Lucy Stein,  La Muñeca at Hales London – Hales is one of those galleries that seem to just quietly get on with it all, dare we say old school? No need for the hype or the big declarations, walking it rather than talking it. Lucy Stein’s exhibition just opened in the East London space down on Bethnal Green Road  over the road from that Boxpark nightmare. 

“La Muñeca is British artist Lucy Stein’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in London in almost a decade. Stein was recently included in exhibitions at RAMM, Exeter and at the Eden Project, Cornwall. Her solo exhibition Wet Room toured from Spike Island, Bristol to De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill UK (2021/22). In 2024, Stein will have a solo exhibition and performance at Museo Casa Rusca, Locarno, Switzerland and a residency at CCA Andratx, Mallorca”.

This is a subtle show, a considered set of works, powerful, exciting. Exciting without ever shouting or demanding or feeling the need to make the viewer feel confronted. The pieces do ask questions, the chalk-line feel does question the permanence of it all, do like that chalk feel is it saying something beyond the actual pieces on the wall?  

“Across a twenty-year practice, Stein has developed an expansive body of conceptual work rooted in painting which embraces performance, film, writing and collaborative projects. Building upon rich painterly traditions and contemporary culture, Stein creates a world of stories. Narratives and imagery, which appear in her work, are drawn from Stein’s study of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, esoteric histories, and personal experience”. 

There a world of intrigue on the walls in here, it feels very personal, of course it does, this is a collection of work that asks good questions and the best art always feels personal, a feeling of something revealed, something that matters just a little bit more to the artist     

 
“The title of the exhibition, La Muñeca translates from Spanish to mean both ‘doll’ and ‘wrist’. For Stein this double meaning encapsulates the relationship between process and iconography in the paintings. Drawing on psychoanalysis, her works reveal multitudes, she notes: ‘they are neither illustration nor abstraction nor narrative nor process painting but all of those things and become deeper as the complexity of the relations between these frames of reference is extrapolated whilst I work.’ Stein’s connection to Spain is also of importance: as a child she spent every summer living in the village of Jesus Pobre on the Valencian coast, which she considers another “home.” Tile panelled works have been a strand of Stein’s practice since a research trip to Manises, Spain in 2013, where tile artworks line the streets”.

There’s a joy in here, there’s also an edge, this is the fifth or six gallery I’ve spent time in today, it feels like the first show I’ve seen today that properly matters. I mean every show matters, every gallery, but now and again there are shows that matter just a little more, that have a little more depth, that hold you a little bit longer…     

“Stein continues to explore dolls and goddesses — feminine archetypes she has looked to for many years. In this exhibition she moves slightly away from her study of esoteric modernism in Cornwall. She has been contemplating a line from Elena Ferrante’s novel The Lost Daughter, quoted in Jaqueline Rose’s Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty: “‘A mother is only a daughter who plays,’ Leda thinks to herself as she enacts various hideous rituals on the doll she has stolen. ‘I was playing now.’”  


“The exhibition combines a few key motifs including depictions of Lilith – the stand in for all that is complex and vengeful in womanhood as well as a reference to the Head of St Anne by Leonardo da Vinci, relating to boundlessness and motherhood. The ghostly paintings La Muñeca (deathwatch) and La Muñeca (grannies/abuelas) depict a 1950s nurse doll, which Stein associates with her maternal grandmother who was psychic, suffered from depression and worked as a nurse. Flowers are sourced from the artist and book illustrator Walter Crane, speaking to the Golden age of mournful saccharine children’s illustration in Britain which happened at the apex of empire. By using these motifs, the works invoke childhood and foreground what is impossible to slough off politically or unconsciously, ‘cycles of guilt, complicity, pleasure and rage coexist as an exuberant swoon.’ (Stein, 2023). sw

Hales Gallery is in The Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, London, E1 6LA. The entrance is on the main street directly over the road from Boxpart rather than in the Tea Building. The show runs until 20th January 2024. Hales is open Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 11am until 6pm