cerith Wyn Evans one day and Cerith introduced me to Donald because there was a pop-up project in Spitalfields market. Donald was presenting lots of his fanzine-type T-shirts and things he’d drawn. I was intrigued with what he was making. We hadn’t crossed each other in the club scene, but I liked that that’s where he had emerged. And that he was doing things mainly for love. Those original impulses that he had in his work were really important to me as well as to him. I went to a show he did when Herald St [which jointly represents Urquhart with Maureen Paley] was further up into Dalston and bought one of the drawings which I liked very much—I have it up now in my place in Hove, Brighton. Then I included him in a show I did called “The Black Album.” And he decided after having done that group show that we might collaborate again.

Could you expand on your affinity with Donald’s approach to art?

One of the events that occurs in the London art calendar that I absolutely adore and really get excited by is Publish and Be Damned. Something I like, going back to the punk days, is that artists create all sorts of printed matter. I really value things like fanzines, created by musicians and designers and people that don’t necessarily only classify themselves as artists, and I think they are important ways of expressing yourself without all the trappings of a gallery. So the immediacy of that material and the fact that Donald does posters, his like of photocopying—something that Wolfgang Tillmans also likes very much—all that immediacy strikes me as incredibly important.

Do you generally come into contact with your artists through friend recommendations or outside the usual loop?

I think that artists are very interesting people to recommend other artists. Often artists are aware of a great deal that’s happening around them.  But it’s having a sensibility, and then an openness. I know I’ve cited [the late BBC Radio 1 DJ] John Peel before…I’m not saying in any way that I see myself as being as open as he was, he really was quite exceptional, quite a genius. But I do feel that there’s something in his sense of how things can percolate up from the street, his respect for people inventing themselves and giving themselves a platform, that has always been very interesting to me.

Did you get on with Donald personally when you first met him?

He’s so bright. Donald is a great raconteur, he’s really well read. He’s fantastic to speak with, he has incredible insight, he’s very witty. In his work as well there’s tremendous use of language. Donald is an excellent writer. His writing is so readable and so entertaining—his potted histories of his club days, his observations about life in general.

There are actually a lot of artists on your roster who work with text—Gillian Wearing is the obvious example.

I was thinking about this the other day. I was thinking about Wolfgang, I was thinking about Gillian, I was thinking about Donald, I was thinking even about Banks Violette. I’m interested in artists who are concerned with the social and who are also writing their own scripts. It’s interesting that Donald’s newest project is Vanity Fair, and that he’s responding to a classic book that very much chronicles the past but can be related to now in terms of social climbing and ways people have of presenting themselves, so he can draw parallels. It makes a lot of sense that he would engage with that.