Mathew Hale: Spontaneous Generation (Facts of Life)

Opening Thursday, July 9, 2026, 6–9 pm

This summer at Sperling, we are proud to present Mathew Hale’s new suite of free drawings*, FACTS OF LIFE, in its entirety. The four hundred pictures will be pinned up directly on the gallery walls allowing the visitor to enjoy them all at once, and echoing the creative environment of Hale’s studio.

Facts of Life are a series of spontaneously generated images made by an adult in relation to their childhood. Emptying his head, the artist begins to draw, and this is what has appeared; not truth, or innocence, but beautiful and disturbing surprises grown in the soil of truth and innocence.

To quote the artist Bruno Schultz: “To you I can reveal the secrets of these drawings. I always doubted that it was I who drew them. Sometimes they seem like unintentional plagiarisms. Something that was whispered to me, that reached my ear … as though a stranger had used my inspiration for purposes unknown, for I confess I have discovered the ‘real thing’.”

A publication entitled FACTS OF LIFE: Drawn from forgetfulness by Mathew (and Mummy), featuring texts by Rye Dag Holmboe and Julie Mehretu, is forthcoming from X Artists’ Books (Los Angeles/Berlin).

* “Free drawing” is the term coined by the psychoanalyst, writer and artist Marion Milner in her book On Not Being Able to Paint, when theorizing her practice of sitting down to draw with no prior image in her head, only to be led by her hand, eye and mind to produce something that was naturally significant, because not preconceived. Mathew Hale was Marion Milner’s assistant and friend from 1990–1998, the last eight years of her life.