Walker Art Gallery, part of National Museums Liverpool, will present Ally Fallon: The Shape of a Room, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the youngest artist ever to win the John Moores Painting Prize, from 14 November 2026 to 16 May 2027.
Fallon (b. 1998, London) moved to Manchester to study English literature, with painting taking centre stage in his practice during lockdown. He went on to complete an MA in Painting at Manchester School of Art and was working as a teacher when he won the John Moores Painting Prize in September 2025, aged 27. His painting was chosen anonymously from more than 3,000 entries. Among the judges, the painter Zhang Enli said it had “an indescribable quality”, while Michael Simpson, who won the prize in 2016, praised its “deceptive simplicity”. Winning first prize allowed Fallon to begin painting full time, and the award also includes a solo exhibition at the Walker.
The tiled floor in each painting comes from a real place. Most are photographs Fallon has taken on doorsteps and in pubs, many of them in Manchester and Italy, and a few come from Renaissance paintings. The floors he finds are worn and chipped, and he paints them slowly, trying to capture that surface, while the gestural marks above them take seconds and give him only one attempt. He has said that variation in time is what creates the tension in the work. For the viewer, the floor is “a sort of concrete entrance into the painting”, and from there the things you know and expect start to break down until you’re in “a painted space rather than a painting of a space”.
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. People bring their own memories to the floors, and one visitor told him a painting looked like the tiles in their grandmother’s bathroom, which he says he could never have controlled. The titles come from his reading: he keeps an archive of quotations and picks a title from it once a painting is finished. If You Were Certain, What Would You Do Then?, the painting that won the prize, comes from a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about doubt, and several others come from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
The paintings featured in The Shape of a Room were made in his studio in Salford and finished this autumn. They follow directly from At the still point of the turning world, his debut solo exhibition at Hales in London this summer, which The Art Newspaper’s critics selected among the highlights of London Gallery Weekend.
In Unto the Different Dawn!, one of the largest paintings in the show, a mass of loosely brushed red hangs in a pale green room above a floor of orange octagonal tiles, leaving a dark stain on the floor beneath it like a shadow. A thin blue line swings through the space around it. Silence in the Floor of My House sets a soft-edged block of coral pink over a rough yellow-green wall, the paint running from its lower edge towards a patterned tiled floor. In Altogether, Elsewhere the tiles climb the wall as well as covering the floor, and pale, horn-like forms seem to float in front of them, each throwing its own shadow.
Ally Fallon said,
‘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.’
Charlotte Keenan McDonald, Head of Walker Art Gallery, said,
‘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 opens in Room 13 at Walker Art Gallery on 14 November 2026 and runs until 16 May 2027, into a year in which Walker Art Gallery marks its 150th anniversary and the John Moores Painting Prize its 70th.
Entry is free, and donations help keep the gallery open to everyone and look after the collection for the future.
For more information, visit liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/
