One line, set on the first morning
The hang line at Kolm was pencilled onto the wall of room I on 15 March 2025, before the first exhibition went up, and it has not moved since. It runs at 150cm above the floor, all the way through the building, and every work the gallery has ever shown has been hung with its centre on it.
That is the whole system. A 40 x 50cm study and a canvas 320cm across are hung the same way: find the centre, put the centre on the line, walk away.
What we did before
For the first three weeks of the first hang we composed the walls, which is what almost everybody does. Small works were lifted so they would not look lost. Big works were dropped so they would not tower. Groups were levelled at the top edge because that reads as tidy, and a heavy work was slid left to balance a light one.
Composing the wall edits the work
Raising a small painting so it holds its own is a judgement about that painting - it says the work needs help. Lowering a large one says it is showing off. Do it across a room and you have curated the sizes instead of showing them, and a visitor can no longer tell how big anything actually is without walking up to it.
One line, set once, applied without exception. The wall stops being a composition and goes back to being a wall, and the only thing that varies across a room is what the works are.
Can a visitor standing in the doorway tell which of two paintings is larger, and by roughly how much, without moving?
Why 150 and not 145 or 157
There is no correct number and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling a course. 150cm is close to standing eye height for a lot of adults, it is a round number a technician can find on a tape in a dark room, and it leaves a 200cm painting with 50cm of clear wall above it under a 290cm cornice.
We drop the line to 145cm for exhibitions of small works on paper, because paper is read at reading distance and the whole room moves closer. That is the only exception, it is decided before the show is designed, and it applies to every work in it.
Setting the line in a new room
- Mark the floor first. Measure 150cm up from the floor at both ends of the wall, not from the ceiling. Ceilings in old buildings are not level and floors are what people stand on.
- Snap a chalk line between the marks. A laser is faster and lies more; it will follow a bow in the wall.
- Check the middle. If the chalk line and a spirit level disagree by more than 4mm across the wall, the wall is out and the line wins.
- Write the centre height on the back of each work, in pencil, before anything goes up. Hanging is then arithmetic: centre height minus half the work, minus the drop of the cord.
- Pencil the marks. Never tape them. Tape pulls paint and the room is repainted between shows anyway.
Heads up Half the height of the work is not half the height of the frame, and a stretcher that has bowed is shorter than the number on the checklist. Measure the object in front of you.
What it costs
It costs the wall. A small work on the 150 line sits in a lot of empty space and looks, to an eye trained on domestic hanging, slightly wrong. Two visitors in the first year asked at the desk whether a painting had been hung by mistake.
It also costs flexibility. A wall of forty drawings cannot be hung on one line, so we do not hang forty drawings in the same room as a 320cm painting. The line decides the programme more often than the programme decides the line, and we have turned down two loans because of it.
What is checked, in this order
- Line found on both ends of every wall, chalked, checked in the middle
- Every work measured in front of you, not read off the checklist
- Centre height written in pencil on the back of each work
- Gaps set from the label block outward, not by eye
- Lights set flat, then one work looked at from the doorway
- Labels printed, checked against the works, hung at 130cm
What it buys
Sizes come back. In Surface Tension there is a 40 x 50cm study on the same wall as a 90 x 90cm black painting and, two rooms later, a canvas 320cm wide. Nobody has been helped and nobody has been cut down, and the difference between the smallest and largest work in the show is eight to one, which is what it is on the wall and what it will be in your memory of it.
That is worth more to us than a well-composed wall, which nobody remembers anyway.
The line is easier to see than to read about
Three rooms, one floor, about forty minutes if you read the labels. Wednesday to Sunday, 11:00 to 18:00. Admission is free and there is no booking.
- Kolm hang plan, rooms I - III, first drawn 15 March 2025, revised twice.
- Installation notes, Nine Grays, June 2025 - the first show hung entirely to the line.
- Desk log, first year: visitor questions recorded by the front-of-house team.