Gelles / Beach Huts: Sunrise to Sunset

De Soto Gallery presented an exhibition of works by Judy Gelles to mark the gallery’s announcement of its representation of the artist. The show featured her series Beach Huts: Sunrise to Sunset, alongside selections from her earlier Beach Boxes (2002). Gelles was in attendance for the opening reception.

Beach Huts documented brightly colored beachfront shelters lining a stretch of coastline in Bournemouth, England. Each of the seventy-five huts was painted in a unique tint inspired by the surrounding landscape as it appeared from sunrise to sunset. Like the Beach Boxes photographed in Melbourne, Australia, these structures were captured in direct, simplified compositions. Arranged in color-coordinated grids and rows, the works operated as typological studies, emphasizing both uniformity and variation.

Gelles’ interest in cataloguing dwellings stemmed from a larger investigation into how architecture reflects and shapes social organization, particularly within families. Beach huts, with their layered histories as both public and private spaces, offered rich material for this inquiry. The huts at Bournemouth were among the oldest of their kind—some believed to have evolved from Victorian bathing machines used to enforce gender segregation at the seaside. Over time, these structures transitioned from aristocratic retreats to markers of popular leisure, and later, prized commodities for the affluent. Through her systematic, almost taxonomic lens, Gelles raised nuanced questions about space, identity, and belonging—how we inhabit environments and how those environments, in turn, define us.

Judy Gelles (1944–2020) received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.