Long before there was the idea for The Gallery At Night Barber Studios, art had been part of my life since I was a child.
My mother was a gallerist. For more than 30 years, she ran an art gallery. I grew up around the business of art: artists, collectors, exhibitions, personalities, negotiations, stories, triumphs, disappointments, eccentricities and all the strange theatre that comes with trying to bring creative work into the world.
And, of course, I heard the stories.
Artists can be brilliant, difficult, chaotic, inspired, unreliable, obsessive, generous, impossible and unforgettable—sometimes all before lunch. I spent years listening to my mother navigate that world, and without really intending to, I absorbed a great deal of it.
So perhaps the Gallery was always somewhere in the blood. It just took a very indirect route to get here.
In the summer of 2018, putting my 25-year career as a teacher aside and after completing a six-month apprenticeship in The Hague with Master Barber Sam Aydani, I was offered the chance to find out what owning my own barbershop might actually feel like.
A fellow hair professional—an eccentric Russian hairstylist—was leaving Den Haag for his annual summer pilgrimage to Italy with his Italian husband. He offered me the use of his small hair studio at Oude Molstraat 5, on one of the city centre’s busy pedestrian streets, while he was away.
There was one condition.
By the end of the month, I was to seriously consider taking over the lease.
I accepted.
For a few weeks, I had something resembling a shop of my own. Customers came through the door. I worked independently. I began to understand what it meant to occupy a space, set the tone, welcome people in and imagine what a place could become.
Then the Russian returned from Italy.
Curiously, it turned out that he lived at the end of my own street. He invited me to his house, made cappuccinos, and eventually dispensed with all ceremony.
“So,” he asked, “do you want the shop or not?”
I told him the month had been a valuable experience, but that taking on a lease was a rather larger decision and I wanted a little more time to think about the terms.
He was not impressed and, at once, took the coffee cup and saucer out of my hands and showed me the door.
That might have been the end of the experiment.
Instead, the more important encounter had already happened.
During that same month on Oude Molstraat, the owner of an art gallery around the corner on Annastraat came into the shop to introduce herself. She invited me to visit the gallery and have tea.
I gladly accepted.
We sat surrounded by artwork, talking about our respective businesses, when she jokingly suggested that perhaps we should create a small barber corner at the back of the gallery.
Her reasoning was simple enough: men accompanying their wives to look at art could escape the browsing for a while and have a haircut or shave instead.
We laughed.
Then the laughter became a couple of rather serious smirks.
And then we actually did it.
On 14 September 2018, I welcomed my first customer there, Andrew Bellingham, the son of one of the first people I had cut around the corner.
There was my first proper barber chair.
Inside an art gallery.
It became the beginning of The Night Barber.
Eight years later, the direction of travel has reversed.
Now The Night Barber Studio has a permanent home of its own, and this time the gallery is moving into the barbershop.
And there is one coincidence I particularly enjoy.
That first gallery stood on Annastraat.
The new Gallery at Night Barber Studios stands on Anna Paulownaplein.
Another Anna.
Another barber chair.
Another gallery.
But this time, rather than being the barber invited into somebody else’s art space, I am inviting artists into mine.
Perhaps that is the real full circle.
The son of a gallerist eventually became a barber.
The barber began in a gallery.
And now the barber has opened one of his own.
The Gallery will also become a working space for my own art.
Over the years I have accumulated an extraordinary archive of objects—small possessions, papers, fragments, photographs, ephemera and things that would mean very little to anyone else, but which carry pieces of a life lived across more than half a century on two continents, four countries, and seven cities.
My intention is to begin turning those materials into assemblage: one-of-a-kind works built from found and personal objects, where unrelated fragments are brought together to create something entirely new.
In my case, they will be less “found objects” than remembered objects.
The work will draw on roughly 50 years of personal history and on another archive I have been building for most of my adult life: nearly 2,000 poems written over the past five decades.
Fragments of those poems—lines, handwritten pages, typewritten pieces, old drafts and perhaps words removed entirely from their original context—will become part of the physical works.
So The Gallery will not only be a place to exhibit and represent other artists.
It will also be a place where some of my own history is dismantled, rearranged and made visible.
And somehow, that feels entirely at home here.
I look forward to welcoming you to The Gallery at Night Barber Studios this autumn.
-Richard