Maureen Paley

Maureen Paley (born 1953) is the American owner of a contemporary art gallery in Bethnal Green, London, where she lives. It was founded in 1984, called Interim Art during the 1990s, and renamed Maureen Paley in 2004. She exhibited Young British Artists at an early stage. Artists represented include Turner Prize winners, Gillian Wearing and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Maureen Paley was born in New York, the daughter of Alfred Paley and Sylvia Paley; she attended Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Brown University in 1975. Her artwork appears on the cover of the Summer 1973 edition of Sarah Lawrence Magazine.

She received Russian training as a ballet dancer. She emigrated to England in 1977, attending The Royal College of Art, where she gained an MA in photography. In 1978, she met and became one of the first London friends of Helen Chadwick, who, like Paley, lived in Beck Road, Bethnal Green. Paley and other friends took part in Chadwick's first London show, a feminist performance titled In the Kitchen, by strapping themselves in a canvas model of a cooker. Chadwick guided Paley in the conversion of her home into a space for art exhibitions. Paley said, "Helen was always talking about craftsmanship—a constant fount of information".

In 1984, Paley began a gallery programme in her Victorian terraced house. During the late 1980s, she exhibited examples of contemporary art by Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Sarah Charlesworth, Charles Ray, Mike Kelley, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Rosemarie Trockel and Günther Förg. The first artists that Paley exhibited as "represented" artists were Langlands and Bell, Hannah Collins, Angela Bulloch and Helen Chadwick.

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