Sim Smith is delighted to present Rumble, Dido Hallett’s first exhibition at the gallery, opening alongside Sung Jik Yang's exhibition Still Here. Please join us for an opening celebration and a special conversation with Paul Hedge, co-founder of Halles Gallery.
On Thursday, 9th April, from 6:30pm to 8:30pm at Sim Smith, 6 Camberwell Passage, London SE5 0AX. The exhibition explores a compelling new body of paintings that examine the search for stability under the weight of existence. Evolving from earlier horizon-based works that pursued calm and orientation, these paintings shift decisively toward stone, mass, and gravity—embracing forms that are dense, physical, and grounding.
Raised in Somerset, where her father worked as a landscape painter, Hallett’s practice is deeply informed by the traditions of British landscape painting. The horizon—long central to that tradition—structured her early work, offering balance and spatial orientation in ways that echo the compositional poise of John Constable and the atmospheric expansiveness of J. M. W. Turner. In this exhibition, however, the horizon recedes. The gaze lowers. Landscape is no longer distant or atmospheric; it becomes material—weighty, immediate, and insistently present.
Informed by childhood fears, an early awareness of mortality, and the persistent pressure of being alive, Hallett’s paintings approach weight as both unease and reassurance. Rather than proposing escape, the work embraces grounding as an acceptance of matter, time, and the enduring fact of being.
This shift places Hallett in dialogue not only with the Romantic and pastoral traditions of British landscape, but also with the charged Neo-Romantic materiality of Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash, whose landscapes render the land as animate, psychological, mystical and structurally potent. There is, too, an affinity with the clarity and compositional restraint of Eric Ravilious and William Nicholson, particularly in the deliberate ordering of form and space, an affinity for structure, simplified shapes, and a quiet, often unsettling atmosphere.
Hallett’s recent works obviously resonate with the late paintings of Philip Guston and the bold, pared-back figuration of Rose Wylie. Like Guston and Wylie, Hallett embraces simplification without relinquishing emotional or structural weight. Her forms are reduced yet monumental, carrying a deliberate heaviness that refuses transcendence in favour of embodied presence. Weight becomes paradoxical: both threat and ballast, burden and stabiliser.
The title Rumble encapsulates the exhibition’s central tension. It suggests subterranean disturbance and a low, persistent vibration—an energy felt rather than seen. The rumble is not explosive but sustained: a quiet tremor beneath the surface of things. Stone and solidity do not signal despair but reassurance. In accepting gravity, the work discovers steadiness.
Through layered surfaces and carefully calibrated compositional mass, Hallett reconfigures the language of landscape into meditations on being. These paintings resist spectacle, offering instead a sustained, quiet persistence. Stability is not found in transcendence or distance, but in acknowledging the fundamental conditions of existence.
In Rumble, grounding is not retreat—it is an act of resolve: staying with matter, with time, and with the enduring weight of life itself.