Long before there was an idea for The Gallery at Night Barber Studios, art had already been part of my life for as long as I could remember. My mother was a gallerist. For more than 30 years, she ran an art gallery, and 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. I heard the stories, watched the personalities, and absorbed far more than I realized at the time. Artists could be brilliant, difficult, chaotic, inspired, unreliable, obsessive, generous, impossible and unforgettable—sometimes all before lunch. Perhaps the idea of a gallery was always somewhere in the blood. It just took a very indirect route to get here.

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In the summer of 2018, after putting aside a 25-year teaching career and 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 and offered me the use of his small hair studio at Oude Molstraat 5 while he was away. There was one condition: by the end of the month, I was to seriously consider taking over the lease.

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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.

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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.

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That might have been the end of the experiment, except that 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.

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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.

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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.

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Eight years later, the direction of travel has reversed. The Night Barber Studio now has a permanent home of its own, and this time the gallery is moving into the barbershop. There is one coincidence I particularly enjoy: that first gallery stood on Annastraat, while 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.

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That sense of full circle is at the heart of the new gallery, but so is something much simpler: the pleasure of discovering good work in an unexpected place. The Gallery at Night Barber Studios will be an intimate, independent exhibition space for contemporary art, photography, painting, sculpture and other work that deserves to be seen. It will also serve an intimate space for up-close and personal performances including acoustic music, spoken word, conversations, and theatre. The setting is deliberately unusual. It is not a white cube hidden behind a reception desk, but a working studio overlooking one of Den Haag’s most beautiful squares, a place where people already come to talk, look, sit, linger and encounter one another. At the heart of the gallery’s curatorial direction is a particular interest in exploring the male experience.

By “Exploring the Male Experience,” I mean looking at the many ways men move through the world: identity, ageing, fatherhood, friendship, work, vulnerability, sexuality, ritual, loneliness, humor, beauty, failure, tenderness and change. Sometimes that exploration will be direct; sometimes it will simply sit quietly beneath the surface of the work. The aim is not to define what the male experience is, but to make room for different ways of seeing, questioning and representing it.

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The ambition is straightforward: to make the gallery a place worth stepping into, whether you come for a particular artist or event, notice something through the window, wander in out of curiosity, or simply find yourself surprised that a space like this exists here at all. Exhibitions will change regularly, sometimes focusing on one artist and sometimes bringing several together, with the room itself changing character along with the work.

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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.

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I look forward to welcoming you to The Gallery at Night Barber Studios.

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—Richard Morris