Talk Art

New Talk Art! We meet painter Jonas Wood to discuss his new solo exhibitions with Gagosian in London. With Frieze week upon us in London, be sure to visit Jonas' inspiring new shows in Mayfair.

Gagosian present an exhibition of new paintings by Jonas Wood, opening at the Grosvenor Hill gallery in London on October 7, 2024. These works see Wood extend the unmistakable visual language that he has developed over two decades, exploring the dynamics of color, pattern, and space through the treatment of recurring subjects, including plants, family, and interiors. At once exuberant and obsessive, intimate and imaginative, the paintings on view—like much of Wood’s work—are marked by the interplay of apparent opposites.

Wood’s compositions are characterized by sudden disjunctures, the collision of contrasting graphic passages, and sly shifts of scale and perspective, all within a compressed picture plane. These qualities grow out of his elaborate studio process: the artist works from photographs that he frequently alters and collages by hand, which, in turn, form the basis for preparatory drawings from which the paintings derive. Through these stages, he transforms volumes, surfaces, and textures into dense blocks of pattern and vibrant color.

A feeling of intimacy is palpable, too, in the portrait of Wood’s wife (the artist Shio Kusaka) and their two children, titled Shio, Momo, and Kiki with Leaf Masks. Based on a photograph taken in the couple’s shared studio, the painting presents a playful moment, with the kids, in their pajamas, and Kusaka holding up masks improvised from large leaves taken off one of the copious plants around them, as if dressing up as one of his paintings. Other works on view represent family through their creations rather than as themselves: Wall of Fame portrays a wall from Wood’s studio crowded with his children’s art; Shio Shrine imagines a compact staging of work Kusaka made over the course of two decades; and Still Life with Coffee and Minibook features paintings by the children as well as a book of Kusaka’s art, arranged among potted plants and a cup of coffee. These works entail a deft intermixing of subject and object, making and staging, art and life.

Concurrent with the exhibition, Wood is taking over Gagosian Burlington Arcade from October 7 to November 23, 2024. Wallpaper and prints by the artist are on view in the gallery, while posters, artist-designed hats, and books, including a new catalogue that accompanies Wood’s exhibition at Grosvenor Hill, are available in the Gagosian Shop.

Jonas Wood's new solo exhibition runs from October 7–November 23, 2024 at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, W1K 3QD.

His concurrent solo of prints and books runs for the same dates at Gagosian, Burlington Arcade, London, W1J OQJ.

Jonas' new print will launch exclusively from www.countereditions.com at the end of October to fundraise for the charity Choose Love.

Follow @JonasBRWood

Visit @Gagosian and learn more: https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2024/jonas-wood/

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We meet Ekow Eshun, leading curator, writer and broadcaster to discuss his new book The Strangers.

In the western imagination, a Black man is always a stranger. Outsider, foreigner, intruder, alien. One who remains associated with their origins irrespective of how far they have travelled from them. One who is not an individual in their own right but the representative of a type. What kind of performance is required for a person to survive this condition? And what happens beneath the mask?

In answer, Ekow Eshun conjures the voices of five very different men. Ira Aldridge: nineteenth century actor and playwright. Matthew Henson: polar explorer. Frantz Fanon: psychiatrist and political philosopher. Malcolm X: activist leader. Justin Fashanu: million-pound footballer. Each a trailblazer in his field. Each haunted by a sense of isolation and exile. Each reaching for a better future.

Ekow Eshun tells their stories with breathtaking lyricism and empathy, capturing both the hostility and the beauty they experienced in the world. And he locates them within a wider landscape of Black art, culture, history and politics which stretches from Africa to Europe to North America and the Caribbean. As he moves through this landscape, he maps its thematic contours and fault lines, uncovering traces of the monstrous and the fantastic, of exile and escape, of conflict and vulnerability, and of the totemic central figure of the stranger.

Described as a ‘cultural polymath’, Ekow Eshun has been at the heart of international creative culture for several decades, curating exhibitions, authoring books, presenting documentaries and chairing high-profile lectures. His work stretches the span of identity, style, masculinity, art and culture. Ekow rose to prominence as a trailblazer in British culture. He was the first Black editor of a major magazine in the UK (Arena Magazine in 1997) and continued to break ground as the first Black director of a major arts organisation, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2005-2010).

As Chairman of the commissioning group for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, he leads one of the world’s most famous public art projects.

In July 2022, Ekow curated In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery in London a landmark exhibition of visionary Black artists exploring myth, science fiction and Afrofuturism.

His most recent exhibition, The Time Is Always Now, is a landmark study of the Black figure and its representation in contemporary art. The show opened at the National Portrait Gallery, London and is travelling to multiple venues in the USA, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Eshun’s writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Observer, Esquire and Wired. His latest book is a work of creative non fiction called The Strangers, published by Penguin in September 2024.

Follow @EkowEshun or www.ekoweshun.co.uk/

Buy The Strangers, his new book from Waterstone's. Learn more:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/319734/the-strangers-by-eshun-ekow/9780241472026

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We meet artist Megan Rooney to explore her solo exhibition at Kettles Yard, Cambridge. Titled 'Echoes & Hours', this is the first major solo exhibition in the UK of work by Megan Rooney (b. 1985, South Africa). Her paintings have an irresistible life and energy, renewing the potential of abstraction to embody the richness of the visual world. It is curated by Andrew Nairne and Amy Tobin.

This spectacular show is in it's final weeks, running until 6th October 2024, and we strongly recommend visiting! In June 2024, Rooney spent three weeks making a new ‘mural’, painting directly on the walls of one of Kettle’s Yard’s two galleries. In the other gallery a group of new paintings is exhibited for the first time. 

Created in ‘family groups’, the size of the canvases she uses are determined by the reach of her outstretched arms. Vibrant colour and line appear boundless, capturing the ebb and flow of their making, from the use of abrasives to remove pigment to repeated overpainting. Each work tells a compelling story, poetically recalling the real, the remembered and the imagined – inviting visitors into their restless and pleasurable worlds.

An enigmatic storyteller, Megan Rooney works across a variety of media – including painting, sculpture, installation, performance and language – to develop interwoven narratives. The body in her work, as both the subjective starting point and final site for the sedimentation of experiences explored through her practice. The subjects of her works are drawn directly from her own life and surroundings, while her references are deeply invested in the present moment. She addresses the myriad effects of politics and social conventions that manifest in the home and on the female body. Recurring characters and motifs form part of a dreamlike narrative that is never fixed, but obliquely references some of the most urgent issues of our time.

Painting on uniform canvases measuring 200 x 150 cm – the wingspan of the average woman – Rooney presents layers of ethereal forms, often sanded back and painted over multiple times to create abstracted narratives without a discernible beginning or end. 'Each painting is a capsule of time and space,' writes critic Emily LaBarge, 'a palimpsest of effort and care, a portal into an intimate conversation between artist and canvas in which the journey of the work remains pulsing just beneath its surface.' She punctuates these layers with a contrasting dash of colour or energetic line, drawing the viewer in, only to disrupt their gaze with unexpected elements. These elements are often suggestive of corporeal forms that emerge and recede from view in an otherworldly space, as if captured in the process of becoming.

Based in London, Rooney grew up between South Africa, Brazil and Canada, completing her BA at the University of Toronto followed by an MA in Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College, London in 2011. Her work has recently been shown in solo museum exhibitions, including at the Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2020–21); Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto (2020); and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2019).

Follow @KettlesYard and @ThaddeusRopac

Visit: https://ropac.net/artists/210-megan-rooney/

Learn more about the Kettles Yard exhibition here: https://www.kettlesyard.cam.ac.uk/whats-on/megan-rooney/

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Talk Art returns for Season 23! We meet Culture-loving Rob Rinder MBE and Architecture-fan Rylan Clark as they follow in the footsteps of 19th century romantic poet Lord Byron, and other Grand Tourists, on the 200th anniversary of his death.

We discuss Caravaggio, Murano glass blowing, Artemisia Gentileschi & her censored ‘Allegory of Inclination’ (1816) and what it was like to become nude life models themselves. We explore how they met the Venice-based drag/art collective House of Serenissima, and hear all the gossip from the historic era of the Grand Tour.

Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour follows Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark – presenters, friends, and men who love the finer things in life – as they discover the greatest art treasures in Italy, finding out more about themselves along the way. Together, they retrace the steps of countless English aristocrats who took the Grand Tour – the original gap year – leaving behind the confines of British society for freedom and discovery abroad. But can the Grand Tour still work its magic today?

Starting their journey in the winding canals of Venice, Rylan and Rob are ready to embark on the Grand Tour, once a cultural rite of passage designed to turn young men into distinguished gentlemen. In the city, they unveil one of the largest canvas paintings in the world, Tintoretto’s Il Paradiso, leaving them in awe. They also learn about the legacy of Italian painter Canaletto before heading off to the quaint island of Murano, famous for its glass blowing art. Rob, a lover of opera and poetry, attempts to realise a lifelong dream by conducting Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in the same church it was first performed in. Meanwhile, Rylan learns all about the lesser known side of the famous Venice Carnival. 

In episode two, Rob and Rylan head to the Renaissance city of Florence, the “Beating Heart of Tuscany”. Famous for its many museums and art galleries, this charming city is oozing with history around every corner. Set out to uncover the secrets of the Renaissance period, the pair soak up the sights, including the well known Uffizi Gallery in the historic centre, home to pieces by legendary artists Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raffaello. They go on to visit more iconic locations: the Stibbert Museum, the Bargello Museum, Piazzale Michelangelo, Piazza Santa Croce during the final of the Calcio Storico, Piazza della Signoria, Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and Ponte alle Grazie. Along the trip, the duo learnt what it meant to be a Grand Tourist, trying on flamboyant Italian looks, fencing, dancing.

On their final stop, the dynamic duo head to Italy’s capital city, Rome. Here they enjoy exploring the classical ruins of the famous Colosseum and the Roman Forum as well as the Pantheon. Channelling their love of opera, Rylan and Rob enjoy a rooftop performance with sensational views of the city in the background.

Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour is available now to stream on BBC iPlayer.

Follow @RobRinder and @Rylan

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Talk Art Live! We meet artist Studio Lenca (Jose Campos) within his recent solo exhibition 'Leave to Remain' at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate.

‘Leave to Remain’ is the official term used by the UK Home Office, meaning someone who is allowed to stay in the UK with restrictions and without permanent legal status. According to the latest data from the UNHCR, 70.8 million people around the world have been forced from their own homes. Among them are 25.9 million refugees, over half aged under 18. In this latest body of work, Studio Lenca continues to explore his own displaced experience whilst questioning universal themes of belonging, home and lost histories.

Growing up as an illegal immigrant, Studio Lenca travelled illegally overland to the USA, growing up ‘without papers’ in San Francisco. As a young adult the artist moved to the UK, settling in Margate where he is now based. In his ‘Los Historiantes’ paintings Studio Lenca continues to play with the frames of history and identity. This new series depicts the folkloric dancers that theatrically re-enact stories of colonisation and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. The work playfully references a combination of biographical anecdotes, personal reflections and national iconography.

Alongside his characteristically vivid paintings, Studio Lenca will collaborate with KRAN (Kent Refugee Action Network), turning Carl Freedman Gallery into a working studio. Young refugees and asylum seekers will work with Studio Lenca to build large sculptural works based on the volcanoes of El Salvador. These works will explore the ‘borderless’ process of making and reference the artists own problematic encounters with a colonised education system.

Leave to Remain, offers a critical window within the gallery and a space for discussion. The show asks us to address Margate as a border town and who is allowed to leave and to remain.

Studio Lenca (b.1986 La Paz, El Salvador) is based at TKE Studios, Margate, UK. 

Studio Lenca is the working name of artist Jose Campos – ‘Studio’ referring to a space for experimentation and making; ‘Lenca’ referring to the Mesoamerican indigenous people of southwestern Honduras and eastern El Salvador.

He works with performance, video, painting and sculpture. He received an MA from Goldsmiths University of London and his work is included in the permanent collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Parrish Art Museum in New York.

Follow @StudioLenca

Visit: https://carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2024/studio-lenca/

Special thanks to @CarlFreedmanGallery (where Talk Art's Robert Diament is Partner).

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We meet Precious Okoyomon – poet, artist, and chef – stages sculptural topographies composed of living, growing, decaying, and dying materials, including rock, water, wildflowers, snails, and vines. For Okoyomon, nature is inseparable from the historical marks of colonisation and enslavement. In their work, plants like kudzu – a vine native to Asia that was first introduced by the US government to farms in Mississippi in 1876 as a means to fortify erosion of local soil, which had been degraded by the over-cultivation of cotton, and then turned to be uncontrollably invasive – become metaphors for the entanglement of slavery, racialisation, and diaspora with nature, nonetheless holding the capacity for change and revitalisation.

Through their work, Okoyomon explores the intricate interplay between nature, chaos, and regeneration. Raised in the expanses of Ohio’s Midwest, Okoyomon’s formative years were steeped in the natural world. ‘My first love is very much the Earth, the soil,’ they say in this new episode of ‘Meet the artists.’ The sentiment informs their multifaceted practice, encompassing installations, poetry, and culinary arts. Characterized by what they describe as an ‘organic flow,’ in their work each medium seamlessly intersects with the others to create ‘the endless poem.’

Their invasive garden installations frequently feature kudzu, a vine introduced to the American South post-slavery, which Okoyomon employs as a potent metaphor for colonization. The kudzu’s unrestrained growth overtakes a space, embodying themes of chaos and natural reclamation. ‘What dies, dies. What grows is sprung up inside of that. And the beauty of everything is that it regenerates,’ they explain, underscoring the cyclical nature of their practice.

Precious Okoyomon’s work can be seen at Fondation Beyeler’s ‘Summer Show’, May 19 – August 11, 2024. They have also co-conceptualized the show. Their work is also on view as part of the Nigerian Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia 2024.

Follow @DevilInTraining

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We meet artist Puppies Puppies. Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (b. 1989, Dallas, TX), widely known by the moniker Puppies Puppies, expands ideas around the readymade by imbuing ubiquitous and everyday objects, signifiers, and actions with a personal and political charge. Puppies Puppies works across sculpture, installation, and performance art.

She has, for example, reconfigured antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl liquid, the color green, as well as the acts of sleeping, peeing, and taking a pill in installations and performances that challenge ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production. Many of Puppies Puppies’s exhibitions have also included actionable components: a GoFundMe campaign to support a friend’s transition fund, free HIV testing and counseling, and a working shower available for use by the public. Kuriki-Olivo thus asserts that life can be viewed as its own form of endurance practice, especially for those whose very survival is at stake, including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color.

At the Venice Biennale 2024, Puppies Puppies is exhibiting two works. A Sculpture for Trans Women... (2023) is a life-size bronze sculpture taken from a 3-D scan of the artist’s body. Emblazoned with the word “WOMAN”, the work – which will be activated with performances throughout the Biennale – subverts the power of monuments to make visible and celebrates trans life in an act of protest and commemoration.

Electric Dress (Atsuko Tanaka) (2023) pays tribute to those killed in 2016 at the mass shooting that took place during a “Latin Night” party at Pulse, a queer nightclub in Orlando, Florida. The sculpture references Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1956) with LED lights that flicker to the pulse of a heartbeat and lights that cycle through the rainbow colours found in the Progress Pride Flag. Both sculptures honour queer and trans life while confronting oblivion and invisibility.

Follow @PuppiesPuppiesJade

Trigger Warning runs until 31st August @BaliceHertling gallery. Special thanks to Daniel Balice for connecting us! https://www.balicehertling.com/2024/puppies-puppies-jade-guanaro-kuriki-olivo/

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We meet Es Devlin CBE to discuss her new multi-media work SURFACING commissioned by BMW and unveiled at Art Basel in Basel 2024.

A pioneering combination of sustainable energy and movement in an installation of water, light, sound and dance. A dance collaboration and a series of mobile sound installations within a pilot fleet of BMW iX5 Hydrogen vehicles.

In Hall 1.1 of the art fair Devlin created a booth displaying four works: Surfacing (2024), an illuminated cube of rain penetrated by a line of light and Surfacing II (2024), a pair of painted televisions in which a dancing figure appears to displace pixels and pigment, are flanked by Mask (2018) a projection-mapped model city fusing hands and river, and Mask in Motion (2018) a revolving illuminated translucent printed city which meshes viewers within its kinetic shadow.

Each work continues Devlin's 30 year exploration of the entangled dance between humans and technology. The booth surprises visitors each hour as Surfacing's box of rain, like a magician's apparatus, conjures a 7 minute dance work by renowned Paris-based choreographer Sharon Eyal with music composed by London-based duo Polyphonia. 

A meeting of artist and engineers: Devlin has spent the past year engaging with engineers at BMW, learning the mechanics behind the hydrogen fuel cell technology and its implications for the future of sustainable energy systems. As an opening chapter to the works on view in Hall 1.1, she has created a simple soundscape drawn from their conversations and underscored by composers Polyphonia which is played to guests in the pilot fleet of BMW iX5 Hydrogen vehicles.

Devlin says: “I learned from the BMW engineers the beautiful symmetry of the system at work within the hydrogen fuel cell: the energy that is used to separate hydrogen atoms from oxygen is recreated when the oxygen is reunited with hydrogen within the car. The by-product is not only the energy which propels the vehicle, but water.”

The exterior of the BMW iX5 Hydrogen has been wrapped in a painted blue and white collage in which Devlin overlays paintings and text made in response to the prints and literature which populated her wall and bookshelves as a teenager. Painted gestures echoing the 1831 woodcut ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai, are superimposed over hand written extracts from literature’s longest sentence about water drawn from James Joyce’s seminal novel ‘Ulysses’. Underlying the collage are excerpts from BMW Group publications on hydrogen fuel cell technology.

Artist and Stage Designer, Es Devlin’s work explores biodiversity, linguistic diversity and collective ai-generated poetry. She views the audience as a temporary society and encourages profound cognitive shifts by inviting public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and United Nations General Assembly, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Dr Dre, Kendrick Lamar and U2.

Visit: https://EsDevlin.com/ and Follow @EsDevlin and @BMWGroupCulture

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We meet artist Jean Claracq to discuss painting, his recent shows with Galerie Sultana in Paris and Arles, plus what its like living and working from Marseille and its growing artistic community.

Jean Claracq brings the past forward via savvy remarks on the culture industry of the 21st century. Claracq’s paintings exploit, in the most delicate and refined form, the language of advertisement and social media to construct desire, fascination, and lust. With eclectic references that range from medieval paintings to elements of contemporary pop culture, a dystopian view of the joie de vivre unveils a new alternative to the divine perception of the world.

In his work, Jean evokes the ambiguity between joy and pleasure mixed with the anguish of an unstructured world on the verge of collapse. He evokes the architecture and study of suburban areas, in particular car parks, the symbol of a world alienated by consumerism to the point of sacrificing its own existence.

In 2023, he was awarded the Prix Pierre Cardin in Painting by the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Painter of miniatures and icons, Jean Claracq contributes to the dialogue between painting and digital art. His models come from social networks (Instagram, Grindr) and are part of a gay, marginal or culturally different community. They interact with many references to the history of old master painting (especially schools form Northern Europe). Attached to traditional techniques (oil on wood, attention to the smallest details), he plays with the possible reading levels and accurately depicts our relationship to screens and loneliness in an urban environment.

Claracq was Born in 1991 in Bayonne, France. Graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2017, his recent solo exhibitions include Open Space # 7 Jean Claracq, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2020), Fondation Sisley (2020), and group shows Boys Don’t Cry, Le Houloc, Aubervilliers (2020), agnès b., La Fab., Paris (2020).

Follow @JeanClaracq

Visit @GalerieSultana

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We meet Dominique Fung (b.1987), a Canadian artist with ancestry in Hong Kong and Shanghai, whose practice explores the subliminal liminal territory in which tradition, memory and legacy seep through our collective subconsciousness. Through her interest in casting light on overlooked or forgotten stories and her use of specific historical artifacts she infuses with living qualities and complex non-linear narrative paths, she models a new, broader, alternative space of belonging. She lives and works in New York.

Fung's creations in her recent solo exhibition (Up)Rooted served as portals to ancient memories and drifting reveries. They beckon the artist to revisit her own roots, anchoring her to a specific era, geographic origin, and emotional state. Alongside her series of paintings, Fung delves into the realm of sculpture, crafting pieces that resemble ancient relics inspired by Scholars' rocks – geological formations with deep historical significance. Scholars' rocks are often referred to as the "bones of the earth" and likened to the "petrified roots of clouds." They not only represent landscapes like mountains but also embody nature itself. Eroded into intriguing shapes, scholars' rocks have been cherished since ancient times by China's intellectual elite as objects of contemplation. Their original name is gongshi, a word written in Chinese using the characters for 'worship' and 'stone.' Fung’s own gongshi sculptures are designed as living entities, engaging in activities like fishing, blossoming flowers, and hiding fish.

Hailing from Ottawa in Canada, with family roots extending from Shanghai, Hong Kong to Kano in Nigeria, Fung elaborates: “My family lineage has these multiple layers of disconnect due to language and location; we are in search of the ability to communicate and connect with one another. In my art practice, I yearn for that missing piece, that history, and connection, and my works embody a profound sense of longing and distance.”

Fung's exploration is vast, ranging from sea life to artifacts from the Tang and Shang Dynasties. Her curiosity also leads her to delve into the world of Dunhuang frescoes. Through these multiple sources, Fung finds a way to reconnect with a distant past that resides across oceans and centuries: her sense of Chinese heritage is deeply influenced by the objects she encountered both at home and during visits to the Asian art section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Fung reflects on these museum relics as akin to herself, distanced and often removed from their original contexts by vast oceans and the passage of time.

Follow @DominiqueFung

Visit: https://massimodecarlo.com/artists/dominique-fung

Special thanks to Massimo De Carlo.

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We meet curator and writer Gemma Rolls-Bentley to discuss her debut book Queer Art, recorded in front of a live audience at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. With nearly 200 artworks selected by Gemma, this book mixes the high-brow with the low, gallery stalwarts with Instagram stars, and the racy with the fabulous. This is a unique celebration of queer life – a must-have for the LGBTQI+ community, art lovers and anyone interested in the culture surrounding queer identity.

The twentieth century saw key shifts for the LGBTQI+ community across the western world: from the Stonewall uprising to the first pride parades and homosexuality law reforms. The years following these milestone moments have seen queer life face new challenges, celebrations, injustices and liberations. As ever, this journey has been closely mapped by art and culture. Artists working across all mediums from painting, performance, digital and beyond have captured key moments, from the HIV/AIDS crisis and the rise of drag, to marriage equality and the fight for trans liberation.

Gemma was born and raised in South Yorkshire. She spent her early years living on a farm and then in a village on the Yorkshire/Derbyshire border at the edge of Sheffield, where her parents still live. She left when she was 18 to go to Edinburgh University to study Maths & A.I. but graduated with a degree in Art History instead. When she moved to London to do an MA at the Courtauld Institute of Art she discovered that everyone in the art world was posh. She changed her surname to Rolls-Bentley on Facebook as a joke and it stuck. Gemma curated her first exhibition when she was a student in Edinburgh, a group show of fine art students in an abandoned travel agents. She's been curating ever since.

She's spent almost two decades working passionately to champion diversity in the field. Curating exhibitions and building art collections internationally, her curatorial practice amplifies the work of female and queer artists as well as providing a platform for art that explores LGBTQ+ identity. She co-chairs the board of trustees for the charity Queercircle, and sits on the Courtauld Association Committee. She was previously a trustee for Deptford X. In 2011, Gemma launched the arts arm of the East London Fawcett Group and ran their 2012-2013 Art Audit campaign.

Recent curatorial projects include Tschabalala Self’s first public art project at Coal Drops Yard in London, the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival, and the Brighton Beacon Collection, which is the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK. In 2023, she curated the group exhibition Dreaming of Home at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in NYC, and she is the host of the museum’s new podcast series.

Follow @GemmaRollsBentley

Gemma's debut book Queer Art; From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between is out now. 

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We meet Mary McCartney, world renowned photographer, film-maker and sustainable food pioneer. As a leading British creative, her work covers multiple disciplines, but is always rooted in her passion for impactful storytelling.

We meet at Claridges Art Space in London to explore her joint show 'Double Exposure' with photography legend David Bailey. Unfolding like a conversation between two friends, Double Exposure: David Bailey & Mary McCartney brings two era-defining British photographers into dialogue for the first time. Curated by Brandei Estes, this striking series of works spans the 1960s to the present day – exploring a shared aesthetic of reinvention, play and the art of portraiture itself.

Mary McCartney’s insightful gaze reveals enigmatic and evocative portraits of celebrity icons, from Kate Moss to Harry Styles. Like Bailey, there’s a dash of the theatrical and performative in her photographs. But set alongside everyday moments – a ballet dancer ‘off pointe’ or a woman hailing a taxi – she conjures the sense that anything, or anyone, could be a subject. 

As a portrait and fine art photographer, McCartney’s work has been featured globally, with exhibitions taking place in London, New York, France and in 2015 was invited by Buckingham Palace to take the official photograph to mark Queen Elizabeth II becoming the longest reigning Monarch. Her work is held in major private and public permanent collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the National Portrait Gallery, London; The Royal Academy, London; and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, Paris, and has been commissioned by leading publications including National Geographic, British Vogue and GQ. 

In 2023, McCartney’s first feature documentary If These Walls Could Sing, the untold story of the Abbey Road Studios 90 year history, was selected to premiere at The Telluride Film Festival. Streaming globally on Disney, and was nominated for a Critics Choice Documentary Award. 

McCartney has also been at the forefront of food sustainability for over 25 years, with a history and heritage rooted in her mother’s pioneering work and creation of one of the first meat free brands Linda McCartney Food in 1991. In 2009, Mary co-founded the global collective Meat Free Monday with her father and sister, and is a global ambassador for Green Common Foods, a food tech brand in Asia that is focused on plant based meat substitute products. McCartney has also executive produced and presented three seasons of her EMMY nominated plant based cooking show, “Mary McCartney Serves It Up!” for Discovery+.

McCartney is a multi-published author, with a range of fine art photography books available from globally renowned publishers including, HENI and Chatto & Windus. Combining her passion for food and publishing, her latest book Feeding Creativity, published by TASCHEN is a unique hybrid coffee table, portrait and recipe book, featuring favourite recipes for friends, family, and members of the creative community.

Follow @MaryMcCartney

Double Exposure: David Bailey & Mary McCartney is open to all, and will run in Claridge’s ArtSpace until 19 July 2024. Visit: https://www.claridges.co.uk/claridges-artspace/

Thanks to Katy Wick and The Wick.

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We meet artist Corbin Shaw, live from the Crossed Wires podcast festival in Sheffield's City Hall.

Corbin Shaw (b. 1998) is a British artist based in East London, originally from Sheffield. Exploring the complex realm of masculinity and identity through the medium of textiles. Using his upbringing in a South Yorkshire ex-mining town Corbin investigate's masculinity and how it was defined to him growing up. Breaking stigmas and stereotypes through his re-imagination of masculine 'icons' and objects. The artist pays homage to the people and places that have shaped his northern identity – the pub, football pitches and boxing gyms. Collaborations include Women’s Aid, BBC Sport & Fred Perry and had cover’s for EXIT, Perfect Magazine and Circle Zero Eight as well as features in The Guardian, The Face, Dazed and Metal Magazine.

Corbin Shaw presented his fourth London solo show ‘Little Dark Age’ at Incubator, Marylebone, where he explores modern day Britishness through ancient crafts, exploring what is the meaning of tradition and questioning what it means to be ‘English’ today.

Follow @CorbinShaww

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Talk Art Live, recorded at Apple Covent Garden. We meet Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem to celebrate her first new music in 3 years, the new single Big Man featuring Moonchild Sanelly.

Recorded in front of a live audience of 400 art lovers, we explore her rise to fame over the past few years, what it was like playing the Sally Bowles lead in Cabaret on London's West End and her love of art and how artists continue to inspire her creative process while recording her third album. We discuss her admiration for artists including Lindsey Mendick, Marina Abramović, Tracey Emin, Cindy Sherman, Corbin Shaw and Jenny Holzer. Her passion for visiting museums like Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Hayward Gallery and artist degree shows, responding to Tony Soprano and masculine archetypes in her new imagery and what it feels like to be permanently hanging on the walls in the National Portrait Gallery collection in a portrait by photographer Karina Lax.

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, known professionally by her stage name Self Esteem, is an award winning English singer-songwriter. Nominated for the Mercury Music Prize for her last hit album, Prioritise Pleasure, Self Esteem had sell-out tours at ever-growing venues across the UK and played the largest gigs of her career including Glastonbury – in recognising herself and others, Rebecca Taylor has made countless people feel esteemed.

We love Self Esteem SO much! You can stream her new single, which is without doubt THE song of the summer BIG MAN, and also listen to her award-winning album PRIORITISE PLEASURE now at Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your music!!! View her new video for BIG MAN here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mteCEloA1bs

Follow @SelfEsteemSelfEsteem on Instagram and @SelfEsteem___ on Twitter.

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For his first exhibition in London in over 20 years, New York-based artist Jack Pierson presents a new series of works at Lisson Gallery that explores love, kinship, celebration, poetry, youth, and identity. Pierson diverted from the path of documentary photographers that he studied with in Boston, and was instead drawn to punk-influenced performativity, embracing non-linear, spontaneous compilations that prioritise the expression of individual freedoms over existing narratives. He has since, through a multi-disciplinary practice, challenged conventional hierarchies by commingling mediums equally. Featuring his signature word sculptures, photographs, YELLOW ARRAY, MALE ARRAY, FEMALE ARRAY, DRAWING ARRAY (all 2024), and a series of folded photographic works, a journey through the exhibition invites viewers into a world where narratives, intimate and autobiographical, interact with those distinctly universal and inclusive. 

A yellow hue echoes throughout the exhibition – a shift from Pierson’s typical blue, pink and grayscale themes – the centrepiece of this being YELLOW ARRAY (2024). A coalescence of archival pigment prints, C-type prints, cylindrical magnets, folded pigment prints, found posters, galvanized metal, paper, spray and watercolour paint, these large-scale compositions, spanning ten by fifteen-foot panels, intricately incorporate magazine pages, photographs, drawings, vintage poster and other ephemera, both personal and unfamiliar. Pierson's meticulous process of addition and rearrangement of diverse components – either produced by Pierson himself or discovered during his travels – mirrors that of a collector; each material is afforded a prominent presence within the whole. 

Pierson is acclaimed for his evocative word-sculptures and installations created by re-appropriating commercial signage and large-scale vintage lettering. The first word sculpture in the exhibition is titled PETER BLAKE (2024), named after the leading English visual artist who, having created the design for multiple iconic musical records including The Beatles' 1967 album ‘Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and the 2012 Brit Award statuette, became a key figure in the pop art movement. Pierson’s sculpture embodies the connection between the two artists – one which began in the 1960s when the young artist first encountered the work of Peter Blake distributed in the media. Years later, the artists would meet, with Blake inviting Pierson to visit his studio – an encounter that left a lasting impression on both. Blake himself was inspired to create a series of word sculptures bearing Pierson’s name: Appropriating Jack Pierson, Copying Jack Pierson and Borrowing from Jack Pierson (all 2002).

While Pierson has been profoundly inspired by the work of Peter Blake – his own sculptural homage suggesting echoes of the playful and colourful arrangements of Blake’s work – this is the first time he has reciprocated this creative exchange by producing a word piece that directly references this history. Peter Blake also carries the legacy of the transformative period of cultural exchange between the UK and US in the 1960s, intertwining personal history with wider cultural influences. The exchange between Pierson and Blake serves as a testament to the power of artistic inspiration and collaboration, transcending time and distance to create connections within the ever-evolving landscape of contemporary art. 

Follow @JackPierson9 and @Lisson_Gallery

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We meet artist Nathanaëlle Herbelin to discuss her major solo show in Paris. A constant visitor to the Musée d’Orsay’s collections since childhood, Herbelin has been invited to put her canvases and sources of inspiration into perspective. An heiress to Les Nabis (active in Paris from 1888-1900), the artist brings their favorite subjects – daily life, domestic interiors and intimacy – up to date in resolutely contemporary compositions.

The presentation of her work at the Musée d’Orsay is very much in line with one of the focuses of the museum’s cultural project, which consists of extending “Orsay’s polyphony” to less classical artistic figures, in this case by presenting an emerging artist who has already won considerable critical praise. Her meteoric career since she graduated from the Paris School of Fine Arts less than ten years ago has drawn a great deal of attention and will also provide an opportunity to highlight the Musée d’Orsay’s interest in artists attending the school that is its neighbor, especially the alumni fascinated by its collections.

The Spring 2024 temporary exhibition will show how the artist delicately follows the path of the Nabis. Although the artist's subtle brushstrokes, chromatic palette, and preferred motifs may bring to mind Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, or Félix Vallotton, other figurative details bring us back to a more contemporary reality: the elements of modern life (cellphones and electronic power cables) that can be seen in her updated genre scenes, and the way she brings present-day issues into these compositions. Hence, the intimacy of the maternal body at her toilette may present the model in the act of depilating, or the whole genre is called into question by the transposition of a male sitter naked in the bathtub; another canvas even presents an intimate scene centered on female pleasure, or a couple depicted in the bedroom are illuminated by the midnight blue light of a portable computer set on the knees of a figure sitting up in bed.

Born in Israel in 1989 to a French father and an Israeli mother, Nathanaëlle Herbelin has always been drawn to make work that reflects her position within and between the two cultures. Her works contain subtle hints—both in subject matter and form—as windows into a world imbued with a quiet melancholy. Herbelin encourages the viewer to slow down, as a way of embracing the intimacy involved in viewing art. She has developed a formal style unique within the contemporary tendency towards figurative painting. Certain patterns and colours appear more defined than others in the softened memories that she so delicately captures. Earth tones give the works a quality evocative of a reverie and her loose brushwork recalls post-impressionist techniques. Herbelin has cited Les Nabis—a group of young painters active in Paris during the late 19th century—as a central influence in her practice. Most notably, she takes inspiration from the stylistic poetry that art historical figures such as Pierre Bonnard applied to domestic scenes.

This modern twist should indisputably be able to resonate with the paintings of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Felix Vallotton, hung permanently in these galleries, with no conflict or impression of imitation since the world of Nathanaëlle Herbelin remains so sensitive and unique.

Follow @NathanaelleHerbelin and @MuseeOrsay

Thanks to @XavierHufkens and @GalerieJousseEnterprise

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We meet author/art critic Jennifer Higgie and Sotheby’s Chloe Stead to discuss the inspiring new exhibition ‘London: An Artistic Crossroads’ which has just opened at Sotheby’s New Bond Street and runs until 5th July 2024. #AD / this episode is presented by Sotheby’s.

Sotheby's, in partnership with Art UK and twelve museums across the country, are staging a month-long exhibition, open to the public and free of charge, shining a spotlight on the UK as a centre of creative cross-pollination.

The exhibition, ‘London: An Artistic Crossroads’, brings together an assemblage of remarkable works by artists who passed through or settled in the UK during their lifetime. The earliest of the works is a vivacious portrait by Flemish artist Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, who became one of the most sought-after portraitists in England during the 16th century. It is joined by a vibrant landscape by André Derain, for whom London was a place of explosive transformation, as well as an iconic

Composition by Piet Mondrian who, out of fear of German invasion and encouraged by Ben Nicholson, left Paris for Hampstead in 1938. Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Dame Lucie Rie are included in the line up, all émigrés, Freud from metropolitan Germany, Bacon from rural Ireland and Rie from Vienna, in addition to Frank Bowling, R.B. Kitaj and Dame Magdalene Odundo, among others.

The exhibition coincides with NG200 - the Bicentenary celebrations of London's National Gallery - which it is intended to complement. As the National Gallery launches its National Treasures programme, where 12 of the nation’s most iconic and well-loved paintings from the collection are lent to 12 venues across the UK, this exhibition does the reverse: bringing 12 works from major regional collections together in the capital city.

The National Gallery has long provided a source of inspiration for creatives, who look to its rich collection to further enhance their own practices. Many of the artists presented in Sotheby’s exhibition publicly acknowledged the museum’s influence over their own styles and practice, including Bacon, Freud (the subject of a landmark National Gallery exhibition – ‘New Perspectives’ – in 2022/23), Kitaj (who selected paintings for ‘The Artist’s Eye’ exhibition at the National Gallery in 1980), Bowling and Auerbach, who was even invited to show his interpretations of some of the National Gallery’s paintings in 1995.

Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer. Previously the editor of Frieze magazine, and the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history, she is the author of a 2021 book on women’s self-portraits, 'The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Revolution & Resistance, 500 Years of Women's Self Portraits'. Her latest book 'The Other Side: Women, Art and the Spirit World', was published in 2023. Jennifer has been a judge of the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize and the John Moore’s Painting Prize.

Chloe Stead is Global Head of Private Sales, Old Masters Paintings for Sotheby's. She actively works with collectors, institutions, and dealers in buying and selling works of art internationally.

Follow @Jennifer_Higgie and to learn more about the exhibition visit: @Sothebys

‘London: An Artistic Crossroads’ is open now and runs until 5th July at Sotheby’s New Bond Street.

Learn more: https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/twelve-artistic-treasures-meet-in-london

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We meet KAWS aka Brian Donnelly to discuss his three major institutional exhibitions all opening in 2024. The first show has just opened at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh and is the first time that Donnelly's work has been aligned with Warhol. Followed by the Parrish Art Museum this summer, and The Drawing Center, set to open in Autumn.

In celebration of its 30th anniversary, The Warhol presents KAWS + Warhol, the first exhibition to examine the dark themes present in the work of both artists. From skulls to car crashes, both artists deploy their signature bright colors and pop culture references while also presenting the lurid spectacle of death. The dark undercurrents in the work of KAWS and Warhol are magnified and brought into plain sight by presenting the two artists together for the first time.

KAWS will also respond to Warhol’s embrace of commercialism by presenting a new series of paintings, sculptures, and installations related to his recent commission with General Mills which inserted his signature characters into the packaging for some of America’s most loved cereal boxes including Reese’s Puffs, Count Chocula, and Boo-Berry. The cereal works will be juxtaposed with Warhol’s iconic Brillo Boxes and his lesser-known series of paintings for children.

In response to The Warhol’s new initiative The Pop District, KAWS will also present a monumental wooden sculpture in Pop Park, directly across from the museum and visible from its entrance space.

In July, The Parrish Art Museum will be presenting a major solo exhibition devoted to the artist KAWS, including a wide array of sculptures and paintings. This exhibition marks the first KAWS survey on the East End of Long Island.

In October, The Drawing Center, New York will open ‘The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection Since’. Since the mid 1990s, the artist KAWS (Brian Donnelly) has collected over 3,000 works on paper by a wide variety of artists, ranging from Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning to graffiti writer Dondi. His collection is particularly rich in drawings by self-taught artists, historical and contemporary, comic artists, and graffiti artists. It contains masterpieces by Adolf Wölfli, Martín Ramírez and Helen Rae, extraordinary sketchbooks pages by legendary graffiti writers like Lee Quiñones, comics by Robert Crumb and Rick Griffin, and a cache of drawings by Chicago Imagist artists including Jim Nutt, and Gladys Nilsson, among many others. For this exhibition, KAWS will curate a selection of more than two hundred drawings from his collection in an exhibition of his own design that will occupy the entirety of The Drawing Center’s gallery spaces.

Follow @KAWS on Instagram.

This is our second episode with KAWS and we strongly recommend you visit his 3 exhibitions in 2024. Learn more @TalkArt

Visit KAWS x WARHOL, now open: https://www.warhol.org/exhibition/kaws-warhol/

Visit KAWS X Drawing Center, from October 2024: https://drawingcenter.org/exhibitions/kaws-collection

Visit KAWS x Parrish Art Museum, from July 2024: https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/kaws/

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We meet artist Shaqúelle Whyte to explore his current solo exhibition at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London.

Whyte imagines fictional environments in his paintings, creating an enigmatic atmosphere that contributes to his psychoanalytic approach. The painted medium is paramount for the artist whose broad, loosely rendered brushstrokes are mirrored in his expansive compositions, in which time and space expand and contract across the canvas. Although non-linear, narrative plays a central role in Whyte’s work, which sees him carry certain motifs over from one painting to the next. These recurring details contribute to the sense of theatre that pervades his work; Whyte directs his subjects as though they are actors and his canvas a stage.

Despite excluding himself from the work representationally, the stories he crafts reflect his everyday life and innermost thoughts. The figures in Whyte’s paintings act as conduits for his subconscious. Giving form to thought through paint, he generates a sense of introspection through his characters’ often averted or guarded faces. At once enigmatic and familiar, Whyte’s paintings evoke the surreal and shape the ephemeral, ultimately leaving his world open to the viewer’s own interpretation.

Shaqúelle Whyte (b. 2000, Wolverhampton) lives and works in London. He received a BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art and an MA at the Royal College of Art. He is currently exhibiting his first solo show with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Yute, you’re gonna be fine. Recent group shows include Present Tense, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset (2024); Buffer, Guts Gallery, London (2022); Seasons in the City, curated by Artuner, Palazzo Capris, Turin (2022); Showstopper, Saatchi Gallery, London (2022); and WHAT NOW?, PM/AM Gallery, London (2022). Whyte has taken part in residencies at The Fores Project, London (2022); AM/PM, London (2022); and the Denise Israel Scholarship, Rome (2021), amongst others.

Follow @Shaq.Whyte and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

Visit the final weekend of Shaqúelle Whyte's solo exhibition. Last chance! His show runs until this Saturday 25th May: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/exhibitions/147-shaquelle-whyte-yute-youre-gonna-be-fine/press_release_text/

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#AD - New Talk Art special episode! We meet legendary art critic Louisa Buck for a tour of Cork Street Galleries, to visit galleries including Alison Jacques, Tiwani Contemporary, Frieze No.9 Cork St, Waddington Custot, Goodman Gallery, Stephen Friedman, Marianne Holtermann and Flowers Gallery. We discover their current exhibitions but also explore the history of this iconic art street in London’s W1.

London Gallery Weekend, the biggest gallery weekend event in the world, returns for its fourth edition from Friday 31 May to Sunday 2 June 2024 uniting the city’s network of world-class galleries for a three-day programme of exhibitions and events. With more than 130 participating galleries – ranging from established galleries to emerging spaces and featuring 16 new participants – London Gallery Weekend demonstrates the vibrancy and variety of the London gallery scene.

Cork Street Banner Commission

Cork Street Galleries is pleased to announce Sir John Akomfrah as the artist for its Cork Street Galleries Banners Commission 2024, which will be unveiled on Cork Street for London Gallery Weekend. Akomfrah's new work, The Secret Life of Memorable Things (2024) follows on from the artist’s presentation at the Venice Biennale, Listening All Night To the Rain, commissioned by the British Council for the British Pavilion, and continues to investigate themes and motifs that explore memory and the personality (ties) of the object, in a new form.

The commission comprises five lines of double-sided banners across Cork Street, with three banners per line and a total of 30 individual artworks, with one exhibition running from north to south of the street and another exhibition south to north.

Visit http://CorkStGalleries.com to discover more about this history of Cork Street as well as current exhibitions! #CorkStreetGalleries

Follow Louisa Buck on her new Instagram @LouBuck01

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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Talk Art exclusive! We meet Sir Elton John and David Furnish to discuss their epic, brand new exhibition Fragile Beauty. Opening this weekend, Saturday, 18 May 2024 at the V&A South Kensington.

An unparalleled selection of the world's leading photographers, telling the story of modern and contemporary photography. Discover iconic images across subjects such as fashion, celebrity, reportage and the male body. This exclusive episode was recorded in person at the South of France home of Elton & David.

Showcasing over three hundred rare prints from 140 photographers, Fragile Beauty is a major presentation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century photography, on loan from the private collection of Sir Elton John and David Furnish. Selected from over seven thousand images, the photographs—many of which are on public display for the first time—are era-defining images that explore both the strength and vulnerability inherent to the human condition.

Over the past 30 years, Sir Elton John and David Furnish have carefully built an unrivalled collection of photography. Remarkable in its range and depth, it's a who's who of photographer and subject ranging across disciplines from fashion and film to landscape and reportage.

This interview is also included in the accompanying new book which presents 150 of the most important photographs from artists including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, David LaChapelle, Robert Mapplethorpe, Tyler Mitchell, Zanele Muholi, Helmut Newton, Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei. Featuring an afterword from Sam Taylor-Johnson and an in-depth interview with Sir Elton John and David Furnish by Russell Tovey and Robert Diament, as well as curatorial insights into themes within the collection - Fragile Beauty shares images that are beautiful, dynamic, striking, sometimes disturbing but always inspiring. Buy the book from Waterstone’s, the V&A gift shop or wherever you buy your books.

Follow @VAMuseum @EltonJohn @DavidFurnish

Visit: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/fragile-beauty-photographs-from-the-sir-elton-john-and-david-furnish-collection

Buy tickets from the V&A, £20.

Exhibition runs from 18th May 2024 – 5th January, 2025

Victoria & Albert Museum, London

www.vam.ac.uk

Special thanks to Elton & David, their collection Director & curator Newell Harbin, and their wonderful team at Rocket. Thank you to the incredible V&A curator Lydia Caston and the entire museum team including Rebecca Fortey.

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We meet writer Oisín McKenna to discuss his debut novel Evenings and Weekends which is released today!

We discuss Oisín‘s passion for spoken word and performance art and discover his early years inspired by artists like David Hoyle, Penny Arcade, Taylor Mac or Lucy McCormick. We learn how museums like the National Gallery, Dublin improved his life, the impact of his art teacher, and his love of the work of Caravaggio, Doris Salcedo, Oscar Wilde and Wolfgang Tillmans. We explore the relationship between art, class, and sexuality, and how this has inspired his writing.

Oisín makes work about love, money, health and history. He’s interested in the ways that political, economic and social conditions shape how we act, think, and feel at particular places and times. He writes about the mundane details of people’s daily lives in order to tell a bigger story about the world.

“I still don't know that many writers but I know a lot of artists. Most of the conversations I have about artistic processes are with visual artists rather than writers, and I feel my process is more influenced by a visual art approach than by a literary one. The book is very concerned with aesthetics, particularly architectural aesthetics, and it pays a lot of attention to the built landscape of post-war Britain - I would say this attention is informed somewhat by a visual arts approach.”

Oisín McKenna was born in Dublin and lives in London. He was awarded the Next Generation Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to write Evenings and Weekends and it was developed with further funding from Arts Council England. Evenings and Weekends has been awarded a 2022 London Writers Award and in 2017, Oisín was named in the Irish Times as one of the best-spoken word artists in the country. He has written and performed four theatre shows, including ADMIN, an award-winning production at Dublin Fringe 2019, and has written for outlets including the Irish Times on issues such as gentrification and the alienation of Dublin’s youth.

Buy Oisin's new book now https://www.waterstones.com/book/evenings-and-weekends/ois-n-mckenna/9780008604172

 Follow @Ois_McK91 & @4thEstateBooks

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We meet artist Leilah Babirye to discuss her inspiring multidisciplinary practice, her major solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and new sculptures in the Venice Biennale 2024.

Transforming everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights, the artist fled her native Uganda to New York in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In spring 2018 Babirye was granted asylum with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.

Composed of debris collected from the streets of New York, Babirye’s sculptures are woven, whittled, welded, burned and burnished. Her choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘abasiyazi’, meaning sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains Babirye, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.” The artist also frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQI identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. In a similar vein, Babirye creates loosely rendered portraits in vivid colours of members from her community. 

Describing her practice, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general. Recently, my working process has been fuelled by a need to find a language to respond to the recent passing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda.”

For her Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo, Babirye spent the summer of 2023 at YSP making a clan of seven larger-than-life-size figures in wood and five coloured ceramics. Supported by YSP’s technical team, the seven sculptures were carved using a chainsaw and chisels from trees that had reached the end of their life on site. The artist describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree for carving. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, the charring once used to make the works ‘disappear’ but which is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty. Details of the sculptures are treated with a blowtorch before the surfaces are carefully waxed to acknowledge the skin of the piece and the tree from which it came. The final stage is one Babirye calls ‘taking the girls to the salon’, in which found elements complete the sculptures, including bicycle chains, nails and copper from a dismantled boiler, as well as redundant stainless steel teapots.

Follow @BabiryeSculptor and @YSPsculpture

Visit: https://ysp.org.uk/profile/leilah-babirye

Leilah Babirye: Obumu (Unity) runs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Sunday 8th September 2024.

https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/leilah-babirye-obumu-unity

Her work is also part of the Venice Biennale 2024

Thanks to YSP, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Gordon Robichaux.

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New @TalkArt! We meet the PET SHOP BOYS to explore their new album NONETHELESS!!!

Recorded in London’s Kings Cross, we chat to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe about their history as the UK’s most successful pop duo, their mutual love of art, collaborations with artists throughout their 40 year career including Derek Jarman, Eric Watson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and most recently Tim Walker, plus we explore Neil’s interest in the Arts & Crafts movement, and for collecting & living with art. 

This feature-length exclusive episode celebrates today’s release (April 26th 2024) of their incredible new album Nonetheless, via Parlophone Records. This is their 15th studio album, and since releasing their debut single back in 1984 they’ve gone on to sell more than 50 million records worldwide.

‘Nonetheless’ features 10 brand new tracks and is available now digitally and in various physical formats, including CD, black vinyl, clear vinyl, grey vinyl and cassette. Recorded and mixed in London last year, the album is the duo’s first with producer James Ford at his studio in East London. The orchestra and backing vocals were recorded at The Church studio in North London. 

This is one of our favourite PSB albums they’ve made! Be sure to download or buy it now. The album also sees the duo return to Parlophone, the label which released their iconic and massively successful material spanning 1985 – 2012. 

🔗 Follow @PetShopBoys on Instagram.

Visit: https://www.petshopboys.co.uk

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Talk Art live at the Venice Biennale, presented by Burberry. Recorded at the St Regis Library, we meet leading artist Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA and Tarini Malik, the curator of the British pavilion 2024.

The British Council is delighted to present Listening All Night To The Rain by John Akomfrah at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024.

The exhibition runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024.

Exploring post-colonialism, environmental devastation and the politics of aesthetics, Listening All Night To The Rain is Akomfrah’s boldest and most ambitious commission to date.

The exhibition draws its title from 11th century Chinese writer and artist Su Dongpo’s poetry, which explores the transitory nature of life during a period of political exile. Organised in a series of song-like movements, or ‘cantos’, the exhibition brings together eight interlocking and overlapping multimedia and sound installations into a single and immersive environment that tells stories of migrant diasporas in Britain. It is the result of decades of extensive research by the artist and his team, using historical records to contextualise our experience of the present day.

Listening All Night To The Rain weaves together newly filmed material, archive video footage and still images, with audio and text from international archives and libraries. The exhibition tells global stories through the ‘memories’ of people who represent migrant communities in Britain and examines how multiple geopolitical narratives are reflected in the experiences of diasporic people more broadly.

Each gallery space layers together a specific colour field, influenced by the paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, in order to highlight the ways in which abstraction can represent the fundamental nature of human drama.

Listening All Night To The Rain positions various theories of acoustemology: the study of how the sonic experience mirrors and shapes our cultural realities. Akomfrah draws on an acute acoustic sensitivity influenced by a variety of formative experiences, from protests to club culture in 1970s-80s London. Each of Akomfrah’s ‘cantos’ is accompanied by a specific soundtrack, which layers archival material with field recordings, speeches and popular and devotional music. Extending the sense of hybridity in the filmic collages, Akomfrah’s use of sound encourages us to consider the breadth of cultural identity in Britain more broadly.

Follow @Smoking_Dog_Films, @AkomfrahJohn @TariniMalik, @BritishArts Presented by @Burberry

Thanks @Lisson_Gallery and @LaBiennale

Learn more at Lisson: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/john-akomfrah

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TALK ART EXCLUSIVE! We meet Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA to discuss his forthcoming solo show 'Aerial' at White Cube New York, USA and his epic new 'Time Horizon' public installation of 100 sculptures which is about to open at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK. We explore his entire career across this intimate, highly detailed, feature-length special episode recorded in person at his London studio.

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. Gormley’s work is concerned with the experience of being in the world and an expression of how it feels to be alive. Through a critical engagement with his own physical existence, Gormley identifies art as a place where new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. For him, art can be a place of becoming where, collectively, we can think about our role as creators of the future: ‘I want it to be about life. I want it to be about potential.’

We explore his new works made for ‘Aerial’, an exhibition by Antony Gormley in New York, in which the artist considers sculpture as an instrument for proprioception – the body’s innate capacity to sense and perceive its position, movements and orientation in relation to itself and the environment. The exhibition features two recent developments in Gormley’s practice: one explores physical proximity in mass and scale, where two over-life-size bodies merge as one, while the other endeavours to catalyse space almost without mass.

Whilst 'Time Horizon', one of Antony Gormley’s most spectacular large-scale installations, is currently being shown across the grounds and through the house at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Featuring 100 life-size sculptures, the works are distributed across 300 acres of the park, the furthest away being approximately 1.5 miles on the West Avenue. The cast-iron sculptures, each weighing 620kg and standing at an average of 191cm, are installed at the same datum level to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape. Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography. Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface. Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four meters off the ground.

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Antony Gormley's 'Aerial' runs from 30 April – 15 June 2024 at White Cube New York.

‘Time Horizon’ runs concurrently at Houghton Hall, Norfolk from 21 April – 31 October 2024, the first time the work has been staged in the UK.

Follow @WhiteCube and @HoughtonHall

Visit: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/antony-gormley-new-york-2024

and

https://www.houghtonhall.com/antony-gormleys-time-horizon-2/

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We meet artist Brook Hsu. We discuss other worlds, the power of storytelling, the colour green, the drive to make paintings and making art at your own pace.

BROOK HSU (b. 1987 Pullman, Washington) deploys and weaves the autobiographical and the mythopoetic into paintings using an array of materials, including ink, oil paint, industrial carpets, and off-cuts of ready-made lumber. The sources for Hsu’s imagery come from her own observations, sometimes arising from art history, film and literature.

Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and writing, her works aim to question how we define representation today, producing abstract and figurative works that employ a host of signs and motifs, recounting stories of love, pain and humor. Hsu says of her practice, 'I seek to understand what we value in life by asking how we value the world.'

Taiwanese-American artist Brook Hsu grew up in Oklahoma, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Hsu currently lives and works in New York and Wyoming. 

Recent solo exhibitions include: Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2022); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2021); Manual Arts, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2019). Group exhibitions include: Reference Material, Adler Beatty, New York (2022), The Practice of Everyday Life, Derosia Gallery, New York (2022), Sweet Days of Discipline, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2022); kaufmann repetto, New York and Milan (2021), More, More, More (curated by Passing Fancy), TANK, Shanghai (2020); LIFE STILL, CLEARING, New York (2020); The End of Expressionism, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2020); Polly, Insect Gallery, Los Angeles (2019-2020); A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2019); Finders’ Lodge, in lieu, Los Angeles (2019); and Let Me Consider It from Here, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2018-2019).

Her work is part of the collections of X Museum, Beijing; Long Museum, Shanghai.

Follow @Broooooooooooooook on Instagram. Thanks to Brook's galleries @KraupaTuskanyZeidler

and @KiangMalingue

Visit KT-Z: https://www.k-t-z.com/artists/94-brook-hsu/

Visit Kiang Malingue: https://kiangmalingue.com/artists/brook-hsu/

See also Gladstone Gallery: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/10551/brook-hsu/info

and this article from Various Artists: https://various-artists.com/brook-hsu/

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Season 21!!! We are back with an icon of art, the one and only Judith Bernstein (b. 1942, Newark, New Jersey) to discuss almost 60 years of art making.

Since graduating from Yale in 1967, Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. Steadfast in her cultural, political and social critique for over 50 years, she surged into art world prominence in the early 1970’s with her monumental charcoal drawings of penis-screw hybrids; early incarnations of which were exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA P.S.1, among other institutions. In reviewing Bernstein’s 2012-13 solo exhibition at the New Museum in NY, Ken Johnson, critic at the New York Times, referred to these words as “bravura performances of draftsmanship” and “masterpieces of feminine protest”. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery – the first all-female artists gallery in the United States – as well as an early member of many art and activist organizations including Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition and Fight Censorship.

We explore Bernstein’s first exhibition in London in over a decade at Emalin gallery. TRUTH AND CHAOS comprises works spanning thirty years of her practice. Direct and confrontational, they are inspired by outrage and violence, the American military industrial complex and the private scribbles of the Yale University men’s bathroom stalls. The exhibition presents historical works from her 1990s ‘word drawings’ series alongside the maximalist phallic screw drawings that Bernstein has been making since 1969 and that initiated her complicated relationship with censorship and popular recognition amidst 1970s second-wave feminism.

Judith Bernstein is concerned with the psyche of men and whatever men may stand for. She observes the scribbles and cartoons they leave behind in bathroom stalls, their furious impotence and possessiveness, the overpowering penetration of their violence and its statistics in war. Most of all, she watches their self-involvement: there is nothing beyond the raging ego, no depth to their own picture-plane. Detaching the symbol of an erect penis from any personhood and mounting it as a standalone totem of military violence and industrial extraction, she hacks with charcoal and oil paint at the abuse of power she witnesses. Symbols of American capitalism scratch their way into the work: guns are dicks, dicks are screws, screws are missiles, missiles are Mickey Mouse and the artist’s signature is an ejaculation. Words and forms are disgorged onto paper – Bernstein’s own subjectivity ejects mark-making.

Follow @Judith_Bernstein and visit @EmalinOfficial

Judith's solo exhibition Truth and Chaos is now open and runs until 15 June 2024. Free entry:

https://emalin.co.uk/exhibitions/truth-and-chaos

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Talk Art Live! We meet Otamere Guobadia, a multidisciplinary writer, poet, and columnist whose work focuses on desire, art, adornment, queerness, and agency, within culture high, low, and popular.

Recorded live in Margate @FortRoadHotel. Thanks to @TheMargateBookshop & @QuenchGallery. 💕🎙️ We discuss lyricism, queerness, love for the Women in our families and friendships, Yves Klein blue and how art and poetry are interconnected!

Otamere’s work has appeared in British Vogue, i-D, Dazed, GQ, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, Wonderland, The BBC, The Independent, and AnOther Magazine, among other publications. His first book, Unutterable Visions, Perishable Breath is available now from all good bookstores.

Otamere Guobadia’s debut, UNUTTERABLE VISIONS, PERISHABLE BREATH, published by Broken Sleep Books, is a gorgeous collection of writings which embody poetic sequences and fragmented poetry as queer forms, a coruscating interplay between language and desire.

A look at how love, lovelessness, agency, and destiny constellate and complicate each other while refracting these notions, and Guobadia’s own personal histories, through a distinct and unabashedly sentimental lens. This is Otamere Guobadia’s Lusk letter, a record of ‘love in bones and air and stars.’

🔗 Follow @Otamere

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We meet artist Li Hei Di on the eve of their debut UK solo exhibition 700 Nights of Winter at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.

In new paintings, Li explores primal, sexual urges with their signature fluid application of paint. Balanced on a knife edge between abstraction and representation, paintings feature figures that swim in and out of view beneath diaphanous veils of paint; each layer offers a different world, or a portal to an altered oneiric space, guided by desire and emotion. Multiple perspectives collide and overlap, creating dynamic compositions that offer manifold realities within a single work. Luminescent orbs appear as though submerged in deep water, giving the compositions a nebulous quality.

Li’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with repressed desire, rooted in personal experiences of navigating hetero-normative environments that obstruct open expressions of queerness. Their work eschews rigid sexual codes and gender categories in favour of a liberated approach to fantasy and beauty, which exists apart from hierarchical and dominant social structures. For Li, the dichotomous relationship between sexual arousal and repression finds a parallel in the covert ways in which erotic love flourishes on cold winter nights, as bodies become entangled in pursuit of warmth, lost but for the other. The existential threat posed to romantic love by the culture of narcissism engendered under globalised capitalism sets the stage in Li’s work for the negation of the self, in the radical recognition of another, as espoused in the writings of cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han.

This commingling of two entities is found not only in humankind but in the natural world too, and Li’s work explores the role animal pollinators play in the reproductive lives of plants. Such co-evolved relationships encapsulate the exuberance of life in connection with erotic activity and, therefore, death.

In this new body of work Li also investigates the ways in which desire manifests and, notably, declines under the ‘pharmacopornographic regime’, a term coined by philosopher Paul B. Preciado to describe the intersection of the pharmaceutical and pornographic industries.

Li Hei Di (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London and received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA (Hons) from Chelsea College of Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2024, Li will have a solo exhibition at Pond Society, Shanghai and will be part of a group exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon. Recent exhibitions include Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Marguo, Paris (2023); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023), TX; CICA Vancouver (2023); Gagosian, Hong Kong (2023), and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023), amongst others.

Li Hei Di’s new solo exhibition runs from 15th March - until 20th April 2024. Free entry.

Follow @Plum_Black_Field and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

Visit: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/exhibitions/146-li-hei-di-700-nights-of-winter/press_release_text/

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We meet living LEGEND, the English sculptor, performance artist, jewellery-maker, portraitist and all-round cultural ICON... Andrew Logan!!!!! We learn about his friendships with Zandra Rhodes, Vivienne Westwood, Derek Jarman, Angela Flowers, Brian Eno and his recent collaboration with Stella McCartney for her Paris catwalk show.

Logan (b. 1945) belongs to a unique school of English eccentrics. One of Britain’s principal sculptural artists, he challenges convention, mixes media and plays with our artistic values. Since its beginnings, Logan’s work has depended on the inventive use of whatever was to hand. With flair and fantasy he transformed real objects into their new and different versions. His artistic world includes fauna, flora, planets and gods. His love of travel provides the bases for several series of work.

Born in Oxford in 1945, he qualified in architecture in the late 1960s and has worked across the fields of sculpture, stage design, drama, opera, parades, festivals and interior design. To him, “Art can be discovered anywhere.”

Logan crosses cultures and embodies artistic fantasy in a unique and unprecedented way. His work is the art of popular poetry and metropolitan glamour. From his early fame amongst London’s fashionable crowd, he has become an influential artist of international stature, with exhibitions as far afield as Los Angeles (USA), Monterrey (Mexico) and St Petersburg (Russia).

Versatile and enterprising designer and sculptor, born in Witney, Oxfordshire, who graduated with a diploma in architecture from Oxford School of Architecture, 1964–70. He “experienced Flower Power” in America in 1967. Did a hologram course at Goldsmiths’ College, 1982. Logan was noted for projects carried out with a showbiz flair, who to some dressed weirdly, producing camp sculptures, costumes and jewellery out of mirror and lurid plastic, but who was undeniably dedicated and persistent. He said that his aim was “to bring joy and happiness to the world”.

Logan was most famous as the inventor and impresario of The Alternative Miss World, which began in 1972, the series continuing periodically at various venues. The first showing of the film The Alternative Miss World was held at the Odeon, Leicester Square, 1979, followed by the Cannes Film Festival, 1980.

Follow @AndrewLoganSculptor and his official website: https://www.andrewlogan.com/ Visit the @AndrewLoganMuseum in Wales.

Logan had his first solo show at New Art Centre, 1973. Other events in his multi-faceted career included Egypt Revisited, sound and light spectacular in a tent on Clapham Common, 1978; decorations for Zandra Rhodes’ fashion show, 1980; Snow Sculpture World Championships, Finland, 1982; piece in Holographic Show, York Arts Festival, 1984; debut as a theatre designer, Wolfy, Ballet Rambert, Big Top, Battersea, 1987; retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1991, with tour; Jewels Fantasy Exhibition, Victoria & Albert Exhibition, 1992; a show at Cheltenham Art Gallery, 2000–1, and watercolours at A&D Gallery, 2002, in the same year there sharing an exhibition with Duggie Fields. In addition, Norwich Gallery held Logan’s Alternative Miss World Filmshow 1972 to 2002. In 1991 the Andrew Logan Museum of Sculpture opened at Berriew, Powys. In 1993 the National Portrait Gallery bought two portraits. Was based at The Glasshouse, Melier Place, where he also held exhibitions.

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We meet stand up comedian, actress and author Grace Campbell to discuss her experiences with art! We discover that in spite of growing up with artist friends, she had a childhood fear of galleries, her admiration for artists Tracey Emin, Judy Chicago, Marilyn Minter, Elmgreen & Dragset and living with artworks by Marcelina Amelia, Mr Brainwash, and more. Plus we learn about her close friendship with art historian Katy Hessel, her collaborations with illustrator Alice Skinner, and we discuss a new documentary about sex educator and feminist Shere Hite.

Grace Campbell is a riotous force of nature. The stand up comedian, author, and actor, is on a constant, rebellious mission to undermine most of the bullshit we are taught by society. An acclaimed stand-up, and host of the popular comedy night the Disgraceful Club, currently holding a residency at Bush Hall, Grace’s comedy is wild, glamorous, fiery, and provocative.

Grace has just announced a UK tour Grace Campbell Is On Heat

from October to December 2024. Buy tickets now via TicketMaster: https://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/grace-campbell-tickets/artist/1832543 or visit Grace’s website.

Follow @DisGraceCampbell on Instagram and visit https://www.disgracecampbell.com/ 🎧💘 We also highly recommend ‘28 Dates Later’ Grace’s new podcast, available to download wherever you get your podcasts.

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We meet artist Doron Langberg at his new exhibition in London at Victoria Miro Gallery. Night is a hymn to nocturnal worlds both interior and exterior, and the spaces of ambiguity, opportunity and liberation – physical and psychological – that open up after dark. We also meet Doron's gallerists Victoria Miro and Glenn Scott Wright.

Doron Langberg’s intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another.

Titled after queer New York parties and club nights such as Merge and Wrecked, the spaces in these new paintings are worlds in themselves, sites of multiple layers and levels of experience and connection. Together, the works create a narrative arc that follows the course of an evening, a night out becoming the morning after as we move from Basement to Sunrise. The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by New York-based writer and therapist Hannah Baer.

Prominent among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg creates luminous works that celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process. Depicting a range of subjects, from queer love to wildflowers and sweeping landscapes, the broad scope of themes and experiences in Langberg’s work are underscored by his deeply felt use of paint. Aspects of nature are an enduring source of inspiration, resonating feelings of connection through flowers depicted in close up or as part of enveloping vistas.

The works on view in Venice were painted en plein air at different times of the year and include cultivated garden plants as well ostensibly wild or self-seeded varieties – such as ragwort, thistle and dandelion. Langberg paints these fleeting moments spontaneously in one session, alighting on patches of ground and recording them in bursts of activity. Flowers and foliage spring from the whiteness of the canvas in flurries of brushstrokes, preserved by the artist as if moments of revelation.

For the artist, painting nature as an ‘embodied experience’ is key. Capturing both external realities and internal states of mind, he makes a connection with artists across history – for example, the landscapes of Munch or Van Gogh. The work points to the broader significance of landscapes exterior and interior, and how they relate to or signify our own emotional states.

Doron Langberg: Night, featuring large-scale tableaux of nightclub and nocturnal beach scenes, is on view at Victoria Miro, London, is now open and runs until 28 March 2024. Free entry. Visit: https://online.victoria-miro.com/doron-langberg-london-2024/

Victoria Miro, Venice is concurrently presents an exhibition of landscapes and flower paintings by Langberg, whilst Part of Your World, the artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Europe, on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam runs until 26th May 2024.

Follow @DoronLangberg and @VictoriaMiroGallery on Instagram. Thanks for listening! Visit @TalkArt for images and more details.

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Talk Art Special Episode! We meet Paul Green, President and Founder of Halcyon Gallery and Kate Brown, Halcyon's Creative Director. #AD

We explore the epic new Andy Warhol exhibition BEYOND THE BRAND, dedicated to the life and work of Andy Warhol which is now open at Halcyon's galleries until 7th April at 148 & 29 New Bond Street, London. Free to visit!

‘The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.’

ANDY WARHOL

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) explored the intersection between art and commerce like no other artist in history. Beginning his career as a commercial illustrator, his transition to contemporary artist was marked by the depiction of everyday products such as Campbell’s Soup cans, Brillo boxes and Coca-Cola bottles.

Born Andrew Warhola, the artist ‘Americanised’ his name and transformed himself into a brand. He contrived a public persona that was apparently naïve to the implications of his work; ever armed with glib remarks to deflect questions from journalists. As he became active in numerous industries, ‘Andy Warhol’ became a record label, a production company and a publisher.

His commitment to the exploration of commercial themes persisted throughout his career as is best demonstrated by the Ads series, created towards the end of his life. Through these works, Warhol elevated advertisements, transforming them into vibrant, captivating works of art. In doing so, he blurred the line between commercial design and fine art more directly than at any point in his career.

Warhol’s seismic contribution to art history is that he tied his work to a collective consciousness more closely than any other artist had before. His art is a pure reflection of popular culture in his lifetime and the spirit of western capitalism.

Andy Warhol, Beyond the Brand will run until 7th April. Visit Halcyon Gallery's two spaces at 148 & 29 New Bond Street, London to see this powerful exhibition!

Free entry. Show runs until 7th April 2024: https://www.halcyongallery.com/exhibitions/79-andy-warhol-beyond-the-brand/

Follow @HalcyonGallery on Instagram.

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We meet the LEGENDARY, trailblazing artist, author, educator and feminist icon Judy Chicago (b. 1939, Chicago, USA!!! We explore her major retrospective in New York's New Museum. Judy Chicago: Herstory spans her epic sixty-year career to encompass the full breadth of the artist’s contributions across painting, sculpture, installation, drawing, textiles, photography, stained glass, needlework, and printmaking.

Expanding the boundaries of a traditional museum survey, the exhibition will place six decades of Chicago’s work in dialogue with work by other women across centuries in a unique Fourth Floor installation. Entitled “The City of Ladies,” this exhibition-within-the-exhibition will feature artworks and archival materials from over eighty artists, writers, and thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard of Bingen, Artemisia Gentileschi, Zora Neale Hurston, Frida Kahlo, Hilma af Klint, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

Taking over four floors of the Museum, “Herstory” traces the entirety of Chicago’s practice from her 1960s experiments in Minimalism and her revolutionary feminist art of the 1970s to her narrative series of the 1980s and 1990s in which she expanded her focus to confront environmental disaster, birth and creation, masculinity, and mortality. Contextualizing her feminist methodology within the many art movements in which she has participated—and from whose histories she has frequently been erased—“Herstory” will showcase Chicago’s tremendous impact on American art and highlight her critical role as a cultural historian claiming space for women artists previously omitted from the canon.

Summer 2024, Serpentine gallery in London will present a new exhibition of Judy Chicago. Revelations will be Chicago’s first solo presentation in a major London institution. One of the most provocative and influential artists working today, Chicago came to prominence in the late 1960s when she challenged the male-dominated landscape of the art world by making work that was boldly from a woman’s perspective.

With a specific focus on drawing – a medium that has occupied Chicago’s artistic practice for over seven-decades – Judy Chicago: Revelations charts the arc of the artist’s career allowing visitors to uncover the breadth of her practice. It brings together archival and never-before-seen artworks, preparatory studies, notebooks and sketchbooks that reveal her working process and rigour in incorporating intensive, often years-long research. The exhibition presents the ways in which drawing functions as a mode to express Chicago’s innermost thoughts, hopes and, at times, most painful memories and experiences.

Judy Chicago lives and works in New Mexico, USA.

Follow @Judy.Chicago and @NewMuseum on Instagram

Visit HERSTORY at the New Museum until 3rd March 2024: https://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/view/judy-chicago-herstory

Visit Judy's official website: https://judychicago.com/

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We meet mouth artist Henry Fraser from his studio to discuss his art and how his life story led to the award winning theatre play The Little Big Things. Based on the Sunday Times best-selling autobiography by Henry Fraser, The Little Big Things is a new British musical with an explosive theatrical pop soundtrack in a world premiere production. This uplifting and colourful new musical is a life-affirming reminder about the transformative power of family, and how sometimes it really is the little things which matter the most.

An avid sportsman and academy player with a premiership Rugby club, Henry Fraser’s life changed forever when in 2009 he had a diving accident. From that moment he had a new life to live as a tetraplegic and new circumstances to accept and adapt to. Henry’s defiance and determination to prosper against devastating odds led to him wheeling himself out of hospital a whole year earlier than predicted. Today he is a successful artist, inspirational speaker and best-selling author.

Follow @HenryFraser0 & the musical @TLBTmusical on Instagram and also @HenryFraser0 on X (Twitter).

Visit his official website: https://henryfraserart.com/

Go see Henry's play The Little Big Things in London at Soho Place: https://sohoplace.org/shows/the-little-big-things

Henry's story

It was July 18th 2009 when everything in my life changed. It was a glorious day. Blue sky, sunshine, friends all surrounded me on that golden beach. I ran into the sea thinking it was a good depth to dive forward turns out the sea bed kicked up slightly right in front of me. I collided head first and momentarily blacked out. I opened my eyes expecting to stand up, walk out the sea and join my friends. I opened my eyes floating in the sea completely unable to move. It’s amazing to think that one little thing, one brief moment, can change everything.

From that moment I had a new life to live. New circumstances to accept and adapt.

Three weeks spent in a Portuguese hospital (they were incredible !) with surgeries to realign my dislocated fourth vertebrae. Two weeks in intensive care in the UK. Five and half more months in hospital before I was back in the real world again.

In that time I’ve experienced so many things.

In January of 2015 I taught myself how draw and paint by holding the utensils in my mouth.

I had a sore on my back that meant I was bed bound for a few weeks.

I was getting bored sitting in bed for days on end so I found an app on my iPad that I could use for drawing by holding a stylus in my mouth and touching the screen. I loved it.

When my health had improved I was able to get it of bed and I taught myself how to draw and paint with actual pencils and paint by attaching the utensils to a mouth stick.

As a young child I loved art. But as I grew up I fell out of love with the subject. I lost all my enthusiasm to create.

Without my accident I never would have found that love I had as a kid.

Adversity has given me a gift.

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New Talk Art special episode!!!! We meet ICONIC artist Julie Mehretu, presented by BMW. #AD

What does Julie Mehretu think about when creating BMW Art Car 20? Find out on this week’s @TalkArt episode!

@RussellTovey and @RobertDiament interview @JulieMehretu during the process for planning and creating #BMWArtCar20. To design #artcar20, Mehretu translates her signature multi-layered motifs onto the contours of the #BMWMHybridV8. Obscured photographs, dotted grids, neon-coloured spray paint and her iconic gestural markings create abstract visual forms across the body of the car.

Mehretu’s collaboration with BMW goes beyond the Art Car. Julie Mehretu and Mehret Mandefro (@drmehret), Emmy-nominated producer, writer and co-founder of the Realness Institute which aims to strengthen the media ecosystem across Africa, will host a series of gatherings across Africa in 2025 to create space for artists to meet, exchange, and collaborate in translocal ways.

Follow @JulieMehretu and @BMWGroupCulture to stay in the loop for more sneak peeks of the next addition to this legendary car collection.

Ideas of time, space and place are enmeshed in the work of Julie Mehretu. Drawing is fundamental to her practice, whether in works on paper, painting or printmaking. The artist’s dextrous mark-making comes together in a characteristic swirl, an act of assertion in response to social and political change. ‘As I continue drawing,’ she says, ‘I find myself more and more interested in the idea that drawing can be an activist gesture. That drawing – as an informed, intuitive process, a process that is representative of individual agency and culture, a very personal process – offers something radical.’

The countdown for the unveiling of the 20th BMW Art Car is underway. On 21st May, the BMW M Hybrid V8, designed by artist Julie Mehretu and set to compete at the 24 Hours of Le Mans on 15th/16th June, will be presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. The artist is already providing glimpses into her work. Additionally, it is now confirmed that the Art Car will carry the starting number 20 and will be driven by Sheldon van der Linde (RSA), Robin Frijns (NED), and René Rast (GER).

The #20 BMW M Hybrid V8 will be the first Art Car since the 2017 season, where the BMW M6 GTLM designed by John Baldessari raced at the 24 Hours of Daytona (USA), followed by the virtual BMW M6 GT3 Art Car by Cao Fei at the FIA GT World Cup in Macau (CHN). In the past, the most famous BMW Art Cars have participated in Le Mans: in 1975, Alexander Calder’s BMW 3.0 CSL, in 1976, Frank Stella’s BMW 3.0 CSL, in 1977, Roy Lichtenstein’s BMW 320i Turbo, in 1979, Andy Warhol’s BMW M1, in 1999, Jenny Holzer’s BMW V12 LMR, and in 2010, Jeff Koons’ BMW M3 GT2. This illustrious collection is now enriched by Julie Mehretu’s BMW M Hybrid V8.

For the design of the 20th BMW Art Car, Mehretu uses the colour and form vocabulary of an existing large-format painting from a more recent series of works: obscured photographs, dotted grids, neon-coloured spray paint and Mehretu’s iconic gestural markings give her design an abstract visual form. She transfers the resulting image motif as a high-resolution photograph onto the vehicle’s contours using a 3D mapping technique. This creates the unique artistic foiling with which the BMW M Hybrid V8 will compete in the Le Mans race.

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We meet all-round LEGEND, Dan Levy, the Emmy award winning producer, writer, director, actor and art collector!! We discuss his love of art, living with art and collecting, growing up in Canada, The Group of Seven (Canadian landscape painters from 1920s-30s), his collaborations with Jonathan Anderson/Loewe, his love of work #DavidWojnarowicz’s art & @PPOWGallery & @Visual_Aids charity, and his brand new art-inspired movie Good Grief out now on Netflix in which an artist (Dan) grieves the loss of his famous writer husband (Luke Evans) then takes his two best friends on a trip to Paris, where they unpack messy secrets and hard truths.

We explore what it was like to play the role of a painter but also to collaborate with a real world artist Kris Knight @KrisKnight who was commissioned by Dan to make the paintings within/prominently featured at the end of the film… in MARGATE!!!! Plus the time he bought a Schitt’s Creek related watercolour painting on Instagram made by a super fan, the artist Anna Brindley!!! We discuss the artwork of Patrick Carroll @PatCar, and share the love for our mutual friend @EmmaLouiseCorrin (who portrays a determined performance artist in Good Grief!) 

Follow @InstaDanJLevy

Watch Good Grief: https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/81462549

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We meet artist Alexandria Tarver to discuss her current solo exhibition at Deli Gallery, New York. Tarver recontextualizes the traditional floral motif into a space between memory, idealization, and presence.

Her process begins on a ritualistic evening walk around New York City. For Tarver, the night is a dynamic time oscillating between rest, dreams, and frenzy, often unleashing subconscious desires restrained during the day. It's a period when trouble happens, stars become visible, and the city, never at rest, mirrors the cycle akin to death. The variability of the city's nighttime sky, influenced by observation points, weather, and proximity to building lights, becomes a rich palette of colors, each night unique.

On these walks the artist identifies potential subjects, often floral clusters, in an action akin to foraging. Tarver photographs the subject and then creates a preliminary composition in pencil on paper. The subject is finally rendered in oil on panel, employing techniques from various historical movements including post-impressionism, New England mid-century representationalism, and gestural abstraction. The primary layer, accompanied by lapis and cerulean blue ground, captures the electric color of twilight. The timeline varies, with some paintings taking weeks or even months. The vibrant blue of twilight oscillates against the flesh-tones of the central flower form—this blue sometimes deepening, sometimes shifting into an evening haze, sometimes sinking into purple-black depth, a depth halted by the ever-present electric glow of the skyline.

Tarver finds profound meaning in the repetition and variations on a theme. As she explores the possibilities of painting, she grapples with the act of painting and its evolution over time and practice. The disciplined dedication to a subject or landscape, evident in artists like Maureen Gallace, Vija Celmins, and Jim Dine, is mirrored in Tarver's formal repetition, which becomes a grounding force that reflects the rhythm of day-to-day existence.

In the paintings, flowers and markings are situated as acting figures within the particular, ever-variable, and intensely observed color field of the night sky as viewed from the concrete grounds of the city. Much like Ellsworth Kelly's plant drawings served as a device for him, the plant in Tarver's works acts as a stand-in, offering a guiding framework for her hand and a pathway to reflect on the long nights she has experienced. During a vulnerable period around 2013 and 2014, marked by the sickness and imminent mortality of Tarver's father, the practice of looking at flowers and creating paintings became a place of solace. This loyalty endures, providing a grounding force and a way to navigate through fear, pain, and sorrow.

Alexandria Tarver (b. 1989) received a BFA from New York University in 2011. Recently her work has been included in group exhibitions at GRIMM Gallery, London (2023), Marinaro Gallery, NY (2023), Public Gallery, London (2022), UncleBrother, NY (2021), Arsenal Gallery, NY (2019), Et. Al. etc., San Francisco (2017), Danziger Gallery, NY (2016). Tarver also organized group shows Sentimental at Fitness Center for the Arts & Tactics in Brooklyn (2013) and #1 at The Hose in Brooklyn (2013). Tarver had her first solo exhibition with Deli Gallery in 2015. She lives and works in New York City.

Follow @AlexandriaTarver on Instagram and @DeliGallery.

Visit: https://deligallery.com/Alexandria-Tarver-New-Paintings-2024

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SEASON 20 BEGINS!!! We meet ICON of film and Hollywood costumes SANDY POWELL OBE!!!! We discuss her love of art, collaborating with legendary queer artists/creative minds Derek Jarman and Lindsay Kemp, a 25 year collaboration with choreographer Lea Anderson, and how art informs her costume design. We explore a series of portraits of Sandy painted by Sadie Lee. Sandy is a multi award-winning Costume Designer who has won three Academy Awards, three BAFTA Awards for Best Costume Design, plus the recent honour of BAFTA Fellowship 2023, and two Costume Designers Guild Awards.

Londoner, Sandy, studied at St Martins School of Art and the Central School of Art and Design where she specialised in theatre design. She started her professional career in fringe with the National Theatre working on numerous productions including Orders of Obedience and Rococo. She went on to design sets and costumes for productions of Lumiere and Son, Bright Side and Culture Vulture. As a student and one of the leading lights of the international theatre scene she most admired was Lindsay Kemp, the gifted director, designer and performer. On impulse she spoke to him on the phone and said how much she wanted to work with him. After seeing samples of her work he asked her to join him in Milan as costume designer for his theatre company. During her 3 year spell with him she worked on Nijinsky which was a study of the start and madness of the great Russian dancer. She also designed the costumes for The Big Parade, a tragic- comic homage to the silent screen, and the stage and screen versions of A Midsummer Nights Dream. In 1985 she rapidly established herself in the world of video working on many pop promos with director Derek Jarman and with him on his film Caravaggio, and Zenith's For Queen and Country.

Born in 1960, she was raised in south London, where she was taught to sew by her mother on a Singer sewing machine, and began experimenting with cutting and adapting patterns at a young age. Educated at Sydenham High School, she went on to complete an Art Foundation at Saint Martins in 1978, and in 1979 she began a BA in Theatre Design at Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins). In 1981 she withdrew from her degree to assist a costume designer who worked for a fringe theatre company called Rational Theatre, and also began a long collaboration with Lindsay Kemp designing for him in Italy and Spain.

In 1984 when, after a spell as a costume designer on music videos, she moved into the film industry. Her break came when the film director and stage designer Derek Jarman appointed her costume designer on his film, Caravaggio (1986), starring Tilda Swinton and Sean Bean. To date, Powell has worked as Costume Designer on over 50 films, including Orlando (1992);The Crying Game (1992); Interview with the Vampire (1994); Michael Collins (1996); The Wings of The Dove (1997); Hilary and Jackie (1998); The End of the Affair (1999); Gangs of New York (2002); Far From Heaven (2002); Sylvia (2003); The Aviator (2005); The Departed (2006); Shutter Island (2010) Hugo (2011) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013); Cinderella (2015); Carol (2015); Mary Poppins Returns (2018); and Living (2022). She has earned 76 award nominations and won 27 awards in her career, including Academy Awards for Shakespeare in Love (1998) and The Aviator (2004), a BAFTA Award for Velvet Goldmine (1998), and both an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for The Young Victoria (2010).

Follow @TheSandyPowell on Instagram.

Thanks for listening!!! This season is shaping up to be one of the most fascinating so far!!! Thanks for listening. Follow us @TalkArt for images of works we discuss.

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It's 2024!!!! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! We meet iconic writer, director, and producer RYAN MURPHY, best known for American Horror Story, Dahmer, Pose, The Andy Warhol Diaries, Ratched, The Watcher and Glee. We explore his love of collecting and preserving artworks including Old Masters, his passion for artists Andy Warhol, Patrick Angus, Helen Frankenthaler, restoring and safeguarding Hans Hofmann’s house/studio, how art inspires his own creativity and writing, plus we discuss the forthcoming new TV series Feud: Capote vs The Swans, produced by Ryan and co-starring Talk Art's very own Russell Tovey.

Born November 9, 1965 in Indianapolis, Indiana, US as Ryan Murphy is responsible for creating such hits as Nip/Tuck (2003), Glee (2009) and American Horror Story (2011). He attended a Catholic school till the eighth grade and graduated from Warren Central High School. He went on to study journalism at the Indiana University Bloomington, where he was also a member of a vocal ensemble, and went on to intern in the style section of The Washington Post in 1986. In 1990 he got into screenwriting, but only in 1999 was his first story produced: it was Popular (1999), a teen comedy show, which he co-created with Gina Matthews and which run for two seasons. In 2003 he created Nip/Tuck (2003), which brought him his first Emmy nomination. He won the award six years later, when in 2009 he directed the pilot of his hit series Glee (2009) which he co-created with Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk. In 2011 he and Falchuk co-crated another highly popular series, American Horror Story (2011).

In 2015 he was awarded the Award for Inspiration from amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research. In 2018 Murphy signed a five-year $300 million development deal with Netflix. He is a pan equal opportunities activist, both through his movies and television projects which very often focus on the LGBTQ+ community, and as a creator of the Half Initiative, which aims at making Hollywood more inclusive for women and minorities. In 2023, Murphy received the prestigious ‘Carol Burnett Award’ at the Golden Globes. He has won five Golden Globes and has been nominated 16 times for his work. He's been married to photographer David Miller since 2012. They have three sons, Logan Phineas, Ford, and Griffin Sullivan.

Follow @RyanMurphyProductions on Instagram. Stream 'Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans', which premieres on January 31, 2024, on FX and will then stream on Hulu. The series will also be available worldwide to stream via Disney+ including the UK and Europe.

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It's the Talk Art CHRISTMAS EPISODE!!!

We meet the incomparable Boy George: Grammy, Brit and Ivor Novello award-winning lead singer of Culture Club, songwriter, music producer, fashion designer, artist/painter and LGBTQ+ vanguard. All in all, he's a pop culture ICON!!! In this generous, candid, TWO HOUR feature-length special, you can immerse yourself in the creative and fascinating mind of BOY GEORGE!!!!

We explore George's lifetime making art (he has been painting since childhood) in tandem with singing, writing and producing music, collaborating with Sinead O’Connor, his love of Yoko Ono’s art and music, being summoned for lunch with Andy Warhol, his respect & friendships with Duggie Fields, Tracey Emin, John Maybury, Leigh Bowery, Keith Haring, Vivienne Westwood and Derek Jarman plus getting to meet legends Lou Reed, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frank Sinatra!

Plus George reads our star signs and reveals that Russ & Rob share both their star sign and moon.. AND he sings for us his part from Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’!!!!! We discover details of his infinite hat collection but also the art he has collected including a number of artworks by David Bowie as well as Grayson Perry and Yoko Ono. 

George’s best selling book KARMA is out now. Told in his inimitable style, this definitive autobiography tells the story of the charismatic frontman - the drama, the music, his journey of addiction and recovery, surviving prison, meeting legends like David Bowie, Madonna, Diana Ross and Prince, and the highs and lows of a life lived in the spotlight and in the headlines.

In 2024, Boy George will make his return after 20 years to Broadway in the musical Moulin Rouge! The larger-than-life English superstar will take over the role of the boisterous, top-hatted impresario Harold Zidler in the Tony Award-winning musical for a limited run from Tuesday, February 6th to Sunday, May 12th 2024.

Follow @BoyGeorgeOfficial on Instagram and @BoyGeorge on X (formerly Twitter). Buy his new autobiography KARMA at Waterstones. Book tickets for Moulin Rouge and learn more here: @MoulinRougeBway

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!! Thanks for listening to us for the past 5 years!!! We have loved celebrating our 5th anniversary in 2023.

We will return on New Year's Day with another ICONIC guest. Until then, have a magical Christmas. Love, Russell & Robert Xx

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We meet Berlin-based Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg to explore HOME WRECKERS, her first UK solo exhibition, at The Perimeter. Working primarily in sculpture, installation and performance, Anna Uddenberg’s practice reflects on taste and class, appropriation and sexuality, and explores systemised relations of power and conventions of control in the context of a technology-bound consumer culture.

At The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg presents works made over the past seven years, featuring 10 sculptures of hypersexualised and overextended faceless female figures. The sculptures featured in HOME WRECKERS point at the absurdity in the sexualisation of the female form in advertisements for domestic items such as sofas, prams and even for laundry detergent. Uddenberg has created a range of generic interior environments as a setting for these sculptures, transforming The Perimeter with soft furnishings such as sofas and carpets to further emphasise the staged associations of femininity and domesticity. These staged domestic environments which could be found in homes, hotels, on reality TV sets or in furniture showrooms, feel both accessible and familiar. They evoke specific notions of expected behaviours, assigning a performative value to the acts undertaken therein. 

Alongside these sculptures, Uddenberg presents her first ever film at The Perimeter, co-directed with Thyago Sainte. This film also marks The Perimeter’s first time supporting the production of a new commission, which will go on to be shown internationally. The work has been made possible with the additional support of Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler. 

Uddenberg has reached art world, fashion and Internet notoriety with her practice. Three sculptures featured at The Perimeter were originally produced for a Balenciaga advertising campaign for its Balenciaga Crocs collaboration in 2021. Uddenberg most recently received a viral response to a performance piece, ‘Continental Breakfast’ staged at Meredith Rosen Gallery in April 2023. Provoking a strong and ‘real' reaction in the digital space opens up Uddenberg’s practice, as she has long desired for her work to transcend representation, stating, “Instead of representing something, I want to trigger something so that it becomes real in a way.” As the lines between reality and fiction become increasingly blurred, Uddenberg postulates that “Maybe the fake is more authentic than whatever you think of as authentic”. 

Concurrently with her exhibition at The Perimeter, Anna Uddenberg is staging an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim in celebration of her being awarded the Hector Art Prize in 2022. In recognition of the conversation between these exhibitions, The Perimeter has co-published a catalogue with the Kunsthalle Mannheim, which documents the breadth of Anna Uddenberg’s practice to date.

Anna Uddenberg was born in Stockholm in 1982 and today lives and works in Berlin and Stockholm. She studied at Frankfurt Städelschule and Stockholm’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts.

​

Follow @Filet_Minion_Thong on Instagram and visit @ThePerimeterLondon & @KunsthalleMa. Exhibition is free to visit and runs until 22nd December 2023.

💝 Thanks Alex V. Petalas, @MeredithRosenGallery & @KraupaTuskanyZeidler

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We meet painter Andrew Cranston from his studio in Glasgow, Scotland to discuss his major new solo exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield.

Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Cranston studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and then completed his postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig and Adrian Berg.

Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here? features 38 new and recent paintings that range from large-scale canvases to intimate works painted on old linen-bound book covers, comprising subjects that include still life, landscape, seascape, portraits, and interior scenes. This is the first public gallery to present a solo exhibition of his works. 

Engaging with the layered emotional quality and pathos of everyday life, as well as a strong sense of place, be it real or imagined, Cranston’s evocatively titled paintings contain compelling and intriguing narratives that have the collaged dream-like quality of recollection and what he calls ‘creative misremembering’.

His formally inventive and highly intimate paintings find new ways to connect the personal and art historical past with the present through a gamut of visual and literary references and shared experiences. The paintings exploit what is perhaps only glanced existing in the periphery of vision and embody a sense of revelation, wonder and oddness in familiar situations. Connections and highly personal associations are deeply entwined in these works creating a rewarding and memorable experience.

On display at The Hepworth Wakefield for the first time is one of Cranston’s most recent paintings entitled, A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there (2023), which has been generously acquired for Wakefield’s art collection through the JW Anderson Collections Fund. It features what Cranston says is ‘an intrusion of something alien into the familiar, an unlikely presence and threat into the domestic’. A large number of other works in the exhibition, lent from private collections, have never been shown publicly before.

Follow @Andrew.Cranston on Instagram and @HepworthWakefield.

Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here? is now open and runs until 2nd June 2024

Exhibition entry is £13 / £11 / FREE for Members, Wakefield District residents and under 18s.

Visit: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/andrew-cranston/

Visit Andrew's galleries: Ingleby @InglebyGallery Modern Art @stuartshavemodernart and Karma @KarmaKarma9.

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We meet artist Jordan Eagles to mark World Aids Day 2023. For 25 years, Eagles (b. 1977) has been exploring the aesthetics and ethics of blood as an artistic medium since the late 1990s. He lives and works in New York City and we were lucky to visit his studio in Brooklyn and were lucky enough to have our portraits taken by Jordan, within one of his projections.

Exploring the visual power, and cultural uses of blood, are the central tenets of Eagle's practice, which includes painting, sculpture, installation, photography and public programming. Created with animal blood from slaughterhouses, the work address themes of corporeality, spirituality, and regeneration. The preservation technique permanently retains the organic material’s natural colors, patterns, and textures. When lit, the works become translucent and luminous, reflecting the many layers suspended throughout the resin, revealing the blood’s visceral properties and energy. More politically motivated series, rendered from donated human blood—procured from the LGBTQI+ community—are utilized to advocate for fair blood donation policies, anti-stigma, and equality.

We discuss his major museum solo show ONE BLOOD currently on display at Springfield Art Museum, Missouri until February 18, 2024. Blood is frequently associated with violence and death, yet it is a critical life-force universal to all humanity. In an era of mass shootings, war, disease, and the urgent struggle over body autonomy and LGBTQI+ rights, blood is a symbolic connective tissue – often sensationalized – its visceral power is undeniable. 

Over the past decade, Eagles has built an expansive body of work focused on challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) blood donation policy, which advocates suggest is biased, perpetuates stigma and homophobia, and is not in line with modern science. Eagles’ sculptures, panels, screen-prints, photographic and video works are collaborations created with blood donated by members of the LGBTQI+ community, specifically for the purpose of making artworks and advocating for science and equality. 

Eagles utilizes a broad range of techniques in his work and his preservation process retains the natural patterns, colors, and textures of the organic material. Most of the blood in this exhibition is preserved, including sculptures and panels made with medical waste and archival material. 

The title of his solo exhibition, ONE BLOOD, references that despite the different backgrounds and serotypes of the blood donors, they are all united for blood equality. The exhibition features the work Blood Mirror, a large resin sculpture made with 59 individual human blood donations, that could have been used for life saving purposes if the FDA’s policy was more fair. For the first time, key works from several of the artist’s series that connect queer blood with American pop culture, comic books, military propaganda, and religious iconography are on view together. The exhibition also includes new works from Eagles’ latest series utilizing Artificial Intelligence.

Follow @JordanEagles and visit: https://jordaneagles.com/exhibitions

Learn about the Elton John AIDS Foundation's work. Since 1992, they are one of the leading independent AIDS organisations in the world helping to end the AIDS epidemic: https://www.eltonjohnaidsfoundation.org/

Follow @theAIDSmemorial on Instagram.

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We meet artist Navot Miller on the eve of his new solo exhibition at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, where Robert is the Director. We discuss his recent paintings, his journey since his last Talk Art episode one and a half years ago and his future plans - including a duo show with the work of late artist Patrick Angus, in Germany in April 2024.

Enamored with life’s fleeting moments of passion, heartache, and banality, Navot Miller (b. 1991) positions his practice as a record of it all. Drawing from the flow of moments and memories in his own life, Miller records the landscapes, architecture, and people he sees with fresh, inquisitive eyes. To capture these moments, Miller takes hundreds of photos as they pass, revisiting them later as the source material for his paintings. This part of his process-the transfer of composition from screen to canvas-is crucial, as it lends itself to a flatness of form, which Miller enhances with a vibrant, highly contrasted palette of solid pinks, yellows, blues, and greens. The forms that emerge are sectioned into flat blocks of color, punctuated intermittently by elements of richly blended paint that accentuate such elements as hair, skin, or flowing tapestries.

The artist’s experiences as a gay, Jewish immigrant living in Germany figure prominently into his painting. Growing up in a rural Israeli village, Miller found it difficult to express himself and his identity as a young gay person. Upon relocating to Berlin as an adult, he found a community of creatives who opened up new possibilities for self-expression. In Berlin, Miller began to study architecture, but found himself filling his portfolio with drawn depictions of queer love, and eventually switched courses to pursue painting. His background in architecture, however, permeates his compositions, which are filled with dramatic arches and elaborate door and window frames. Within these grandiose spaces, Miller locates men loving, swimming, and resting, many of whom sport peyes, the curled sidelocks worn by many religious Jewish men. The artist celebrates these scenes with a brazenly colorful palette, an exclamation of joy and undeniable presence.

Navot Miller has exhibited work widely in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at 1969 Gallery in New York, NY; Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv, Israel; Grove Collective, London, UK; Wannsee Contemporary, Berlin, Germany; Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. He has presented work in group exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Werkstattgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Unit 1 Gallery, London, UK; and Art Zagreb, Croatia, among others. The artist received his Diploma from Weissensee Art School in Berlin, Germany where he currently works and lives.

Follow @NavotMiller on Instagram. Visit Navot's new solo show at @CarlFreedmanGallery in Margate, Kent until 28th January 2024:

https://carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2023/navot-miller/ Open Wed-Sun, 12-5pm, free entry.

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Talk Art LIVE!!!! Special Episode presented by Stone Island. We talk to emerging galleries Ginny on Frederick and Public Gallery!!!

As part of Stone Island's multi-year global partnership with Frieze, we speak to two emerging contemporary art galleries

from the recent London edition of Frieze art fair's Focus.

We chat to two talented gallerists: Harry Dougall of Public and Freddie Powell of Ginny on Frederick to explore how they founded their art spaces,

the journeys they've both been on since founding in the past few years and their experiences of exhibiting for the first time at Frieze Focus 2023.

The section provides a platform for galleries aged 12 years and younger and Stone Island provide all galleries participating in Focus with a generous bursary, which is the equivalent of up to 30% of each exhibitor’s stand fee. This additional support, together with Frieze’s existing subsidisation of the section, will further aid young galleries participation in the fair. The partnership reflects Stone Island, Talk Art and Frieze’s shared belief in foregrounding the most exciting new artistic talent.

Follow @GinnyonFrederick and @Public__Gallery

Find more details on each gallery via: https://ginnyonfrederick.com/

and https://public.gallery/

Special thanks to Stone Island. This episode was recorded live in November 2023 at Stone Island's flagship London store, Brewer Street, Soho. Visit: @StoneIslandOfficial to learn more!

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We meet American artist Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian, b. 1959, Leicester, Massachusetts) at his apartment in the East Village.

We discuss his love of painting, his collection of glitter, early friendships via Boston including Nan Goldin and Jack Pierson. We explore his 1980s move to NY inspired by Klaus Nomi and New Wave, which led to his own regular performances at the legendary Pyramid Club appearing next to other drag legends like Rupaul and Lady Bunny. Notably, Tabboo! also contributed graphic design for album covers such as Deee-Lite's World Clique. The curly lettering on the album cover became an iconic image for the band and the rave culture of the early 1990s.

Tabboo! is a multidisciplinary artist and painter based in New York City. He renders his subjects in a direct, intuitive style, suspending figurative elements against dreamlike colorfields. Tabboo! often draws subjects from his surroundings, depicting expressive cityscapes, portraits of friends, or imaginative still lifes inspired by the plants in his apartment. He also paints large, panoramic works and site-specific murals. These immersive settings recall the painted backdrops he made for performances in the 1980s and 1990s.

While performing regularly himself, Tabboo! also designed numerous event fliers, posters, and album covers featuring his signature curvilinear text, which still appears in his work. Roberta Smith described Tabboo!’s paintings as “delicious, fresh and transparent, revealing every touch of color, every pour and drip.” His work is held in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Tabboo!’s work is on view in the exhibition The Myth of Normal: A Celebration of Authentic Expression at the MassArt Art Museum, Boston, though May 19, 2024.

Follow @TabbooNYC and https://karmakarma.org/artists/tabboo/

and https://www.gordonrobichaux.com/artists/tabboo

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Talk Art NYC special episode! We meet American art critic ROBERTA SMITH from her apartment in Greenwich Village. We explore her career over the past 50 years - Smith first began publishing art criticism in 1972. This epic feature-length conversation gets deep as we discuss visual literacy within education and the 'meaning' of art! In 2011, Smith became the first woman to hold the title of Co-Chief Art Critic of The New York Times.

Roberta Smith regularly reviews museum exhibitions, art fairs and gallery shows in New York, North America and abroad. Smith began regularly writing for the Times in 1985, and has been on staff there since 1991. She has written on Western and non-Western art from the prehistoric to the contemporary eras. She sees her main responsibility as “getting people out of the house,” making them curious enough to go see the art she covers, but she also enjoys posting artworks on Instagram and Twitter. Special areas of interest include ceramics textiles, folk and outsider art, design and video art. Before the NYT, she was a critic for the Village Voice from 1980 to 1984. She has written critic’s notebooks on the need for museums to be free to the public; Brandeis University’s decision to close its museum and sell its art collection (later rescinded), and the unveiling of the Google Art Project, which allowed online HD views of paintings in the collections of scores of leading museums worldwide.

Born in New York City, Smith was raised in Lawrence, Kansas, and earned her BA from Grinnell College in Iowa. She was introduced to the art world in the late 1960s, first as an intern at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC, and later as a participant in the Whitney’s Independent Study Program. During her time at the Whitney, she became familiar with the New York art world, and she met the artist Donald Judd, who would figure large in her early career. Smith wrote about Judd’s development from two to three dimensions, between 1954 and 1964, and began collecting and archiving his writings.

Smith began working at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1972, at which time she also began writing for Artforum, the New York Times, Art in America, and the Village Voice, where she has written important considerations of Philip Guston’s late paintings, the sculptures of Richard Artschwager, and Scott Burton’s performances. Smith has written many essays for catalogues and monographs on contemporary artists, as well as on the decorative arts, popular and outsider art, design, and architecture. In 2003, the College Art Association awarded her with the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism.

Furthermore in 2019 Smith was presented a $50,000 lifetime achievement award from the Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation. Due to NYT's editorial guidelines, Smith was unable to accept the cash prize and donated the entirety to the Art for Justice Fund, an organization launched by philanthropist Agnes Gund, whose goals include “safely cutting the prison population in states with the highest rates of incarceration, and strengthening education and employment options for people leaving prison.”: "Roberta Smith has been responsible for building an audience for the art of the self-taught, for ceramic art, video art, digital art, systems of re-presentation and much more. Across many traditional boundaries, she has offered a frank, lovingly detailed assessment of new art and artists to her expansive readership. Hers is a voice listened to by millions of readers."

Follow @RobertaSmithNYT on Instagram and Twitter.

Read www.nytimes.com/by/roberta-smith

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New Talk Art! We meet artist Sara Sadik, presented by BMW.

Sara Sadik (b. 1994, FR) is inspired by what she terms “beurcore”: the youth culture developed by working-class members of the Maghrebi diaspora. Her work brings together video, performance, installation and photography in order to explore beurcore’s manifestations, while her references span music, language, fashion, social networks and science fiction. These narratives, which the artist regularly features in, often document and analyse beurcore’s social and aesthetic symbols. Starting from a semiological and sociological analysis of the “beurness”, Sadik  goes on to hijack these social clichés by deconstructing and reintegrating them into fictions.

For the seventh consecutive year, Frieze and BMW continue their long-term partnership with the art initiative BMW Open Work. French artist Sara Sadik worked closely with BMW to present “LA POTION (EH)” - a video and gaming experience, using BMW’s My Modes and the new AirConsole technology of the BMW i5 as a playing device. Both works premiered in October at KOKO inside the BMW Open Work Lounge during Frieze London. In celebration of their collaboration, Frieze and BMW also invited London-based musician Loyle Carner as this year's Frieze Music performer. We loved seeing his concert!

BMW Open Work is a joint initiative between Frieze and BMW, bringing together art, innovation, technology and design in a pioneering multi-platform format. Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work invites an artist to develop an ambitious project utilising BMW technology and design to pursue their practice in new directions. This year, the invited artist is Marseille-based Sara Sadik, whose practice lies halfway between fiction and documentary. Her work, be it video or performance, is inspired by video games, anime, science-fiction as well as French rap, and puts forward characters facing challenges and striving to achieve moral and physical transformation through initiatory stories.

Conceived as part of BMW Open Work 2023, “LA POTION (EH)” continues the artist’s interest in the possibilities of computer-generated scenarios and her investigation into the changing emotional states of young male characters. The project unfolds as an interactive video game, devised to be played exclusively in the new, fully electric BMW i5 as well as a video installation presented both on the public-facing terrace of KOKO and inside the BMW Lounge. Guided by the Avatar Neregy, a virtually alienated character who struggles to connect with people, the viewer follows him across different worlds, tasks, and challenges to complete his quest for psychological healing and transformation.

Learn more at https://frieze.com/bmw-open-work 

Follow @SaraSadik and @BMWGroupCulture on Instagram.

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It's the FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of TALK ART!!! And what better way to CELEBRATE than meeting one of our all-time favourite artists, the warrior of performance art, Marina Abramović. We meet in her hotel room in Green Park to discuss more than 5 DECADES of making art.

An art world icon and a performance art pioneer – Marina Abramović has captivated audiences by pushing the limits of her body and mind, for the past 50 years. Marina Abramović Hon RA has earned worldwide acclaim as a performance artist. She has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work, subjecting herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death.

In her early work Rhythm 0, Abramović invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose – famously resulting in a loaded gun being held to her head. Her later work The House with the Ocean View saw the artist live in a house constructed in a gallery for 12 days. Held in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the performance invited audiences to witness and share in the simple act of living.

This major exhibition presents key moments from Abramović’s career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. Works such as The Artist is Present will be strikingly re-staged through archive footage while others will be reperformed by the next generation of performance artists, trained in the Marina Abramović method.

Live performance art can be both startling and intimate. For Abramović it also has the power to be transformative. Experience this yourself through performances of Imponderabilia, Nude with Skeleton, Luminosity and The House with the Ocean View.

Visit the Royal Academy's major retrospective of 50+ years of Marina's work until 1st January 2024. Buy tickets here: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/marina-abramovic

Follow @AbramovicInstitute on Instagram and @RoyalAcademyArts

#MarinaAbramovićRA

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🍷🎨💫 New @TalkArt! We welcome the MOST WANTED COLLECTIVE!! Over the last few months we have collaborated with Most Wanted Wines to commission a series of limited-edition bottles designed by artists from lesser-represented communities. 

❤ A true celebration of diversity through creativity, and in this podcast we get to hear from the artists. 

🎨 We chose the 3 artists because we felt their work would connect with diverse audiences and inspire people with their symbolic, captivating and striking artwork. Each artist has a unique perspective and style which creates a very special series of designs for each wine bottle.

🎤 In the episode we chew the fat with Tejumola Butler Adenuga @butlerarchive, Ana Curbelo @untepid and Anshika Khullar @aorists, as well as Calum Hall from @creativedebuts who we worked with to select the artists. We discuss their work, influences and pinpoint social issues that present barriers to creativity...and trust us when we say that there are some amazing personal and emotive stories.

🍷 Most Wanted Wines believe that good wine, just like good art, should and can be enjoyed by everyone, and aim to make both wine and art as inclusive as possible.

🔗 Follow @MostWantedWines and visit www.mostwantedwines.co.uk

🔗 Follow Anshika Khullar @aorists

🔗 Follow Ana Curbelo @untepid

🔗 Follow Tejumola Butler Adenuga @butlerarchive

🔗 Follow Calum Hall @creativedebuts 

🍷 The special edition Collective 2.0 bottles are available nationwide #AD

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Artist and Stage Designer, Es Devlin’s work explores biodiversity, linguistic diversity and collective ai-generated poetry. She views the audience as a temporary society and encourages profound cognitive shifts by inviting public participation in communal choral works. Her canvas ranges from public sculptures and installations at Tate Modern, V&A, Serpentine, Imperial War Museum and United Nations General Assembly, to kinetic stage designs at the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Olympic ceremonies, Super-Bowl half-time shows, and monumental illuminated stage sculptures for Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Dr Dre, Kendrick Lamar and U2.

She is the subject of a major new monographic book, An Atlas of Es Devlin, described by Thames & Hudson as their most intricate and sculptural

publication to date, and a retrospective exhibition at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Museum of Design in New York. She was the first female designer of the UK pavilion at Expo 2020 and her practice was the subject of the Netflix documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design. She has been awarded the London Design Medal, three Olivier awards, a Tony award, an Ivor Novello award, Doctorates from the Universities of Bristol, Kent and the University of the Arts London as well as Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts and CBE.

Visit: https://EsDevlin.com/ and Follow @EsDevlin

Buy Es Devlin's major new book An Atlas of Es Devlin at all good bookstores including Waterstone's.

Published by Thames & Hudson: https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/an-atlas-of-es-devlin-hardcover

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We meet artist Phoebe Collings-James whose work often eludes linear retellings of stories. Instead, her works function as “emotional detritus”: they speak of knowledges of feelings, the debris of violence, language and desire which are inherent to living and surviving within hostile environments. Recent works have been dealing with the object as subject, giving life and tension to ceramic forms. As young nettle, a musical alias, she loves sound that totally envelopes her and is part of B.O.S.S., a QTIBIPOC sound system based in South London.

Drawn to high octane sensual emotional sound, with heavy bass and wild lyrical flows, she creates sound design for original music productions. Including Sounds 4 Survival, an undulating live performance created with SERAFINE1369, which asks the question of what an anti-assimilationist practice can be. As the 2021 Freelands Ceramic Fellow she has an upcoming exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, London, in autumn 2021. Collings-James’s Mudbelly ceramics studio began as a personal practice and research outlet, but has since grown to encompass a shop and a teaching facility offering free ceramics courses for Black people in London, taught by Black ceramicists.

Phoebe's new exhibition Bun Babylon; A Heretics Anthology, runs until 28 October 2023 at Arcadia Missa gallery, London.

https://arcadiamissa.com/bun-babylon-a-heretics-anthology/

Follow @PhoebeTheGorgon and @ArcadiaMissa

Visit: https://www.phoebecollingsjames.com/

and https://arcadiamissa.com/phoebe-collings-james/

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We meet artist Sophie von Hellermann (b. 1975, Munich) at her studio in Margate, as she created brand new paintings for her Frieze London 2023 solo booth with Pilar Corrias Gallery. It's an epic installation including a giant hand-painted mural alongside a new series of Margate-themed paintings.

Dreamland, Margate’s iconic funfair, is the inspiration behind a new body of work, featuring carousels, Ferris wheels and soothsayers. Opening in 1870 as a ‘pleasure garden’ set within the coastal resort of Margate, where the artist lives and works, Dreamland has become a symbol of classic British seaside culture: bawdy revelry, tongue-in-cheek humour, decaying grandeur and sepia-tinted sentimentality.

Bringing the funfair to the art fair, von Hellermann builds a carnival populated by a menagerie of characters from literature and popular culture: bathers frolic, seagulls swoop across swirling, Turner-esque skies, and lovers embrace in shadowy corners of the Victorian seafront shelter where TS Eliot wrote his classic work, The Waste Land (1922). Unburdened by the gravities of everyday life, Dreamland’s thrill-seekers begin to sprout wings, or career off into new phantasmic landscapes. In one painting, a group ride tiny cups down an eerie, rainbow-hued river; elsewhere a visitor to a house of mirrors dances and flirts with his own reflections.

As in Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (1767–8), a painting that epitomises the playfulness and joie de vivre of its era, von Hellermann deliberately reclaims a host of clichés associated with pleasure, frivolity and a temporary loss of control. In her rapidly executed tableaux, von Hellermann fuses the trivial and the grandiose, playing with traditional rules of seriousness and propriety in painting. 

Sophie von Hellermann’s paintings recall the look of fables, legends, and traditional stories that are imbued with the workings of her subconscious rather than the content of existing images. Her romantic, pastel-washed canvases are often installed to suggest complex narrative threads. Von Hellermann applies pure pigment directly onto unprimed canvas, her use of broad-brushed washes imbues a sense of weightlessness to her pictures. Von Hellermann’s paintings draw upon current affairs as often and as fluidly as they borrow from the imagery of classical mythology and literature to create expansive imaginary places. In subject matter and style, von Hellermann tests imagination against reality.

Sophie von Hellermann (b. 1975, Munich) received her BFA from Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf and an MFA from Royal College of Art, London. She lives and works in London and Margate, United Kingdom.

Follow @SophieVonHellermann and @PilarCorrias

View the works: https://www.pilarcorrias.com/art-fairs/22-frieze-london-2023-sophie-von-hellermann-dreamland/

and visit Frieze London until Sunday 15th October. Sophie's solo is located at Booth A23.

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Talk Art Special LIVE EPISODE with Ruinart! We met leading French artist EVA JOSPIN! Live from London's Frieze week, this inspiring episode was recorded in the Serpentine Pavilion designed by Lina Ghotmeh in front of a live audience.

With the belief art can enlighten and connect us, Ruinart gives Carte Blanche to leading contemporary artists every year to pay tribute to the Maison’s legacy, this year French Artist Eva Jospin.

As part of the Carte Blanche program Eva Jospin imagined an artistic and sensory encounter offering her vision of the terroir of Maison Ruinart. Like a cross-sectional landscape, the site of the Montagne de Reims appeared to the French artist as composed of different geological and temporal strata, real and imaginary. Eva Jospin is passionate about the richness of this region and the know-how transmitted there: from the underground world of the crayères to the roots and interlacing vines; from the coronation of the kings of France in Reims Cathedral to the ennoblement of the Ruinart family under Charles X; and from the conversion of the old chalk quarries into cellars to the Maison’s expanded commitment to supporting biodiversity.

PROMENADE(S), a series of drawings, sculptures and embroideries, invites each of us to immerse ourselves in this landscape, as if plunging into a mysterious story intertwining the cycles of history and plants, life and creation.  It is on show now at Frieze London in the Ruinart Art Bar until 15 October.

More can be found out at Ruinart.com

Follow @Ruinart

Please drink responsibly

THANKS FOR LISTENING!!! Special thanks to everyone who got a ticket and came to watch this episode recording Live in London!!!

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We meet artist Rafał Zajko (b.1988, Białystok, Poland). Zajko’s work deals with issues around the industrial past, exploring its environmental impact in relation to working class heritage and queer identities. His sculptural practice incorporates diverse materials and processes including ceramics, ventilation systems, prosthetics and performance as a means to examine folklore, science fiction and queer technoscience, placing an emphasis on the industrial materials and processes that resonate with his heritage.

Zajko is currently working on a public commission with Wysing Arts Centre and St. Peters School in Cambridge, performance commission ‘Techno Harvest’ for Deptford X festival and a new sculptural commission for Kunsthalle Vienna in autumn 2023. 

He studied for an an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, London, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Amber Waves II’, Galeria Fran Reus, Palma, Mallorca, SP (2022), ‘Song to the Siren', Cooke Latham Gallery, London, UK (2022), ‘Amber Waves’, Public Gallery, London, UK (2021), ‘Resuscitation’, Castor Projects, London, UK (2020), ‘We Were Here/My Tu Bylismy’, Galeria Im. Slendzinskich, Białystok, PL (2019) and ‘Unputdownable’, White Cubicle, London, UK (2018).

Selected group exhibitions include ‘Support Structures’, Gathering, London (2023), ‘Swiat nie wierzy lzom’, Galeria Arsenal, Białystok, Poland (2022), ‘London Open 2022’, Whitechapel Gallery, London Uk (2022), ‘New Contemporaries 2021’, South London Gallery, London, UK (2021), ‘26 Degrees East’, Wiels Annex, Brussels, Belgium (2020), ‘Age of Ephemerality’, X Museum, Beijing, CN (2020), 'Clay TM’, TJ Boulting, London, UK (2020) and ‘Bold Tendencies 2020’, London, UK (2020). In 2020 Zajko was the recipient of the Bow Graduation Studio Award.

Visit: RAFAŁ ZAJKO CLOCKING OFF open now and runs until 26th November 2023: https://queercircle.org/rafal/

Nearest tube: North Greenwich. Free entry.

Follow @Rafal_Zajko and @QueerCircle

Rafal's website is: https://www.rafal-zajko.com/

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We meet Bengi Ünsal, Director of ICA London which is celebrating its landmark 75th year. She is the second woman to serve as the Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and has been successfully refocusing their commitment to live music, live performances alongside extensive visual arts, film and education programmes. (As we discover in this episode, the first female Director was Dorothy Morland from 1952-1968, who was also the longest running the ICA for 18 years).

The Institute of Contemporary Arts is much more than a museum. Since its inception in 1947 as the first truly multi-disciplinary arts organisation, the ICA has always been a progressive, alternative, and a safe place for artists who are looking beyond the mainstream: the ones who are willing to go beyond the status quo, and those who take risks and defy definitions.

Today, the ICA remains at the heart of contemporary culture in London, commissioning, producing, and presenting urgent new work in film, music, performance, digital art, and the visual arts, by the most vital and provocative artists of our time.

Follow @ICAlondon and @BengiUnsal

Visit @CounterEditions for 8 new fundraising prints to celebrate 75 Years of the ICA. Find prints here: https://www.countereditions.com

Before the ICA, Bengi was the head of contemporary music at the Southbank Centre, the UK’s largest arts centre and one of the most-visited attractions in the country. During her tenure, she was responsible for a year-round programme of more than 200 gigs and contemporary music performances across its venues. She oversaw the award-winning artist-curated Meltdown festival, alongside guest curators M.I.A in 2017, Robert Smith (2018), Nile Rodgers (2019) and Grace Jones, who brought together artists including Peaches and Skunk Anansie for the 27th edition earlier this year. Under her leadership, the Southbank Centre launched its first regular club night, Concrete Lates, in 2018, and futuretense, a weekly free slot for international emerging music talent, delivered in partnership with BBC Music Introducing. 

As multifaceted as her work, Ünsal is a DJ, has run her own events company, launched a festival, and has worked for radio and music TV channels, Universal Music and BMG.

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Talk Art special episode with WePresent! We meet Durk Dehner to discuss TOM OF FINLAND as the 40th anniversary of the ToF Foundation approaches. Since first meeting Tom in 1978, Durk worked closely with the artist, serving from time to time as Tom's muse which continued until Tom's death in 1991. We also chat with Richard Villiani, the foundation's Creative Director.

In 1984, the nonprofit Tom of Finland Foundation (ToFF) was established by Durk and Touko Laaksonen a.k.a. Tom of Finland (b.1920, Kaarina). As Tom had established worldwide recognition as the master of homoerotic art, the Foundation’s original purpose was to preserve his vast catalog of work. Several years later the scope was widened to offer a safe haven for all erotic art in response to rampant discrimination against art that portrayed sexual behavior or generated a sexual response. Today ToFF continues in its efforts of educating the public as to the cultural merits of erotic art and in promoting healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality. 

Unlike many artists, Tom of Finland’s work has always been appreciated by a grass-roots audience as his work was first seen in commercial settings such as magazine illustration, posters and advertising. From the perspective of art historians, Tom’s work had an effect on global culture unmatched by that of virtually any other artist. Tom’s work had a defining impact on the way Gay men throughout the world were perceived and more importantly, how they perceived themselves. Tom’s work has, therefore, had a ripple effect throughout Gay and Straight culture, influencing lifestyle, political tolerance, design, fashion and art.

Follow @TomOfFinlandFoundation & support ToFF by donating, shopping or getting involved via their official website: www.TomOfFinland.org

Join the global community of ToF! It really is a loving, creative, safe space for all.

Russell Tovey is WeTransfer’s third Guest Curator across 2023 where he spotlights LGBTQIA+ artists that have inspired him. The selected artists of the Guest Curatorship have been given a platform on WePresent, the arts arm of WeTransfer, and on these TalkArt episodes.  As part of this collaboration, WePresent will also launch Russell Tovey’s documentary Life is Excellent and present a tour of four performances of BLUE NOW, a live version of Derek Jarman’s film BLUE directed by Neil Bartlett and performed by Russell Tovey alongside three other performers. 

As a certified B Corporation™, WeTransfer has long been a champion of using business as a force for good. Since its founding in 2009, WeTransfer has donated up to 30% of its advertising space to support artists and social causes, and commissioned original projects for its Oscar-winning arts platform WePresent. Last year, WeTransfer also launched its Supporting Act Foundation to support emerging creative talent through arts education, grants, and an annual prize.

Follow @WePresent on Instagram and visit https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/ to stay up to date on Russell Tovey’s Guest Curatorship on WePresent.

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We meet legendary artist Sylvia Snowden from her home in Washington DC where she has been painting for the past 60+ years!

Known for her use of abundantly thick, layered paint, Snowden has developed a visual language in which gems of colour and texture emerge from densely-worked under layers. From dark and earthy tones to the vibrant and artificial, Snowden’s command of chromatic range is the fuel of her expressionistic style. Over the course of her more than five-decade-long career, in which she has always painted in series, Snowden developed an adroitness with her medium. She initially employed oil paint and pastels then moved toward acrylic–a less toxic and faster-drying alternative–after having children. Snowden paints sculpturally, her compositions range from larger-than-life to portrait-sized. Her process allows visible evidence of constructed layers and employs impasto that interacts with her bold figures caught in motion with physical weight.

Snowden’s voluminous bodies, often contrapposto, are surrounded by peaks of shifting chroma in a physical manifestation of feeling; she depicts the tension and intensity of life, and the troubled, optimistic, and dramatic elements of our sublime existence. Snowden encapsulates the psychological essence of her subjects–some of whom were unhoused and transient, displaced by gentrification, others with whom she had intimate or long-term relationships–their triumphs, paranoia, agony, and anger are all visible; these works convey an emotionally turbulent environment. Snowden’s expressive paintings reference the immediate lives of these individuals, and act as interpretations of each subject's psyche. As a serial painter, Snowden alternates between representation and abstraction, exhausting her emotional self between each mode as she articulates the struggles and successes of humanity.

Sylvia Snowden (b.1942, Raleigh, NC) spent her childhood in New Orleans. Aged 14, she and her family moved to Washington, D.C. Snowden’s parents Dr. George W. Snowden & Mrs. Jessie Burns Snowden encouraged her artistic pursuits at a young age, which led to her enrolment in the art department at Howard University. Snowden received a scholarship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME and has a certificate from La Grande Chaumier in Paris, France. She holds both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Howard University. At Howard University she studied under David C. Driskell. She has taught at Howard University, Cornell and Yale, has served as an artist-in-residence, a panelist, visiting artist, lecturer/instructor and curator in universities, galleries and art schools both in the United States and internationally.

Visit Sylvia's new exhibition 'M Street on White' until 28th October 2023 in London at Edel Assanti: https://edelassanti.com/exhibitions/118-sylvia-snowden-m-street-on-white/

Follow Sylvia's galleries @EdelAssanti and @ParraschHeijnen and @FranklinParraschGallery

Visit Sylvia's official website: https://sylviasnowden.com/

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Talk Art special episode with WePresent! We meet artist FIZA KHATRI to discuss their recent paintings. Their work represents intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community. They remix imagery from lived experiences, imagined fantasies, sacred landscapes, and archival research to imbricate the social, sacral, and political stakes of building ecosystems of cohabitation.  

Fiza Khatri was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. They currently live in New Haven, CT and are an MFA candidate at the Yale School of Art in Painting and Printmaking.

Follow @fklmnop on Instagram and visit Fiza's website: https://www.fizakhatri.com/

Russell Tovey is WeTransfer’s third Guest Curator across 2023 where he spotlights LGBTQIA+ artists that have inspired him. The selected artists of the Guest Curatorship have been given a platform on WePresent, the arts arm of WeTransfer, and on these TalkArt episodes.  

As part of this collaboration, WePresent will also launch Russell Tovey’s documentary Life is Excellent and present a tour of four performances of BLUE NOW, a live version of Derek Jarman’s film BLUE directed by Neil Bartlett and performed by Russell Tovey alongside three other performers. 

As a certified B Corporation™, WeTransfer has long been a champion of using business as a force for good. Since its founding in 2009, WeTransfer has donated up to 30% of its advertising space to support artists and social causes, and commissioned original projects for its Oscar-winning arts platform WePresent. Last year, WeTransfer also launched its Supporting Act Foundation to support emerging creative talent through arts education, grants, and an annual prize.

With more then more than 80 million monthly active users in 190 countries, WeTransfer is a platform by creators for creators. Its ecosystem of creative productivity tools makes it easy to collaborate, share and deliver work. 

Follow @WePresent on Instagram and visit https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/ to stay up to date on Russell Tovey’s Guest Curatorship on WePresent, the arts arm of WeTransfer.

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We meet legendary artist Julian Schnabel to explore more than 40 years of painting. Since his first solo exhibition in 1976, Schnabel has been on a quest to express the inexpressible. Best known for his multidisciplinary practice that extends beyond painting to include sculpture and film. His use of preexisting materials not traditionally used in art making, varied painting surfaces and modes of construction were pivotal in the reemergence of painting in the United States.

Resisting the turn to traditional conventions of painting and sculpture that characterized the 1980s, he began his series of Plate Paintings, representational works with sculptural surfaces produced by layering shards of found pottery with thick applications of pigment. Throughout his career, he has sustained his use of found materials and chance-based processes, transforming the conventions of painting and opening the door for a new generation of young artists.

The works on display in Schnabel’s upcoming show were made in concert with the preparation of his seventh feature film, In the Hand of Dante, an adaptation of Nick Tosches’s novel of the same name. For Schnabel, filmmaking and painting exist in a continuum in which subject matter crosses between mediums, assuming myriad forms. This relationship resonates throughout the exhibition, where indecipherable narratives emerge from a process of imagery central both to Schnabel’s film and to the paintings on view.

Celebrated for his vast and experimental practice that extends into the realms of sculpture and filmmaking, the artist has always been a painter first and foremost. Since 1978, when he created the first plate painting, The Patients and the Doctors—a work which abandoned traditional canvas in favor of a surface composed of broken plates—his use of unconventional, found materials has led to the invention of entirely new modes of painting. Dispensing with traditional distinctions between abstraction and figuration, Schnabel’s plate paintings, and his works on velvet, reinvigorated interest in painting as a medium for contemporary art. Moreover, in the early years of his practice, Schnabel decided to make paintings that incorporated the history and materiality of the medium itself, embracing a singular approach to both form and subject.

With these new velvet paintings, Schnabel considers the ways that the material appears as subject matter throughout the history of art—particularly in the works of Titian, Goya, and other Old Masters—and its symbolic weight in the history of humanity itself. But rather than creating illusionistic depictions of velvet, the artist uses the material for the surfaces of his works, inventing a new, contemporary kind of history painting in the process.

Among Schnabel’s recent velvet works in the exhibition is the ten-panel Buñuel Awake (for Jean-Claude Carrière) or Bouquet of Mistakes (2022), a large-scale composition that evokes the grandeur of retablos, architecturally scaled paintings that loom behind the altars of Renaissance and Baroque churches across southern Europe. Also included in this body of new works is Gesù Deriso. Jesus Mocked (2023), which refers directly to an enigmatic Renaissance fresco by the Dominican monk Fra Angelico in the famous monastery of San Marco in Florence.

Julian's new exhibition 'Bouquet of Mistakes' is now open and runs until October 28th 2023.

Visit: pacegallery.com/exhibitions/julian-schnabel-new-york/

Follow @JulianSchnabel and visit his official website: www.julianschnabel.com

Special thanks to @PaceGallery.

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Talk Art special episode with WePresent!!! 

We meet TED ROGERS, a multidisciplinary artist based in Margate working predominantly with movement. Ted explores the extremities of movement through the neurodivergent and non binary lens; plowing their unwavering and infectious energy into any and all mediums, with a particular focus on entertainment and the deeper emotional aspects of humanity.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience within their debut solo show at Quench Gallery. They trained professionally in Musical Theatre before moving to London and finding nightlife, queer culture, gogo-dancing, drag, fashion, music and contemporary dance.

Ted's collaborations have included renowned contemporary artists such as: Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan, Lindsey Mendick, Jenkin Van Zyl, Holly Blakey, Anthea Hamilton & Lucy Mcormick. Ted is currently the performance artist in Residence at Tracey Emin's TKE studios following a sell out commission to open the studios with a performance called "Valentine”.

Follow @ArtPornBlog on Instagram and visit Ted's website: https://www.MxRogers.com/

Russell Tovey is WeTransfer’s third Guest Curator across 2023 where he spotlights LGBTQIA+ artists that have inspired him. The selected artists of the Guest Curatorship have been given a platform on WePresent, the arts arm of WeTransfer, and on these TalkArt episodes.  

As part of this collaboration, WePresent will also launch Russell Tovey’s documentary Life is Excellent and present a tour of four performances of BLUE NOW, a live version of Derek Jarman’s film BLUE directed by Neil Bartlett and performed by Russell Tovey alongside three other performers. 

As a certified B Corporation™, WeTransfer has long been a champion of using business as a force for good. Since its founding in 2009, WeTransfer has donated up to 30% of its advertising space to support artists and social causes, and commissioned original projects for its Oscar-winning arts platform WePresent. Last year, WeTransfer also launched its Supporting Act Foundation to support emerging creative talent through arts education, grants, and an annual prize.

With more then more than 80 million monthly active users in 190 countries, WeTransfer is a platform by creators for creators. Its ecosystem of creative productivity tools makes it easy to collaborate, share and deliver work. 

Follow @WePresent on Instagram and visit https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/ to stay up to date on Russell Tovey’s Guest Curatorship on WePresent, the arts arm of WeTransfer.

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Season 18 begins!!! We meet GUS VAN SANT, iconic American film director, producer, painter, photographer and musician. We discuss his deconstructed Mona Lisa series, his friendship with Derek Jarman and how he became a painter in his teens, the lasting influence of his art teacher, and how painting informed his filmmaking!!!

Gus Van Sant (b. 1952, Louisville, Kentucky), admired internationally as a filmmaker, painter, photographer, and musician, received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 1975. Since that time his studio painting practice has moved in and out of the foreground of a multi-disciplinary career, becoming a priority again over recent years. Van Sant’s work in different mediums is united by a single overarching interest in portraying people on the fringes of society.

Van Sant’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, Le Case d’Arte in Milan, Italy, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon in Eugene, among others. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions since the 1980s, presenting drawings, paintings, photographs, video works, and writing. Among Van Sant’s many internationally acclaimed feature films are Milk (2008); Elephant (2003); Good Will Hunting (1997); My Own Private Idaho (1991); and Drugstore Cowboy (1989).

Van Sant lives and works in Los Angeles.

Follow @Gus_Van_Sant

Visit Gus' gallery @VitoSchnabelGallery: https://www.vitoschnabel.com/projects/gus-van-sant

Feud: Capote's Women forthcoming TV series will air later this year (starring Talk Art’s very own Russell Tovey as John O'Shea, longtime boyfriend of Truman Capote). @RyanMurphyProductions

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Talk Art Live with Oliver Hemsley!!! Season 17 FINALE!!! For our second interview with artist Oliver Hemsley, we meet within his debut exhibition at TKE Studios, Margate - the artist studio complex and gallery founded by Tracey Emin. Recorded in front of an intimate audience of art lovers, Margate family and friends, this episode is one of our proudest moments - proud of our talent friend Oliver and his extraordinary exhibition. We discuss his new works on canvas - a new development in his journey making paintings, having predominantly previously worked on paper.

Oliver Hemsley is an autobiographical artist who lives in Suffolk with his two dogs. For his first solo exhibition, Hemsley presents a selection of intimate and confronting self-portrait paintings produced in his home studio. CAREGIVERS is an unapologetic and uncompromising look at the body and the personal complexities of an existence that is dependent on the care of others.

Hemsley is the first artist to have a solo show curated by Tracey Emin and Elissa Cray at TKE Studios and it has been selected to coincide with Margate Pride. You can read more from Oliver in our recent Talk Art: The Interviews book. Available now! You can listen to our previous 2021 interview with Oliver in the Talk Art podcast archive (click here).

Special thanks to Oliver, Tracey and Elissa! We also recommend reading this new review of Oliver's exhibition at ANOTHER Magazine: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/15075/oliver-hemsley-tracey-emin-exhibition-caregivers-margate

Visit Oliver's new exhibition @TKEStudios in Margate, Kent until 15th October 2023. Visit: https://www.TraceyEminFoundation.com/

TKE EXHIBITION OPENING HOURS:

SATURDAYS AND SUNDAYS 12PM - 4PM

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com

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We meet leading artist Victoria Cantons from her London studios!!! We discuss her autobiographical as well as confessional work. Cantons presents a record of trauma and healing, alongside a rigorous inquiry into the social constraints surrounding gender politics. Deeply informed by her own experience of limitation and stigma, her work reverberates with notions of freedom, selfhood, representation, power and aspects of the human condition which she writes, despite our divergent identities and experiences, "connect us all."

While her incisive and inquisitive creative gaze extends across photography, text and video, painting and drawing remain firmly at the centre of her practice, providing a means of, she writes, "clearing the drainpipes" and exploring the question what can paint and painting do? Her 2022 Flowers Gallery exhibition People Trust People Who Look Like Them presented a series of large self-portraits painted from a personal archive of photographs made over a period of more than a decade in the years before, during, and after intensive facial surgery. Luminous and visceral in their depiction of flesh, the paintings capture the shape-shifting bloom of post-surgical bruising, fading scar tissue, greying hair and the mottled lustre of theatrically applied makeup. Cantons describes the importance of accuracy and honesty in the paintings, saying “I needed to show exactly what this woman has been through.”

Cantons is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting. Her works can be best described as figurative and colourist with political undercurrents. Cantons has a transgender history – having transitioned at thirty-nine – and was an only child, growing up in London with a Catholic mother from Spain and Jewish father of French and Russian descent. Because of this background, Cantons is keenly aware of questions concerning boundaries, stigma and freedom. “What we as individuals present to the world is multifaceted and not always visible, a continuous evolution in response to experience and in relationship to each other.” From its content and imagery to its titles, the human condition, gender, and social identity are at the core of her work. 

Cantons’s portraits and still lifes are painted in gestural brushstrokes with a limited, muted, palette that tends to evoke feelings of nostalgia. She often depicts youthful figures who shine their individual light upon the treacherous path to adulthood; much like how the tenderness of Spring paves the way for a scalding summer.

Victoria Cantons (b. 1969) lives and works in London. She studied Fine Art Painting at Wimbledon (UAL); followed by Turps Art School, London; and graduated with an MFA in Painting from Slade, UCL in 2021, where she received the Felix Slade Scholarship (2018). Cantons has exhibited her work internationally, with some of her most recent shows at London's Guts Gallery and Flowers Gallery (both 2023), the Tree Art Museum in Beijing (2021), Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles (2020) and White Cube in London (2020).

Follow @VictoriaCantons on Instagram and her official website: www.victoriacantons.com

Visit her galleries, Flowers Gallery: https://www.flowersgallery.com/artists/1325-victoria-cantons/

Guts Gallery: https://gutsgallery.co.uk/artists/44-victoria-cantons/

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We meet leading artist RENE MATIĆ to discuss current solo exhibition ‘A Girl For The Living Room’ at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol. This episode includes a special moment with living legend, and focus of Rene’s new show, TRAVIS ALABANZA. We also explore earlier works exhibited at South London Gallery and their solo show at Quench Gallery, Margate. Plus we discuss a series of fifteen photographs that the Tate museum have acquired for their permanent collection - currently on display at Tate Britain's rehang of Modern and Contemporary British Art.

Rene Matić (b. 1997, Peterborough, UK) is a London-based artist and writer whose practice spans across photography, film, and sculpture, converging in a meeting place they describe as "rude(ness)" - an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. Matić draws inspiration from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, Ska, and 2-Tone as a tool to delve into the complex relationship between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain, whilst privileging queer/ing intimacies, partnerships and pleasure as modes of survival.  

In 2022 Martin Parr Foundation commissioned photographic artist Rene Matić to develop a new body of work in Bristol. Rene has created an intimate portrait of their friend Travis Alabanza, a Bristol born and based writer, performer and theatre maker. This new work comprises a mix of portraits alongside diaristic still lifes that document Rene and Travis’s developing relationship as it became “lit by a table lamp instead of a disco ball.”

‘We were excited to discover Rene’s work and started to think about the idea of Rene shooting a project in Bristol and what this might look like. In 2022 we gave them a carte blanche to pursue any subject of their choice for this commission, so long as there was a Bristol connection. In ‘a girl for the living room’ Rene has found a way of capturing and expressing their relationship with Travis Alabanza, a Bristol-born and based artist and performer.’ – Martin Parr

Follow @Rene.Matic on Instagram and their gallery @ArcadiaMissa, 35 Duke Street, London: https://arcadiamissa.com/rene-matic/

A GIRL FOR THE LIVING ROOM BY RENE MATIĆ runs until 17th September 2023 in Bristol.

Visit: @MartinParrFdn and https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/exhibitions/a-girl-for-the-living-room/

Thanks for listening!!!

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We meet leading artist Rana Begum to discuss her new public art flag display on London's Piccadilly in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts and Art of London. We also explore her incredible current solo exhibition at The Box in Plymouth titled 'Dappled Light'.

The vibrant designs entitled No.1273 Flag are currently adorning the London skies until 20th August 2023, so make sure you visit if you're in London this month! Each flag showcases intricate geometric patterns, celebrating the multicultural fabric of the city. Rana Begum, a distinguished Royal Academician elected in December of 2019, has skilfully infused the flags with meticulously tiled mosaic patterns, symbolising unity and the diverse community of London. With her mastery of minimalist abstraction, she captures the vibrant essence of the city's world-class culture and entertainment scene, particularly in the iconic West End. Her artwork spills out onto the streets of the West End, bringing vivid colours and vibrancy along London’s iconic Piccadilly.

Part of Art of London's Summer Season, these striking designs give us a glimpse of what's in store for the city's streets. Rana Begum's designs, responding to the "Art of Entertainment" theme, reflect the liveliness and excitement of dance, music, and theatre. Her clever blend of colour and geometry captures the fluidity of movement, resulting in a rhythm that connects with passers-by.

The work of London-based artist Rana Begum distils spatial and visual experience into ordered form. Through her refined language of Minimalist abstraction, Begum blurs the boundaries between sculpture, painting and architecture. Her visual language draws from the urban landscape as well as geometric patterns from traditional Islamic art and architecture. Light is fundamental to her process. Begum’s works absorb and reflect varied densities of light to produce an experience for the viewer that is both temporal and sensorial. In 1999, Begum graduated with a BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design and, in 2002, gained an MFA in Painting from Slade School of Fine Art. Rana Begum lives and works in London.

Follow @RanaBegumStudio @TheArtofLdn and view image of Rana's new flags at: https://artoflondon.co.uk/events/art-of-london-unveils-new-flags-by-rana-begum-on-piccadilly

and visit @TheBoxPlymouth for her current solo exhibition. @RoyalAcademyArts Summer Exhibition 2023 is open until 20thAugust, for more information visit: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2023

Thanks for listening and happy Summer!!!

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We meet renowned British painter and artist David Remfry MBE RA RWS, to discuss curating/coordinating this year's RA Summer Exhibition, working with watercolour, more than 5 decades of art making, and what it was like to live in New York's iconic Hotel Chelsea for 20 years!!!

Remfry’s Summer Exhibition 2023 explores the theme Only Connect, taken from the famous quote in Howards End by E.M. Forster. Among the 1,614 featured works you will find towering sculptures by the late Phyllida Barlow RA, Richard Malone’s dramatic mobile installation in the Wohl Central Hall, and a witty painting by comedian Joe Lycett. Plus pieces by Tracey Emin RA, Hew Locke RA, Barbara Walker RA, Gavin Turk, Lindsey Mendick, Caroline Walker and much, much more.

Remfry was born in Worthing, UK, in 1942. His family moved to Hull and he studied Art and Printmaking at the Hull College of Art. He currently lives and works in London. Early solo exhibitions include Ferens Art Gallery, Hull in 1974 and Folkestone Art Gallery, Kent in 1976. Since 1973 he has exhibited regularly at galleries and museums across the UK, Europe and the USA. He is perhaps best known for his large-scale watercolours of dancers; his series of drawings and watercolours of his neighbours and friends at the Hotel Chelsea New York City where he lived from 1995-2016, and his commission by designer Stella McCartney to produce a series of drawings for the launch of her fashion house and for Absolut Vodka.

Over the past five decades his work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; and the DeLand Museum of Art, Florida. In 2014 he was commissioned by Fortnum & Mason, London, to create a series of watercolours which is now on permanent display in Piccadilly, and he was commissioned to paint Sir John Gielgud for the National Portrait Gallery, London, which also acquired for their collection his portrait of Jean Muir.

Remfry was elected a member of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1987. In 2001 he was awarded an MBE for services to British Art in America, in 2006 he was elected a Member of the Royal Academy of Arts and, in 2007, he was invited to receive Honorary Doctorate of Arts by the University of Lincoln. He was awarded the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize at the 2010 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and, in 2016, was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy Schools.

His work is included in museum permanent collections including the Bass Museum of Art, Florida; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; the British Museum, London; the Contemporary Art Society, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; MIMA, Middlesborough; the National Portrait Gallery, London; New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; the Royal Academy of Arts, London; the Royal Watercolour Society, London; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

A retrospective of Remfry’s work, curated by Dr Gerardine Mulcahy-Parker, is planned for 2025 at Beverley Art Gallery, East Riding.

Follow @David_Remfry_RA on Instagram

Visit his official website: www.davidremfry.com/

Visit the RA Summer Exhibition until 20th August 2023: www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2023

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Russell & Robert meet leading artist Lindsey Mendick, recorded in front of an intimate live audience at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh. We explore Lindsey's major new solo exhibition 'Sh*tfaced', her first solo show in Scotland. Running until 1st October 2023, this multi-layered exhibition of new ceramics, film and sculptural installations is presented across all of Jupiter Artland’s galleries.

Lindsey Mendick’s work is one of confession, where taboo topics and uncomfortable truths are revealed with candour and humour. Her work is characterised by an intense attention to detail and verisimilitude, whereby everyday scenes – a nightclub, a kitchen, a bedroom – are expertly crafted in ceramic and staged in larger-than-life tableaux.

Mendick has transformed Jupiter’s Ballroom Gallery and Steadings Gallery into a diptych of nightlife; one that draws inspiration from the gothic novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with all its troubling contentions of virtue, appearance, public shaming and masking. Like an anxiety dream come to life, there is a sobering mirroring of contemporary binge drinking culture and gender-based shaming presented in the work, although the anticipated judgemental tone is noticeably absent. By subverting the genre of morality tale, Mendick’s work opens a space where our public and private faces can be encountered without prejudice.

Lindsey Mendick graduated from Royal College of Art in 2017 and is currently based in Margate. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Her work was also included in the major exhibition, Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art at the Hayward Gallery, London. With her partner, the artist Guy Oliver, Mendick initiated Quench Gallery in Margate to provide vital support for early career artists through exhibitions and mentoring.

This is second Talk Art episode with Lindsey - to listen back to the first, you can find it in the archive Season 8, Episode 4 (recorded in 2020). Also found within Talk Art's new book: The Interviews.

Visit LINDSEY MENDICK: SH*TFACED from 15th July - 1st October 2023. View more details: https://www.jupiterartland.org/art/lindsey-mendick-sht-faced/

Follow @LindseyMendick and @JupiterArtland

Lindsey’s concurrent solo at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Where The Bodies Are Buried taking the form of a decaying house with dark secrets beneath the floorboards, Gothic stories, television and 1990s. @YSPsculpture

Jupiter Artland is an award-winning contemporary sculpture garden located just outside Edinburgh. Founded in 2009 by philanthropist art collectors Robert and Nicky Wilson, Jupiter Artland has grown into one of Scotland’s most significant arts organisations, with an international reputation for innovation and creativity – in 2016 this was recognised by a nomination for ArtFund’s Museum of the Year. Set over 100 acres of meadow, woodland and indoor gallery spaces, Jupiter Artland is home to over 30 permanent and unique site-specific sculptures from artists Phyllida Barlow, Christian Boltanski, Charles Jencks, Tracey Emin and Antony Gormley.

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Talk Art SPECIAL EPISODE!!!! We go on an electric Art Adventure from Leeds to Edinburgh! Russell and Robert drive to Jupiter Artland in Edinburgh in a BMW electric iX to meet Jupiter's founder, the philanthropist Nicky Wilson, and discover some sculpture legends en route. 

Our first stop is the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. We convene in their incredible library with Laurence Sillars, Head of the Institute, to explore their mission to inspire everyone to enjoy and study sculpture through their exhibitions, library, archive & research. We explore their current group exhibition 'The Weight of Words' and a solo show of Egon Altdorf (1922 - 2008). We chat to Errin Hussey to discover the Sculpture Research Centre with archive of sculptors papers including Helen Chadwick. Before driving through the countryside all the way to Antony's Gormley's iconic 'Angel of The North' in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. Since its completion in 1998, this epic public sculpture has become a treasured location for local families but also art lovers who make the pilgrimage from across the UK. It is believed to be the largest sculpture of an angel in the world and is viewed by an estimated 33 million people every year.

We continue our trip all the way to Lindsey Mendick's new solo exhibition at Jupiter Artland in Scotland and meet Nicky Wilson, Jupiter's incredible founder and leading philanthropist. Jupiter Artland is an award-winning contemporary sculpture garden located just outside Edinburgh. Founded in 2009, Jupiter Artland has grown into one of Scotland’s most significant arts organisations, with an international reputation for innovation and creativity. Set over 100 acres of meadow, woodland and indoor gallery spaces, Jupiter Artland is home to over 30 permanent and unique site-specific sculptures from artists Phyllida Barlow, Christian Boltanski, Charles Jencks, Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley, as well as a seasonal programme of carefully curated exhibitions and events from a plethora of artists, both emerging and established.

We navigated our art trip with help from the My BMW App and the BMW Art Guide - a wonderful book created with Independent Collectors - the go-to guide to discover new collections where art is presented in the most diverse and interesting settings. The first of its kind, the Art Guide is a perfect companion for city trips abroad or for finding havens of contemporary art right on your doorstep. Now in it's 7th edition, the guide presents 304 private, yet publicly accessible, collections of Contemporary Art — featuring large and small, famous and the relatively unknown. Succinct portraits of the collections with color photographs take the reader to 51 countries and 224 cities, often to regions that are off the beaten path.

Talk Art exclusive! We have 100 free copies of the BMW Art Guide on a first come, first serve basis for our listeners. Until stocks last. Visit the BMW microsite to get your free copy: https://bmwgroupculture.com/talk-art?partner=wXh5oswjlP

Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art.

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We meet leading artist Ilana Savdie from her studio in New York to explore the making of her major new solo exhibition at Whitney Museum!

Ilana Savdie explores themes of performance, transgression, identity and power in her vibrant, large-scale paintings. Assembling fragments into finely detailed, fluid compositions, her canvases pulsate with flamboyant colour, conjoining, merging and blending their forms in an aesthetics of riotous excess. At their core, Savdie’s paintings aim to dismantle ideas of binary or fixed identity, and to embrace the notion of performance as a transformative tool.

Drawing on a range of subjects and environments for her source material, Savdie explores variable textures and forms of mark making across each expansive canvas. Combining areas of stained and blurred colour with passages of thick visible brushwork or smooth, hard-edged marks, she employs acrylic, oil and beeswax into paintings characterised by their dreamlike illusion yet grounded to the physical body.

Now living and working in New York, Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and draws extensively on the city’s tradition of Carnaval in her work. A week-long display of transgressive abundance, Savdie sees the queer potential in the Carnavalesque idea that figures and characters are mutable, with the potential to change at any moment. Connecting this to wider constructs of social and sexual identity, specifically Colombian figures such as the ‘Marimonda’ (a monkey/elephant hybrid with a phallic looking mask), assert an element of the transgressive, exemplifying the disruptive, socially-penetrating mockery at the heart of Carnaval display. ‘I loved the concept of this exaggeration of the body as a form of mockery and mockery as a form of protest’, Savdie has stated.

The influence of Carnaval extends to the artist’s use of colour, which is instinctual and often saturated in hue, a saccharine palette of pinks, purples, yellows and greens: ‘There’s just something about the excess of colour that feels like seductive subversion,’ Savdie has said. While this colourful exuberance points to a tactical subversion, it also makes reference to established visual tropes: to the representation of sexuality in culture and the bright colours associated with ‘queer space’.

Recalling the colourful abstract works of Helen Frankenthaler or the extenuated figuration of Francis Bacon, Savdie equally draws on the drama of Baroque painting and, more recently, on film. Her work is particularly attuned to the melodrama of horror and science fiction as an entry point into the aesthetics of excess. Using elements and figures that seem violent and other-worldly, pulling from the aesthetics and behaviours of the parasite, she blends the darkly comic nature of caricature with the euphoric and the grotesque.

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986, raised in Barranquilla, Colombia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In 2008 she received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA, and in 2018 she received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, USA.

Visit Ilana's solo show 'Radical Contractions' at the @WhitneyMuseum now open until 29th October 2023: https://whitney.org/exhibitions/ilana-savdie

Follow @Ilana_Savdie and @WhiteCube

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We meet Nadya Tolokonnikova of PUSSY RIOT, the legendary Russian feminist protest art collective. We discuss Nadya's journey in art thus far and her monumental current exhibition in Sante Fe at CONTAINER space.

"While working with artifacts, bottling ashes, and manufacturing the faux furry frames for the bottles, I used skills that I learned in the sweatshops of my penal colony. I was forced to sew police and army uniforms in a Russian jail. I turned what I learned in my labor camp against those who locked me up. Putin is a danger to the whole world, and he has to be stopped immediately." Nadya Tolokonnikova.

CONTAINER Turner Carroll is bringing Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs "wanted list" Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova to Santa Fe. The exhibition Putin's Ashes will transform CONTAINER into a kind of war zone.

Pussy Riot’s Putin's Ashes was initiated in August 2022, when Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10 foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Twelve women participated in the performance. In order to join, women were required to experience acute hatred and resentment toward the Russian president. Most of the participants were either Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Russian. Nadya Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of the burnt portrait and incorporated them into her objects that are being presented alongside her short art film Putin's Ashes, directed, edited, and scored by Tolokonnikova and co-produced John Caldwell.

Follow Nadya and Pussy Riot on Instagram: @NadyaRiot and @PussyRiot

View the exhibition (click here)

Follow @Container_TurnerCarroll

Read Nadya's book: Read and Riot: A Pussy Riot Guide To Activism

Visit the official websites: https://pussyriot.love/ 

https://unicorndao.com/

https://zona.media/ - Pussy Riot-founded, independent news outlet. Focused on (mainly) Russian investigative reporting, courtroom live-blogging, digital censorship coverage

We stand in solidarity with Pussy Riot!!!

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We meet Daniel Lismore live at Hay Festival 2023!

Daniel is a London-based artist. He was born in Bournemouth and raised in Fillongley Village on the border of Coventry. Although he started his career as an artist from the perspective of the outsider, working as a photographer within a year he had moved in front of the lens as a model, later emerging as a creative consultant for Mert & Marcus, Steven Klein, David LaChapelle and Ellen von Unwerth. Lismore has been named by Vogue as ‘England's Most Eccentric Dresser’. In 2017 he was selected in the top hundred of the Out 100 List. In 2018 and 2020 he was named in the top hundred, Guardian’s Pride Power List.

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In 2016, Daniel Lismore became the Circuit Ambassador for the Tate Museums. Here, Lismore hosted his first two exhibitions in Tate Modern 2012 and Tate Britain 2013 featuring self-portraits.

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Daniel Lismore’s first book, ‘Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Already Taken,’ published by Rizzoli in 2016, documented the 32 figurative sculptures of Lismore which comprised his first USA museum exhibition. The exhibition was co-curated by Raphael Gomes and Savannah College of Art and Design and was later displayed at Miami Art Basel. In May 2017 Lismore exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In June 2018, Lismore curated a month-long show of his work at Harpa Hall in Iceland as the highlight of the Reykjavik Arts Festival. The exhibition subsequently toured Europe, opening at the Pan Museum in Naples and Stary Brower Gallery in Poznań, Poland. The exhibition has been attended by over 150,000+ visitors. In April 2019 Lismore gave a TED Talk at the main TED conference in Vancouver, titled "My Life as A Work of Art" in which he spoke about his life as a Living Sculpture.

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In September 2019, Lismore opened Naomi Campbell’s Fashion for Relief runway show at the British Museum revealing one of the first costumes he designed for the English National Opera (in collaboration with Swarovski) for Harrison Birtwistle's iconic opera The Mask of Orpheus which was staged at the London Coliseum.  

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During the Covid-19 pandemic, Lismore resided between Coventry and London working on LGBTQ+ activism and new artworks. His show Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken was opened in February 2022 in Coventry UK City of Culture at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum it attracted around 50,000 guests from all over the world.

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In 2021 Lismore took a selection of his show Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Already Taken and exhibited them at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as part of their Fashion in Motion program. This was also his debut performance as a performance artist. He joined the sculptures exhibiting himself as a statue between his works to deliver a dialogue under a mask to confuse the audience.

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In 2023 Lismore exhibited “Studio Visit” a site-specific installation based on the studio environment that is instrumental to his practice, aiming to give visitors a unique insight into the creative process and the development of his work in Giant Gallery Bournemouth, co-curated by Stuart Semple. 

Follow @DanielLismore

Visit: https://www.daniellismore.com/

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We meet living legend Sue Tilley and artist Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira!!!

Sue Tilley (b. 1957), also known as Big Sue, is an artist, artist's model and writer. Most notably, she modelled for painter Lucian Freud. Tilley collaborated, and was best friends, with performance artist and club promoter Leigh Bowery. In 1997, she published Leigh Bowery: The life and times of an Icon, a biography. Freud painted several large nude portraits of Tilley, the first being Evening in the Studio (1993). Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, painted in 1995, was sold at auction for £35 million ($56 million USD).

We discuss a brand new exhibition at The Sunday Painter in South London - the first painting show of Portuguese artist Rui Miguel Leitão Ferreira (b.1977) in the UK. Curated by Daniel Malarkey, the exhibition sees Ferreira further develop his self-portrait series 

Posing for Sue.

The works on show explore Ferreira's relationship with close friend and mentor Sue Tilley – widely known for her long-standing professional relationship with Lucian Freud – whilst subtly manipulating and subverting the complex dialogue between the three subjects traditionally involved in portraiture: the portrayed, the artist and the observer. The artist first met Tilley at a charity event in 2013. An in-depth exploration into the experiences of life models within the realm of fine art had recently prompted Ferreira to begin modelling himself, a disquieting endeavour that left the artist feeling increasingly vulnerable and directionless when it came to his own practice. Ferreira found solace in Tilley’s gaze, eventually leading the two to forge a close friendship. Inspired by the powerful artist-model dynamic between Freud and Tilley – whose iconic four-year professional relationship saw Freud produce perhaps some of his most acclaimed and psychologically charged nude portraits – Ferreira sought to capture the intimacy of time spent between artist and sitter through the specificity of paint.

Rather than simply mirroring the pair’s relationship, however, the Posing for Sue series attempts to subvert art history’s long established traditions of portraiture – one of the oldest enduring art forms – by reconsidering the roles of all those involved. Ferreira begins his artistic process by filming a video piece in which he undresses in front of Tilley, with each recording capturing the collaborators reacting and responding to each other’s physical presence. Ferreira then paints from carefully chosen film stills, allowing him to analyse the process in motion rather than focusing on one particular viewpoint. By undressing in front of Tilley and remaining completely exposed throughout each filmed session, the source of the gaze, usually strictly maintained by the artist, is intentionally displaced to the model.

Posing for Sue explores the notion of shared experience between artist and sitter, tapping into the deep-rooted human desire to capture the complexities of expression via mimetic representation. Through the act of being observed in his most vulnerable state – both by the model and by the viewer – Ferreira utilises his body as an instrument to explore the heights and depths of the human psyche.

Follow @SueTilley1 and @RuiMiguelLeitaoFerreira

Visit @TheSundayPainter for info on the new exhibition and their website: https://thesundaypainter.co.uk/

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New Talk Art! We meet artist Tim Stoner (b. 1970, UK), best know for his paintings, which we explore in depth in this fascinating discussion!!!

Before settling in London full-time, Tim lived and worked between London and Ronda, Southern Spain. In Ronda, a village in Andalucía, he began experimenting with unfinished canvases submerging them in swimming pools, pouring dissolving chemicals and distressing their surfaces with palette knives, scalpels and sanding discs. Often reworked over several years Tim creates layered ethereal abstract scenes.

Conceived from a multitude of drawings and works on paper, Stoner approaches his paintings as palimpsests, with some of the scenes described as much by the removal and erasure of painting, as by the addition of materials. They have often been amended and reworked over a period of several years. The final paintings become much like visual autopsies, their visible layers revealing damaged, dissected brushstrokes, and elements of the picture surface flayed away to reveal earlier forms and gestures. This distance from nature and the painted gesture, results in compositions which are as much abstract depictions of light, colour and movement, as recordings of the landscape.

Tim Stoner was born in 1970 and grew up in London. He lives and works in London and Ronda, Spain. Stoner studied at Norwich School of Art and Design (1989−1992), the Royal College of Art, London (1992−1994), the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (1997−1998), and attended the British School at Rome (2001). Tim Stoner was the winner of the 2001 ica Futures prize.

Follow @StonerTim on Instagram.

Visit his official website: www.TimStoner.net

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We meet Nicholas Cullinan, leading art historian, curator and current Director of the National Portrait Gallery in London.

The new National Portrait Gallery opens its doors to the public on 22nd June 2023. The Gallery is home to the most extensive collection of portraits in the world, from the 8th century. The NPG collection has over 220,000 works, 150,000 of which are illustrated from the 16th century to the present day in a wide variety of different mediums.

The National Portrait Gallery tells the story of the people who have shaped British history through the medium of portraits and encourages and promotes portraiture in all media. The Gallery houses the most extensive collection of portraits in the world, which offers unique insights into the men and women who have and who are contributing to the culture, identity and rich diversity of Britain. The Gallery aims to be the foremost centre for the study of and research into portraiture, as well as making its work and activities of interest and accessible to as wide a range of visitors as possible.

Founded in 1856 and located just off Trafalgar Square, the National Portrait Gallery is home to the largest collection of portraiture in the world, featuring famous men and women who have helped shape British history from the great Tudor courts to the present day, with contemporary portraits reflecting the diversity, inventiveness and multi-culturalism of modern-day Britain. By weaving together 500 years of history, art, biography and fame, the Gallery offers a unique and fascinating insight into those individuals that together characterise a nation. Visitors can come face to face with kings and queens, courtiers and courtesans, politicians and poets, soldiers and scientists, artists and writers, philosophers and film stars.

Its 3,000 paintings feature some of the most iconic and instantly recognisable faces in British history, from Elizabeth I to Tracey Emin, with artists ranging from Holbein to Hockney. Behind each image is a fascinating story giving an insight into an individual who stood out in their generation and enriched our culture and national consciousness.

Follow @NationalPortraitGallery

Visit: www.npg.org.uk/

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In a significant moment for Talk Art podcast, we meet the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate - run by his sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux.

We explore the extraordinary, new Los Angeles exhibition 'Jean-Michel Basquiat: KING PLEASURE©' of over 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown paintings, drawings, multimedia presentations, ephemera, and personal artefacts that tell the story of Jean-Michel from an intimate perspective, intertwining his artistic endeavors with his personal life, influences, and the times in which he lived.

THANK YOU so much to Jeanine and Lisane for this generous, heartfelt and joyful conversation. It is such an inspiring and thought provoking episode.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s contributions to the history of art and his explorations of multifaceted cultural phenomena––including music, the Black experience, pop culture, Black American sports figures, literature, and other sources––will be showcased through immersive environments providing unique insight into the late artist’s creative life and his singular voice that propelled a social and cultural narrative that continues to this day.

This major exhibition is now open at The Grand LA, 100 S Grand Ave, Los Angeles, 90012, USA. Organised, curated and executive produced by the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, as administrated by Jean-Michel's sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux. Sir David Adjaye OBE leads the exhibition design for Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure©. 

Follow @BasquiatKingPleasure for images from this must-see exhibition in LA. Plus follow the official instagram of the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate at: @BasquiatOfficial

Visit the official website: https://kingpleasure.basquiat.com/

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Season 17 continues with a magical episode!!! We meet artist STUDIO LENCA!!!! Studio Lenca is the working name of artist Jose Campos – ‘Studio’ refers to a space for experimentation and constantly shifting place; ‘Lenca’ referring to the name of the artists ancestors from El Salvador.

Jose Campos was born in 1986 in La Paz, El Salvador and like many had to flee the country during its violent civil war during the late 1980s. He travelled to the US by land, illegally with his mother and grew up in the gaze of a strictly conservative administration - an ‘illegal alien’. Studio Lenca is focused on ideas surrounding difference, knowledge and visibility. He works with performance, video, painting and sculpture.

‘When people ask me where I’m from, I never know how to answer. Born in El Salvador, growing up illegally in California then spending my adult life in the UK. What does that question mean and why do people ask it?’Studio Lenca’s process starts with personal memories and is underpinned by social activism and different forms of praxis.

Studio Lenca paintings tell an autobiographical story which navigates borders and identities destroyed, redrawn and erased through colonisation and war. The portraits depict the artist and his community proudly wearing hats and vibrant colours in noble defiance of the ‘western’ discourse around migration.

Campos lives and works in Margate, UK. His current studio is based at TKE Studios, founded by Tracey Emin. @TKEStudios

Follow @StudioLenca on Instagram and visit his official website: www.studiolenca.com

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New Season 17!!! For the first episode of our NEW SEASON we meet the legendary photographer and activisit AJAMU X, at his studio on Railton Road, South London.

Ajamu X (1963, Huddersfield, UK) is a photographic artist, scholar, archive curator and radical sex activist best known for his imagery that challenges dominant ideas around black masculinity, gender, sexuality, and representation of black LGBTQ people in the United Kingdom.

He is the co-founder of rukus! Federation and the rukus! Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer + Archive and one of a few leading specialists on Black British LGBTQ+ history, heritage, and cultural memory in the UK. In 1997, Ajamu was the Autograph x Lightwork artist-in-residence in Syracuse, USA developing a series of self-portraits during his residency. He studied at the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Maastricht, The Netherlands, and is currently an PhD candidate at Royal College of Art, London. In 2022 Ajamu was canonised by The Trans Pennine Traveling Sisters as The Patron Saint of Darkrooms in his hometown Huddersfield and he received an honorary fellowship from the Royal photographic society.

Ajamu’s works have been shown in exhibitions in museums, galleries, and alternatives spaces across globally since the 1990s, his recent solo exhibitions include Archival Senoria at Cubitt Gallery, 2021. As well as included in several thematic group Very Private? at Charleston House, 2022; Fashioning Masculinities, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2022; Kiss My Genders, Hayward Gallery, 2019; Get Up, Stand Up Now, Somerset House, 2019; On our Backs: The Revolution Art of Queer Sex Work, Leslie Lohman Museum, 2019. Ajamu’s works are held in collections including Tate, London; Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; Autograph, London; Neuberger Museum of Art, New York amongst others. His second monograph AJAMU: ARCHIVE was published in 2021.

Ajamu X: The theoretical provocations, politics, and aesthetic qualities of my work unapologetically celebrate black queer bodies, the erotic, sex. pleasure and play. The work also poses the imagination/fiction in opposition to the constant framing of our complex and nuanced experiences from with a sociological framework, which constitutes a paradigm based on deficit. As a fine art studio-based and darkroom led photographer working with both digital/large format cameras and early analogue printing processes, my practice privileges process over outcome. The tangible/tactile sensuous elements of fine art photography are essential to my visual-photographic philosophy.In tandem with this, the work explores the ‘thingness; of the photographic print as well as the sensual, material attributes of both print and image, without allowing the usual flattening -out of the photographic image to simple notions of representation to enter the frame.

Follow @AjamuStudios and visit his major solo exhibition in London: https://autograph.org.uk/exhibitions/ajamu-the-patron-saint-of-darkrooms

Ajamu: The Patron Saint of Darkrooms runs until Saturday 2nd September 2023, Free entry! @AutographABP Gallery address: Autograph, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA, UK

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Bonus Live Episode!!! We meet Emma Dabiri, Irish author, academic, and broadcaster live at Dulwich Picture Gallery in South London to discuss Talk Art Book 2!

Emma's debut book, Don't Touch My Hair, was published in 2019, followed by the Sunday Times Best Seller What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition in 2021. Her new book Disobedient Bodies will be published in Autumn.

Emma Dabiri is a teaching fellow in the African department at SOAS, a Visual Sociology PhD researcher at Goldsmiths and advisor to the British Council's Arts and Creative Economy board, the Wellcome Trust's Anti-Racism Expert Advisory Group and is a Trustee of Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. She has presented several television and radio programmes including BBC Radio 4's critically-acclaimed documentaries 'Journeys into Afro-futurism' and 'Britain's Lost Masterpieces'.

Follow @EmmaDabiri on Instagram. Follow @DulwichGallery to visit the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Buy signed copies of Talk Art Book 2 at Waterstones nationwide and The Margate Bookshop.

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TALK ART - THE PARTY!!!! In a first for the Podcast, we invite legendary DOSA CAT to take over the podcast during our official

launch party at Shreeji News in London's Marylebone, in a glamorous, roving reporter styleeeee!!! Listen in to the wild launch party of Talk Art: The Interviews... OUR NEW BOOK!

Conversations captured in this episode include Russell & Robert's MOTHERS - Carole and Judith!!! Artists Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Joy Yamusangie, Navot Miller, Lydia Pettit and Matilde Cerruti Quara. Plus actors Dino Fetscher, Kadiff Kirwan, Laura Aikman, Charlie King as well the Talk Art boys Russ & Rob themselves on the day their second book is published to the world.

Follow @ThatDosaCat on Instagram.

Buy signed copies of Talk Art Book 2 at Waterstones nationwide and The Margate Bookshop.

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TURNING THE TABLES ON TALK ART with ALAN CARR!!!! To celebrate the launch of the brand new Talk Art book 'The Interviews', Russell & Robert meet legendary broadcaster, stand-up comedian and writer ALAN CARR. Who better to chat with than the CHATTY MAN himself???!!!

We discuss our new book Talk Art: The Interviews! That's right, it's TALK ART BOOK 2 release day!!! We are PUBLISHED AUTHORS! for a second time!!

A huge THANK YOU to all the talented artists whose artworks are featured in the book and to our superstar editor Alison Starling and the team @octopus_books_ & @ilex_creative for their support and belief. 

Follow Alan Carr @ChattyMan on Instagram. Visit Waterstone's or The Margate Bookshop to buy our brand new TALK ART BOOK 2, out today Thursday 11th May 2021 in UK & Europe and from 6th June in USA & Canada. The book has also been translated into Korean and available in South Korea.

'Insights from the zeitgeist are preserved with conviction and clarity, offering an inclusive way to access contemporary art in all its forms. If Talk Art is the fun podcast, then this book is the educational supplement to be prescribed alongside it.' - Aesthetica

The authors of the Sunday Times bestseller Talk Art: Everything you wanted to know about contemporary art but were afraid to ask, have brought together 24 of the most profound, moving, funny and informative interviews from the wildly popular Talk Art podcast.

These curated excerpts explore the inspirations, art experiences and favourite artists of a fascinating range of creative people from Grayson Perry to Elton John, from Tracey Emin to Paul Smith, and from Wolfgang Tillmans to Sonia Boyce, accompanied by images of the artworks that they have created or that have influenced them.

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. We are on Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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We meet Hettie Judah, chief art critic on the British daily paper The i, a regular contributor to The Guardian’s arts pages, and a columnist for Apollo magazine. Following publication of her 2020 study on the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, in 2021 she worked with a group of artists to draw up the manifesto How Not To Exclude Artist Parents, now available in 15 languages.

She writes for Frieze, Art Quarterly, Art Monthly, ArtReview and other publications with 'art' in the title, and is a contributing editor to The Plant magazine. She regularly talks about art and with artists for museum and gallery events, and has been a visiting lecturer for Goldsmiths University and the Royal College of Art in London and Dauphine University, Paris. A supporter of Arts Emergency she has mentored artists and students through a variety of different schemes.

As a broadcaster she can be heard (and sometimes seen) on programmes including BBC Radio 4’s Front Row and Art That Made Us. Recent books include How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (Lund Humphries, 2022) and Lapidarium (John Murray, London, 2022/ Penguin, NY, 2023). She is currently working on a book and Hayward Touring exhibition On Art and Motherhood (opening at Arnolfini in Bristol, March 2024) among other things.

In 2022, together with Jo Harrison, Hettie co-founded the Art Working Parents Alliance - a supportive network and campaigning group for curators, academics, gallerists, technicians, educators and others working in the arts.

Follow: @HettieJudah

Visit: https://www.hettiejudah.co.uk/

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Special Episode presented by BMW. We meet artist and curator Ronan Mckenzie at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate to discuss her monumental new group exhibition To Be Held. The show is now open and runs until 25th June 2023. Free entry, so we really recommend visiting Margate to see this EXTRAORDINARY show.

To Be Held brings together nineteen artists and three furniture designers in an immersive exhibition which aims to open a dialogue on tenderness, and what it means to care and be cared for. The show presents works from a range of disciplines including painting, sculpture and scent; inviting us to consider the relationship between our experiences, and our internal sense of grounding and joy. To Be Held explores the impact of how we choose to share our spaces with all that they encompass, intentionally creating environments that we fill with love, and allow them, and those who inhabit them to care for us in return.

What does it mean to be held?

To see and be seen, to be warmed by surroundings which create space for one to feel and be felt, to be comforted by the knowing of acceptance and to leave by choice, when one chooses. For the doors to always be open, for ears to always be available, to be soothed by an atmosphere which calms and cares, which touches old memories that tickle before becoming visual. To be held in a space is to relax into one’s breathing because we know that we’re not alone.

Participating artists include: Annan Affotey, Alvin Armstrong, Mabintou Badjie, Chris Bramble, Toby Cato, CHUKES, Mac Collins, Rayvenn D’Clark, Shaye Gregan, Ezra-Lloyd Jackson, Adama Jalloh, Julianknxx, Alfie Kungu, Mario Moore, Ronan Mckenzie, Sola Olulode, Natassja E Swift, Naomi Williams and Joy Yamusangie.

With furniture designs by: Modular by Mensah, ROL Studio by Holly Rollins and Miminat Shodeinde.

The collaboration with BMW organically formed through conversations around responding to space, interiors, design, and artwork, informed by the desire to have an expansive experience of everyday spaces. Both Mckenzie’s and BMW foundations have developed instinctively through the attention to tactility and texture, fabrication, sound, and an interest in activating multiple senses to shape emotional responses and experiences. Inspired by a shared vision for more meaningful connections, this collaboration forms one of an ongoing discourse between design and the arts.

For over 50 years, the BMW Group has initiated and been engaged in hundreds of cultural collaborations worldwide. The main focus of its long-term commitment is set on modern and contemporary art, classical music, jazz and sound, as well as architecture and design.

Follow @RonanKSM on Instagram to learn more about #ToBeHeld.

Follow: @CarlFreedmanGallery on Instagram #CarlFreedmanGallery

Visit the exhibition: https://carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2023/to-be-held-curated-by-ronan-mckenzie/

Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art. BMW has created an Art Guide listing over 300 private art collections that are accessible to the public in 224 cities and 51 countries around the world. Get your free copy by clicking here.

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New @talkart!! We meet Antoni Porowski, inspiring chef, New York Times Bestselling Author and star of Netflix’s Emmy Award-winning series Queer Eye. 

We discover his passion for Louise Nevelson’s sculptures, the impact his art teacher had on his life, the paintings of Giacomo Balla, Les Lelannes sheep sculptures, collecting furniture and photography by Simen Johan, Ryan McGinley and Paul Mpagi Sepuya! We also discuss Sally Mann’s photos, visiting New York galleries like Team Gallery and art fairs Frieze NY and The Armory, museums including the Met and Guggenheim, his love of living in the city and Patti Smith.

Born in Canada to European emigrants, Antoni is an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ+ rights everywhere, especially his family’s native Poland where he serves on the board of the Equaversity Foundation which was established to organize international fundraising to support the LGBTQ+ community in Poland.

Follow @Antoni on Instagram and watch the new series of Queer Eye, hitting screens this May on Netflix! #AntoniPorowski @QueerEye

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We meet living legend DUANE MICHALS (b. 1932, McKeesport, PA) one of the GREATEST photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text. For more than 60 years he has pushed photography and art to new dimensions. Without doubt, so many contemporary artists have been inspired by, and have directly referenced, the groundbreaking work of Duane Michals - he has truly shifted the way we think about art forever!!! Duane Michals is an artist who has been much imitated, highly influential and endlessly re-inventive. He celebrated his 91st birthday the week before this episode was recorded, so a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Duane!!!

Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’ singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

Over the past five decades, Michals’ work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’ first solo exhibition (1970). In 2019, The Morgan Library and Museum in New York exhibited a career retrospective of Michals' work The Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan. More recently, he had one-person shows at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo (1999), and at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005). In 2008, Michals celebrated his 50th anniversary as a photographer with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece, and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy.

Michals's work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michals's archive is housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Michals received a BA from the University of Denver in 1953 and worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. He currently lives and works in New York City, USA.

Follow @TheDuaneMichals on Instagram.

Views more than 50 recent short films at Duane's Vimeo channel: https://vimeo.com/duanemichals

Learn more at DC Gallery: https://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/duane-michals

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Paula Siebra is a Brazilian painter born in Fortaleza, Ceará, in 1998. The artist focuses on images related to everyday life and scenes of intimacy using Brazilian northeastern culture as her starting point. Her paintings emerge from the exploration of established themes such as portraits, landscapes and still lifes. These motifs, throughout her research, acquire a peculiar aspect: a certain simplification in the contours, added to a reduction in the contrast between chromatic tones, polarizing reality and reverie – as if the artist were daydreaming about ordinary life.

In addition to following a straightforward continuum from tradition, her paintings relate to an inherent visualness of her native land of Ceará and the Brazilian Northeast as a whole. She is particularly close to with folk art, since her interests encompass the synthetic form of clay objects, laces and other textile works such as crochet and embroidery, as well as the geometric and colorful architectural features of traditional houses. Surrounding villages, household objects and anonymous faces are elements of the landscape in which the artist is immersed, appearing as if clothed by a light mist that covers everything - alternately concealing or revealing them.

Paula Siebra (1998, Fortaleza, Brazil) lives and works in Fortaleza, Brazil).

Follow @Paula_Siebra on Instagram and her gallery @MendesWoodDM

Visit: https://mendeswooddm.com/en/artist/paula-siebra

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We meet legendary artist MIKE NELSON!!!

Nelson’s installations take the viewer on enthralling journeys into fictive worlds that eerily echo our own.

Constructed with materials scavenged from salvage yards, junk shops, auctions and flea markets, the immersive installations have a startling life-like quality.

Weaving references to science fiction, failed political movements, dark histories and countercultures, they touch on alternative ways of living and thinking: lost belief systems, interrupted histories and cultures that resist inclusion in an increasingly homogenised and globalised world.

Utterly transforming the spaces of the Hayward Gallery, the exhibition features sculptural works and new versions of key large-scale installations, many of which are shown here for the first time since their original presentations.

Nelson represented Great Britain at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and has shown in leading galleries around the world. He has also been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 13th Biennale of Sydney, the 8th Istanbul Biennial and the 13th Lyon Biennale.

Follow @HaywardGallery

Visit Mike's major solo exhibition EXTINCTION BECKONS at Hayward Gallery, runs until 7th May 2023: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/mike-nelson-extinction-beckons

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We meet Péjú Oshin, a British-Nigerian curator, writer and lecturer born and raised in London. Her work sits at the intersection of art, style & culture with a keen interest in liminal theory and diasporic narratives. Core to her practice is working with visual artists, brands and people globally.

Since starting her career working in arts & culture in 2015, Péjú has worked broadly in engaging audiences through public programming, exhibitions, and outdoor art projects in a number of cultural spaces and institutions with a history of supporting artists at various stages of their careers. Péjú is the curator of the forthcoming Gagosain exhibition Rites of Passage which brings together nineteen artists with shared histories of migration.

Her previous work and projects include managing the delivery of the Workshop Artists in Residence programme, curating live performance Stillness: We Invoke the Black to Rest (2020), Beyond Boundaries (2021), Late at Tate Britain: Life Between Islands (2021), Late at Tate Britain: Hew Locke (2022) and in-person and online programming at Tate. Leading Barbican’s first Young Curators Group (2019-2020) and delivering a number of public-facing events at Wellcome Collection in response to exhibitions such as Living with Buildings and Being Human.

As a writer, Péjú has written texts for artists which have been used in exhibitions and solo presentations of artists internationally. She has also been commissioned to write for various platforms and published her first collection of poetry and prose Between Words & Space (2021) which explores performativity, a fear of vulnerability both in public and private spheres and relationships in their varying complexities through the nuances of culture, liminality and where we find home.

In 2021 Péjú was shortlisted for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list in the Arts & Culture category and nominated and selected for one of fifteen memberships to AWITA sponsored by Martin Millers Gin, the Adara Foundation and Hauser & Wirth (2021).

Péjú currently works at @Gagosian as Associate Director (2022 - present), is an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins. She previously worked at Tate (2018-2022) most recently as Curator: Young People’s Programmes.

Follow @PejuOshin on Instagram

Visit: www.pejuoshin.com and https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2023/rites-of-passage/

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Welcome to this very special edition of Talk Art brought to you by "The Recharge in Nature Project", a three-year collaboration between National Parks UK and BMW. Our guest for today is the extremely talented Hannah Lees, a Margate-based artist whose art is deeply influenced by the beauty of nature, its landscapes, discarded treasures and sustainability.

Hannah's artistic vision aligns seamlessly with The Recharge in Nature Project's mission, which aims to promote nature restoration, biodiversity, wellbeing, and accessibility. This initiative seeks to improve the electric vehicle charging infrastructure in and around our National Parks, making it more convenient for visitors to use an electric car while exploring the great outdoors. In this episode we delve into Hannah's work, her personal background, and the inspiration behind her creations.

Hannah Lees’ work encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, internet art, performance, writing, sound and video.

Lees investigates ideas of cycles: constancy and mortality; the sense that things come to an end and the potential for new beginnings.

This constancy, be it in religion, science, history or in organic matter, is visible in her practice through her attempts to make sense of and recognise traces of life.

Through appreciating this, her work is focused towards an understanding of the essential nature of the materials she uses.

Visit: https://www.hannahlees.com/

Follows @hannahjlees

Hannah Lees' solo show 'Not now not anymore' opens at Roland Ross, 11.03.23 - 29.05.23

Preview: 11.03.23 2-5pm Follow: @rolyross

To discover more about the Recharge in Nature Project, visit bmw.co.uk/NationalParks

"...Not really now, not anymore... For what does the phrase point to 

if not a fatal temporality? No now, not any more, not really. Does this 

mean that the present has eroded, disappeared - no now any more?

Are we in the time of the always-already, where the future has been 

written; in which case it is not the future not really"

p91, Mark Fisher "The Weird And The Eerie" 2016 Pub. Repeater Books, London, UK

Please join us for the opening of Not Now Not Anymore at 174-176 

Hither Green Lane where Hannah Lees will present a series of new 

tablet works that combine beach combed objects with the elements of 

mica dust and rust converted iron powder, to create a kind of alchemy, 

embedded in plaster forms that are reminiscent of ancient artefacts. 

The works alternate between exploring circularity and linearity, 

at times following a process by which objects are permanently 

transformed and reactivated as painterly abstractions.

Roland Ross | 174-176 Hither Green Lane, London SE13 6QB

By appointment only Fri-Sat 12-4pm

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Talk Art EXCLUSIVE! We meet Hollywood icon SHARON STONE!!! In this feature length special episode, we discover Sharon's obsession with painting, her current debut solo exhibition 'Shedding' at Allouche Gallery in Los Angeles and her lifelong passion for art. We learn about her journey collecting art, her close friendships with artists including Robert Rauschenberg and her love of museums. But most of all, we reveal Sharon’s LOVE for MARGATE, Turner and @turnercontemporary!!!!!

Stone has a diverse range of creative projects - writing, producing, acting, activism and painting. Sharon Stone’s paintings are predominately abstract, meditative landscapes. Yet occasionally figurative elements appear within her colourful abstractions. Dream worlds, nostalgia, imagined landscapes, views of idyllic nature. Motifs recur including an ominous moon. 

Sharon Stone is best known for her acting roles in Basic Instinct, Casino, Total Recall, The Specialist, Catwoman and more recently Ryan Murphy's Ratched. She is the recipient of various accolades including an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award nomination. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1995 and was named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in France in 2005 (Commander in 2021). She has been honoured with a Nobel Peace Summit Award, a Harvard Humanitarian Award, a Human Rights Campaign Humanitarian Award and an Einstein Spirit Award. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Follow @SharonStone

Visit @AlloucheGallery and https://allouchegallery.com/exhibitions-la

Sharon Stone 'Shedding' runs until 31st March at Allouche Gallery, Los Angeles.

Read Sharon's extraordinary memoir 'The Beauty of Living Twice', published by Allen & Unwin. Order from Waterstone's in UK.

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Talk Art special episode!! We meet awesome artist RYCA to explore his new collaboration with Stella Artois Unfiltered to reimagine an iconic pub sign as a nude artwork to raise awareness and support for pubs struggling with rising energy bills!!!

RYCA is one of 11 contemporary artists who’s original artworks will be sold at online auction, with all profits going to Hospitality Action.

'The Pub Renaissance', a new art collection curated by Stella Artois, features work from renowned artists including Reuben Dangoor and Heath Kane.

The campaign is in direct response to the threat facing pubs across the country. Amid the cost of living crisis, many are struggling to pay their bills as energy prices continue to skyrocket - latest data from charity, Hospitality Action, has revealed applications for financial support are up by almost a third (29 per cent) on the previous year.

The nude signs are available for online auction for a limited time only at The Auction Collective. All profits will be donated to Hospitality Action to assist pubs with rising energy bills and Stella Artois will match funds raised, up to £50,000.

Inspired by the recent launch of Stella Artois Unfiltered, the eleven-piece collection celebrates the beauty of living life 'au naturel' - just like the naturally unfiltered beer itself.

The cheeky series includes ‘The Cricketers’ reimagined by Reuben Dangoor to star a batsman with a strategically placed bat, a new view of 'Queen Victoria' by Samuel Rees-Price, and a brand-new portrait of HRH King Charles for 'The Kings Head' by Heath Kane. Spanning a variety of signs from across the UK, the full collection includes:

● Reuben Dangoor x The Cricketers

● Bernadette Timko x Duke of Wellington

● Emma Wesley x The Bricklayers Arms

● Becki Gill x Britannia

● Samuel Rees Price x Queen Victoria  

● Alice Tye x The Plough

● Mattia Guarnera x Horse & Jockey

● Natasha Klutch x George & Dragon

● RYCA x Robin Hood

● Enigma x The Cannon

● Heath Kane x King’s Head

The original works will be sold via The Auction Collective, with online auction closing on 5th April. 

So... Buy nude art. Help pubs.

Follow

@RYCA_Artist #StellaPubSigns #ad #RYCA

Learn more by visiting

@StellaArtoisUK

Ryan Callanan (a.k.a. RYCA, born 1981) draws on his disparate experiences in 3D design, commercial printing, and street art to make paintings, prints, hand-etched signs, and sculptures that riff on pop culture. Common themes include Star Wars, 1980s acid house culture, song lyrics, and art historical figures such as Johannes Vermeer and Andy Warhol. RYCA has exhibited extensively in London and has had shows in Brighton, New York, Miami, and Hong Kong.

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We meet Arthur Lambert from the Estate of artist LARRY STANTON (1947-1984).

Larry Stanton was a Manhattan-based portrait artist whose work was championed by David Hockney, Henry Geldzahler, Ellsworth Kelly and others. He was a gay man who lived in Greenwich Village in New York City. Stanton produced a significant body of work—mostly drawings and paintings—in the four years leading up to his death from AIDS-related complications. Stanton drew portraits of the young men he slept with, as well as his friends and family. Many of Stanton’s subjects were other gay men who died in the 80s from AIDS, and his brightly colored faces sketched quickly in crayon and colored pencil stand as an archive of lives lost. Lambert inherited all of Stanton’s work after he died.

We discuss the new book, edited by Italian theatre director Fabio Cherstich and Stanton's lover Arthur Lambert titled Larry Stanton: Think of Me When It Thunders. A tribute to yet another artist that died before they could leave their mark and is the definitive publication on Stanton’s art and life to date. It includes 139 artworks, many of them portraits of the boys he met on nightly outings, as well as friends and family and a large collection of self- portraits, plus previously unpublished archive imagery of Stanton’s circle. With texts by Cherstich, Lambert, Hockney, Geldzahler, and more, it’s part artbook, part personal history, a round-up of the faces and names that formed Stanton’s world.

Since meeting Cherstich, the two have founded the Estate of Larry Stanton to bring renewed attention to Stanton’s art. A collection was recently on display at Daniel Cooney Gallery, while Acne Studios has presented an exhibition of works and objects featuring Stanton’s drawings in Milan, Seoul, Tokyo and New York in Feb 2023.

‘The portraitist is an observer of people; his attitudes and feelings will be reflected in his observations, and usually the interest in personality makes one study faces. Other aspects of personality show in the body—posture, ways of moving, etc.—but most is revealed in the face. People make their own faces, and Larry knew this instinctively’.

—David Hockney

'Larry Stanton lived and painted in Manhattan until he died of AIDS at the age of 37. In Greenwich Village, he was a familiar sight, starting his practice every day in the early afternoon, drinking coffee at the same spot while balancing his sketchbook and drawing someone who caught his eye. His studio developed into a gathering place for artists and writers and they became subjects for his portraits.

In the late '70s and early '80s, NYC was a magnet for boys who were escaping from homes and places where being gay was not accepted. Many of these boys became models for Larry. His work provides a telling picture of faces from a segment of NYC life which shortly disappeared with the advent of AIDS, an epidemic that annihilated so many of these faces, including Larry's own.' Text by Visual AIDS.

Follow @Larry_Stanton_Art, @DanielCooneyFineArt and @ApalazzoGallery

View the Acne Studios recent collaboration: https://www.acnestudios.com/eu/en/man/larry-stanton/

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We meet painter KATY MORAN to discuss More Me, the artist's first presentation in Australia to date, showcasing her signature style of painting that defies and dispels traditional genres of landscape, portraiture or still life, instead, existing as free, gestural explorations of colour and line.

Moran’s practice hovers in a productive space between figuration and abstraction. She paints over canvases found in flea markets and charity shops, blurring the found images beneath her layers of paint, evoking a deliberate sense of nostalgia and longing, as if unravelling a distant memory.

Katy Moran’s paintings reflect a responsive working process: shifting or rotating the canvas while painting, reworking textures, and reconsidering the shapes and figures that emerge. With this approach to painting along with the inclusion of collage, often partially obscured, her work conveys a deliberate tension between materiality and subject. Moran creates a dynamic push and pull between the addition and the removal of paint; some works exhibit thick application of paint, while in others the painterly gesture is removed with rags dipped in varnish or even by sanding. Via the oscillation between representation and abstraction, composition and narrative, texture and space, Moran engages thought and sense simultaneously.

Follow @KatyMoran123 on Instagram and visit her gallery Modern Art: https://modernart.net/artists/katy-moran

Katy Moran's new exhibition More Me is now open and runs until 1st April at Station, Melbourne, Australia.

Visit https://stationgallery.com

Katy Moran lives and works in Hertfordshire. She was born in Manchester in 1975 and completed an MA Fine Art in painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2005. Moran’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Parasol Unit for Contemporary Art, London (2015); the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2010); Tate St. Ives (2009); and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK (2008). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Tate St. Ives (2018); Aspen Art Museum (2015); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2013); SFMOMA (2012); and Tate Britain, London (2008). Her work is included in important public and private collections including Arts Council Collection, London; David Roberts Art Foundation; Government Art Collection, London; The Rachofsky Collection, Dallas; Royal College of Art, London; Tate; SFMOMA; and Walker Art Center; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; and Zabludowicz Collection.

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SEASON 16!!! We meet LEGENDARY artist Nicolas Party!!!! We discuss his major new solo show Cascade, Nicolas Party’s third exhibition with Xavier Hufkens. A stunning group of new works, including pastels, cabinets and oil-on-copper paintings. Large tripartite pastels and smaller cabinet paintings point to a new trajectory, both formal and technical, that has opened up in his practice. Mastering the all but forgotten art of painting on copper, Party’s paintings are as luminous as their historical counterparts. A group of single arched pastels and oil-on-copper paintings echo the shape of the cabinet’s central panels.

Born in Lausanne in 1980, Party is a figurative painter who has achieved critical admiration for his familiar yet unsettling landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that simultaneously celebrate and challenge conventions of representational painting. His works are primarily created in soft pastel, an idiosyncratic choice of medium in the 21st-century, and one that allows for exceptional degrees of intensity and fluidity in his depictions of objects both natural and manmade. Transforming these objects into abstracted, biomorphic shapes, Party suggests deeper connections and meanings. His unique visual language has coalesced in a universe of fantastical characters and motifs where perspective is heightened and skewed to uncanny effect.

In addition to paintings, Party creates public murals, pietra dura, ceramics, installation works, and sculptures, including painted busts and body parts that allude to the famous fragments of ancient Greece and Rome. His brightly-colored androgynous figures vary in scale from the handheld to the monumental, and are displayed on tromp l’oeil marble plinths of differing heights that upend conventional perspective. Party’s early interest in graffiti and murals—his projects in this arena have included major commissions for the Dallas Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles—has led to a particular approach to the installation and presentation of his work. He routinely deploys color and makes architectural interventions in exhibition spaces in order to construct enveloping experiences for the viewer.

The artist’s childhood in Switzerland imprinted upon him an early fascination with landscape and the natural world, and the influence of his native country places Party firmly within the trajectory of central European landscape painting. Points of reference in his work include celebrated 19th-century Swiss artists Félix Vallotton, Ferdinand Hodler, and to Hans Emmenegger. One can also find within his works a 21st-century synthesis of the sorts of impulses and ideas that fueled the Renaissance and late 19th-century, early 20th-century figurative painting, the compositional strategies of Rosalba Carriera and Rachel Ruysch, and the visions of such self-taught artists as Louis Eilshemius and Milton Avery.

Based in New York, Party studied at the Lausanne School of Art in Switzerland before receiving his MFA from Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.

Follow @NicolasParty on Instagram and @XavierHufkens

View his new exhibition at https://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibitions/nicolas-party

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We meet artist Aubrey Levinthal from her studio in Philadelphia!!!

Softly-rendered portraits by Aubrey Levinthal explore contemporary psychology. In the works, figures go about familiar daily routines - eating, sleeping and daydreaming. The artist is inspired by a range of modernist painters, from portraitist Alice Neel to collagist Romare Bearden and modernist David Hockney. Her intentionally muted palette of predominantly grey tones is created by layering light washes of oil paint onto panels, and then scraping them down with a blade. This technique renders the skin of her characters as almost translucent - either emerging from, or dissolving into, their surfaces.

Much of Levinthal’s recent work relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. The loneliness and claustrophobia of social isolation is told through melancholic facial expressions and slumped postures. Recurring motifs, such as browning bananas and unfinished meals, allude to the passing of time, while irregularities in proportion and perspective engage the ways in which a home becomes strange when you spend all your time within it. These details embody the crux of Levinthal’s practice - how we inhabit spaces, and how they inhabit us.

Levinthal’s paintings focus on her own daily interiority and the quotidian, mostly situated in the home. More recently, Levinthal reflects on ones’ relationship to the outside world and moves the psychology away from the isolated self to a more unknown drifting space. The paintings are infused with more daylight, colour has become brighter, and the figures are larger. Shared environments, such as neighborhood coffee shops, yoga studios, hospitals, hotels and pools are fraught with nuanced tension and personal connection. Levinthal heightens the psychological space between observing and knowing. The paintings explore a sense of insecurity, self-reflection and curiosity in collective spaces. In Bagel Line (2022), a group of friends situated outside a bagel shop huddle closely together in winter coats. Their expressions range from anxious to annoyed to eager highlighting ones’ own duality. The artist projects an interior life onto these strangers: a barista, a person standing in line, a blue-haired teenager at a take-out counter, or a shopper in a clothing store. Within the paintings, objects take on abstract shapes and act as barriers. In Crab Shack (2022), two brown paper bags give the impression of a wall in front of a pensive young woman. 

Levinthal draws inspiration from the Renassiance period to Modernists such as, Mary Fedden (1915-2012), Milton Avery (1885-1965) and Fairfield Porter (1907-1975). Levinthal’s tenderly observed paintings illuminate the strangeness of daily interiority and introspection. In Yoga Mat (2022), the viewer is confronted with a lone woman in a yoga pose. The figure also doubles as an ancient sculpture, most evident in the shapes used and the manner in which the feet are depicted, as if resembling stone. This painting was directly inspired by the Egyptian sculpture titled Statue of Sitepehu (1479-1458 BCE), which is part of the permanent collection at the Penn Museum, Philadelphia.

The artist lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.

Follow @AubreyLevinthal on Instagram and their official website https://aubreylevinthal.com/

Follow their gallery: @Monya_Rowe_Gallery

Aubrey's new work is included in group show 'Close' at GRIMM Gallery curated by Talk Art co-host Russell Tovey from 4th March - 6th April, 2023 2 Bourdon Street, London (UK).

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We meet leading artist TOM BURR from his studio in Connecticut, USA!

In his spare, enigmatic, mixed-media sculptures and installations, Tom Burr explores the ways in which we imbue the spaces and things by which we are surrounded—like clothing, furniture, or the patterns in wood—with our memories and emotions. As he explains: “I know that objects retain the stain of people and that our memory can be physically located out of longing or grief.” Though his work is grounded in his own memories, it is deliberately ambiguous, allowing viewers to invest it with their own life experiences. He uses what he calls a “focused spectrum” of humble materials and found objects, including plywood, old blankets and t-shirts, radiators, doors, books, and bits of hardware. By draping a pair of nylons over a radiator, encasing sneakers in yellow Plexiglas, or constructing stripped-down rooms, Burr makes his (and our) memories material.

Tom Burr (b. 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut) lives and works in New York. He has shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States. He most recently was the subject of a solo exhibition entitled Hinged Figures at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. His work was recently featured in Queer Abstraction at the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA.

Burr’s work has been collected by major museums internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MuMOK, Vienna, Austria; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Sammlung Grasslin, Germany; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria; Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; FRAC, Champagne Ardenne, France; FRAC, Nord-Pas de Calais, France; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Burr attended the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Tom Burr’s forthcoming solo exhibition runs from 10th March 2023 at Bortolami in New York.

Follow @BurrTomBurr

Visit: Maureen Paley, London, Bortolami, NYC and Galerie Neu, Berlin.

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New Talk Art!!! For this VERY special episode we meet artist couple - photographer Ian Lewandowski and painter Anthony Cudahy to discuss how their individual art practices overlap through their life together and the idea of the 'muse'.

Ian Lewandowski (born 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. He’s exhibited photographs at School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), 1969 Gallery (New York), Skylab Gallery (Columbus), and Lamar Dodd School of Art (Athens). Ian has been published in Unseen, The Fader, American Chordata, and Capricious. In 2017 Dashwood Books published Vigil (RHYTHM) Vigil, a volume of his photographs alongside paintings and drawings by his partner Anthony Cudahy, which was in 2018 featured in theQueering Space group exhibition at Alfred University (Alfred). He holds an MFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. Ian’s work negotiates picture and body histories. He also archives the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002). He lives in Brooklyn. Ian Lewandowski’s first monograph, The Ice Palace is Gone, published by Magic Hour Press, is a collection of large format color photographs depicting queer identities and interiors within the context of community and care. Alluding to the nightclub on Fire Island, the Ice Palace is a space that represents the temporal and precarious nature of queer spaces, and the necessity for them to be constantly rebuilt and reimagined. In The Ice Palace is Gone, Lewandowski creates honest depictions of those he photographs, while presenting a potentiality for who they could be. Lewandowski’s portraits crystalize his subjects as characters within this seductive and surreal world, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. 

Anthony Cudahy (born 1989) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY Anthony Cudahy (b.1989 Florida, USA) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cudahy’s tender paintings reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. Personal and poetic, Cudahy’s figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes. At once dark and luminous, Cudahy’s paintings often have a phosphorescent quality to them, as though they are lit from within. For the artist, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential – the thick textures, light airy space, patterning and delicate marks are all active in the story he is creating. Alongside painting, Cudahy makes incredibly detailed colored pencil drawings, in an all-consuming process of mark making. Unlike his paintings which transform throughout the making, the challenging medium calls for the compositions to be decided beforehand.

Follow @AnthonyCudahy and @ILewando on Instagram

Visit: https://anthonycudahy.com/ and https://ianlewandowski.com/

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We meet SANDRA BERNHARD, performer, actress, singer, comedian, author and ICON!!!! We discover the influence of her artist mother, growing up in Flint Michigan and meeting/collaborating with artists as wide-ranging as Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, John Boskovich, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, and Keith Haring and her deep admiration for the work of Cindy Sherman. We also learn about her passion for expressing herself via fashion, walking the runway for Chanel and Comme des Garçons, and her iconic performances on Late Night with David Letterman in the 80s and 90s.

Bernhard is currently starring (alongside our very own Russell Tovey) in the new season of American Horror Story: NYC, having previously made a special guest appearance on AHS: Apocalypse. Her successful, decades long television career also saw her as a series regular in the immensely popular FX Television/Ryan Murphy show POSE as brassy but caring Nurse Judy Kubrack, who works with H.I.V. / AIDS patients. She is also currently in her fifth year hosting her weekly radio show Sandyland on Sirius XM's Radio Andy channel 102, for which she won a broadcasting Gracie Award.

She first gained attention in the late 1970s with her stand-up comedy, where she often critiqued celebrity culture and political figures. A pioneer of the one-woman show, Bernhard brings a completely unique and raucous mix of cabaret, stand-up, rock-n-roll, and social commentary to her live stage performances. Just last year she celebrated the 10 year anniversary of her iconic annual holiday shows at Joe's Pub in New York City, while she also continues to tour throughout the country and overseas. Extremely notable past live stage shows, which she has performed both on and off-Broadway, include Without You I'm Nothing, I'm Still Here, Dammit, Everything Bad and Beautiful, and #blessed.

Bernhard's film credits include The King of Comedy, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics, Track 29, Hudson Hawk, Dinner Rush, and the live performance film Without You I'm Nothing. Past television credits include Two Broke Girls, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, Difficult People, You're the Worst, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Will &Grace, The Sopranos, The Larry Sanders Show and Roseanne. Music albums include I'm Your Woman (Polygram, 1986), Excuses for Bad Behavior (Epic, 1994) and the world music album Whatever It Takes (Mi5, 2009). She has written three books: May I Kiss You on the Lips, Miss Sandra?, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, Love, Love and Love.

Follow: @SandraGBernhard on Instagram. Visit her official website: https://www.sandrabernhard.com/

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New Talk Art! We head to London's Pippy Houldsworth Gallery to meet leading artist Nengi Omuku (b.1987, Nigeria)!!!

Grappling with ideas around gender, cultural heritage and race, Nengi Omuku’s practice explores the complexities of identity, focusing on interior psychological spaces and how they manifest within the physical world. Rendered in oil paint on strips of sanyan – a traditional Nigerian fabric used for draped clothing – Omuku creates ethereal scenes of figures in constant flux, interacting with one another and the landscape around them. Inspired by both archival and current images taken from the Nigerian press and media, she creates worlds in which the distinction between bodies and nature is often blurred, reflecting on the intricacies around navigating place and belonging. 

The spectral figures in her works have their faces deliberately obscured; silent observers whose gaze penetrates out towards the viewer. Reflecting the fluctuation in her paintings between the figurative and abstract, they too resist singularity and instead look to embrace the collective experience, echoing the choruses in Greek theatre. Omuku’s interrogations of the ambiguous spaces in between is equally explored in her use of materials. Weaving together strips of sanyan, she often combines vintage textiles from different fabrics, creating an amalgamation of materials to which she then reverses and applies oil paint to the back. The dichotomy between the intricately woven and carefully designed materials combined with the fluidity of the oil paint, speaks to living between cultures whilst at the same time feeling deeply connected to her country of birth.

Nengi Omuku (b.1987, Nigeria) has completed both her BA and MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Omuku’s work is inspired by the politics of the body and the complexities that surround identity and difference. With every journey, she considers how human beings position themselves in space in relation to other beings. Foremost on her mind are the ways in which the body needs to adapt in order to belong. It is constantly selecting and gathering its identity, mentally, physically, and emotionally. 

Follow @NengiOmuku and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

Learn more at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/artists/168-nengi-omuku/works/

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Talk Art is back!!! To kick off the new year 2023, we bring you an exclusive interview with artist JAKE GREWAL on the occasion of his major solo show of new paintings at Thomas Dane.

In Jake Grewal’s paintings and drawings nude figures, nearly always male and often based on the artist’s own image, inhabit verdant forests and woodland landscapes. Unmoored from any specific time or place, Grewal’s dream-like scenes are spaces of desire and projection, where the artist’s exploration of self opens out into narratives surrounding the fractious relationship between human and nature, and the search for an idealised place of queer communion. Grewal’s figures appear at once in harmonious cohabitation with their natural surroundings and seemingly on the verge of being consumed by them, an ambiguity that suffuses his works with an atmosphere of quiet uncertainty and longing.

Drawing is central to Grewal’s practice. In his charcoal and pencil sketches, images and narratives are slowly brought into focus, often through the insistent repetition of an idea made in different mediums, on varying grounds and scales. There is an intimacy and expediency offered by charcoal and graphite that Grewal harnesses and embeds in his work in order to lend his figures the quality of being just out of reach. The exhibition includes a number of small charcoal studies made in the studio and out of doors the close-cropped framing of bodies and natural forms makes them feel like fragments of much larger scenes.

Sketching from Old Master paintings informs the way in which Grewal constructs many of his images, drawing from painters such as Constable, Corot, Degas, and Gauguin; artists for whom a deeply evocative relationship to the natural world was central. Close scrutiny of these works allows Grewal to extract formal passages and devices from a quintessentially European landscape idiom and transpose these onto the landscapes of his imagination. As stage sets for subjects cast in the image of his own body, Grewal’s works challenge the entrenched white, heteronormativity of the Western canon of painting.

Once Grewal finds an image that holds enough complexity or embodies a satisfying sense of evasiveness, he will explore the image in paint. Now I Know You I Am Older brings together a number of new works depicting single or double figures, though the multiplying of figures in Grewal’s work can often be read as the observation of a single figure across time, a cubist interrogation of physical and psychological space, or like the unfolding of a filmic sequence. Grewal puts pathetic fallacy to dramatic effect, using twilight or dramatic sunsets to add a sense of drama or foreboding to an image. In If I Stay You’ll Break Me (2021­–2022) a piercing orange light cleaves the canvas in two, turning a large tree into a dramatic tracery of shadowed forms across a brooding sky; two ghostly figures appear in the centre of the work but appear to have been erased. In another large-scale image two figures walk across a watery landscape that recedes into an infinite sublime. The open expanse and quiet movement of its protagonists present an open-ended scenario onto which the viewer is invited to project any number of narratives, their purposeful stride towards a place not yet discovered.

Jake Grewal (b.1994). View Jake's show at Thomas Dane until 28th January 2023, free entry.

View at https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/

Follow @JakeGrewal on Instagram and their website: http://www.jakegrewal.com/

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HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! We have a very funny gift of an episode for you before we take a few weeks off!!! We will return in mid January 2023!

We meet the one and only BILLY EICHNER!!! Leading American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter, Eichner is the star of new gay romcom Bros and also the creator of Billy on the Street, the iconic comedy game show. The show earned Eichner a nomination for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host.

We discuss how Billy grew up with access to the arts in New York City but how he went on to discover most of his favourite artists via musicals, movies and TV shows! Most notably Six Degrees of Separation, the 1993 American comedy-drama starring Will Smith. We learn how Joan Rivers became a mentor and friend and how Madonna's SEX book by Steven Meisel was the first art book he ever owned!

Follow Billy on Instagram: @billyeichner and check out Bros The Movie: @BrosTheMovie

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Talk Art Christmas Special!!!! We meet the one and only Julian Clary, comedy pioneer, camp icon and bonafide Talk Art hero!!!! BORN TO MINCE!!!!

We discuss living with art, the lasting influence of his art teacher and the fine art of Christmas pantomimes! We learn about his interest in the work of Keith Haring, Peter Blake, Jean Cocteau, queer life in the 1980s and his admiration for Noël Coward, Lindsay Kemp and Renaissance Art! We also have an art quiz in the style of Mastermind, to encourage maximum festive drama!!!

After studying Drama and English at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Julian Clary began working on the cabaret and alternative comedy scene in the 1980s, first under the alias Gillian Pieface and later as The Joan Collins Fan-club. We reminisce about Fanny the Wonder Dog and Julian's hosting of groundbreaking TV show Sticky Moments with stage sets inspired by painter Marc Chagall, plus his radical stand-up comedy performances on Friday Night Live, which returned in October 2022 for a special, critically acclaimed & award-nominated brand new episode, as part of the 40th anniversary of Channel 4!

Julian made his London Palladium debut in 2016 and returns to the stage in 2022! This Christmas join comedy superstars Dawn French and Julian Clary, with Alexandra Burke making her Palladium pantomime debut, as they lead the cast of a brand-new production of Jack and the Beanstalk at London’s iconic home of pantomime! Book tickets now: https://palladiumpantomime.com/ or @PalladiumPanto

Visit Julian's Instagram: @JulianClaryRenownedHomosexual and his official website: https://JulianClary.co.uk/

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!! Thank you for another amazing year!!! With love, Russell and Robert X

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New Talk Art! We meet Jammie Holmes from his studio in Dallas, Texas. Holmes is a self-taught painter from Thibodaux, Louisiana, whose work tells the story of contemporary life for many black families in the Deep South. Through portraiture and tableaux, Holmes depicts stories of the celebrations and struggles of everyday life, with particular attention paid to a profound sense of place. Growing up 20 minutes from the Mississippi River, Holmes was surrounded by the social and economic consequences of America’s dark past, situated within a deep pocket of the Sun Belt, where reminders of slavery exist alongside labor union conflicts that have fluctuated in intensity since the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887. His work is a counterpoint to the romantic mythology of Louisiana as a hub of charming hospitality, an idea that has perpetuated in order to hide the deep scars of poverty and racism that have structured life in the state for centuries.

Despite the circumstances of its setting, Holmes’ work is characterized by the moments he captures where family, ritual, and tradition are celebrated. His presentation of simple moments of togetherness and joy within the black population that nurtures the culture of Louisiana has made him an advocate for this community. Holmes’ paintings fall somewhere between realistic depiction and raw abstraction, incorporating text, symbols, and objects rendered in an uncut style that mirrors a short transition from memory to canvas. He often references photographs from home, but also draws heavily on his own recollection of moments and scenes and works quickly to translate his emotions to paint.

Follow @JHolmes214 and visit https://www.jammieholmes.com/

Learn more at Marianne Boesky Gallery: https://marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/440-jammie-holmes/biography/

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We meet leading artist Peter Halley from his studio in NYC!

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Halley’s paintings and extensive writings about the ever-growing digitisation of cultural, artistic, and social life established him as a leading figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement in New York City. In his paintings and writings, Halley described the increasingly isolated built environment through his uniquely invented language of ​‘cells’, ​‘prisons’ and ​‘conduits’. These central motifs were a means of thinking through the French Post-Structuralist ideas of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard – among others – in relation to digital technology and capitalism. The gridded forms of Halley’s paintings reference not only the societal structures of the urban grid and the expansion of its underlying network of information technologies, but also the legacies of minimalist painting with which Halley grew up. It was during this period of the 1980s, while re-evaluating some of the inherited traditions of modernism, that Halley began to use synthetic colours and materials such as Day-Glo paint and Roll-a-Tex, which continue to characterise his work to this day. Alongside his teaching, painting and writing, in 1996, Halley founded index magazine, which was a further locus of his contribution to critical discourse around contemporary culture.

Halley’s exhibition at Modern Art comprises a group of new shaped-canvas paintings that Halley has been evolving over the past several years. Building on his well-developed language of cells, prisons and conduits, these new shaped-canvas paintings further elaborate a relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in relation to the built environment. While remaining faithful to his painterly vocabulary and chosen materials: acrylic, Roll-a-Tex, and fluorescent Roll-a-Tex on canvas, Halley’s new works mark a departure from his paintings from the 1980s which assumed rectangular forms. The shapes of Halley’s new canvas surfaces are defined through the painted geometric compositions, associative of another dimension – perhaps an architectural plan, or a circuitry board – while the works continue to inhabit a point of contradiction between pure, rationalist geometry and playful, irreverent colour and texture. 

Peter Halley was born in 1953 in New York City, where he continues to live and work. He received his ba from Yale University in 1975 and his mfa from the University of New Orleans in 1978, remaining in New Orleans until 1980.

Follow @PeterHalleyStudio on Instagram and https://www.peterhalley.com/

View his works at his gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art: https://modernart.net/artists/peter-halley

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We meet emerging artist Nash Glynn, from her studio in New York's Seaport! Nash Glynn (b.1992) is a transdisciplinary American artist currently working in NYC. Working across painting, photography, and video, Glynn is best known for her groundbreaking nude self-portraits of her experience and life as a transgender woman, an underrepresented figure in the Western art canon until recently. Glynn was born and raised in Miami, Florida and learned to paint while working at her father's set design shop. Speaking about their work, the artist says, ‘I use paint as I use my body, and as such the possibilities for spontaneity of form and change become inexhaustible. By crafting affective figures I seek to create empathy. The work serves as an affirmation, a reminder that representation has no outside, meaning we choose the reference, add and remove as we please, manipulate each stroke with unique gesture and tone. A process of painting, also known as self-determination.’

Nash Glynn (b.1992) received her BFA in 2014 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and in 2017 her MFA from Columbia University. She has had solo shows at Participant Inc. in 2019, OCD Chinatown in 2020, and an upcoming exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles in Fall 2021. Her work has been in publications such as Artforum, Candy Transversal Magazine, and New American Paintings. Glynn was the recipient of the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship in 2017.

"Interiors, with its plural title, belies the singularity of Glynn’s point of view. Lately, she sticks to painting what she sees from the swivel stool she’s positioned between window and easel, things like: apples in a bowl, closed door, knife. Herself in a mirror, or her mind’s eye. Mostly windows. Yet this self-imposed agreement comes with a proviso to also see with her eyes closed, so as to produce landscapes that look mental. Glynn’s intuitive aversion to the rules of the physical world finds its clearest expression in her palette, which has the firmness of a signature. Alice Neel’s cobalt, Paul Gauguin’s vermillion, Lucian Freud’s mauve are all her colours now. Mixing: as little as possible. Earth tones: no. When she concedes the need for green in a landscape, the shade she uses is not actually grass but jade, à la Ferdinand Hodler; the resulting swath of field looks undulant and cold enough to pass for ocean. Then of course there is white. Rauschenberg’s white, or Ryman’s. The white of a well-rested eye, of the sand under the sun, of nothing said. Glynn has, over the past several years, developed a style of both still life and portraiture in which objects and/or subjects are exquisitely rendered and then set out on a ground that is white except for traces of shadow, so that the knife or flower or girl appears surfaced from memory." Excerpt from Catalogue Essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett from show Interiors.

Follow Nash on Instagram: @NashGlynn

Visit Nash's official website: http://www.nashglynn.com/

View images at Vielmetter, LA: https://vielmetter.com/exhibitions/nash-glynn and @Vielmetter

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We meet artist Kyle Coniglio to discuss his paintings which have been described as 'fictional tellings based on authentic experiences'.

Naturally, this leads viewers to search for clues in his paintings to understand Coniglio as an artist, as a painter. A good starting point, as his recent solo exhibition title suggests is Last Summer. The title talks about the particular kind of warming nostalgia from memories of the past, and also Coniglio’s time spent on Fire Island.

Fire Island which is parallel to the south shore of Long Island, New York, has long been a haven to LQBTQ+ visitors and residents alike. The island, a utopian-like place that is bountiful with queerdom, offers social freedoms that are less experienced in the outside heteronormative world. The island provides a space to build a society around another set of values. There is the sexual context which is well documented, but Coniglio also places importance on friendship, and how it brings people together. Because of this queer framework in which interactions are less bounded by traditional notions – connections to each other are more fluid. In turn, feelings of the fevered nature come to the forefront such as rejection, insecurity, isolation and shame. It is within the context of expanded communal interactions that these challenging notions can be candidly embraced.

Orange, reds, blues, soft tans and even black –each portrait in the exhibition have different colours that are tied to a distinctive narrative. All the paintings together function to create a cast of characters and lexicon of emotional experiences. Characters wear briefs that are comfortably sculpted to their bodies, cut off shorts that are tailored around the waist to reveal lean legs, shirts that have been tied above the navel, or an epic combination: tote/beach/paint-brush bag that brings together queer, summer and artist modes of dress.

Kyle Coniglio has his MFA in painting from Yale University and a BFA from Montclair State University. He has been a fellow of the Queer Art Mentorship program in New York and an affiliated fellow at the American Academy in Rome. His work has been included in shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin. Conilgio had a solo exhibition with Taymour Grahne Projects, London, May 2022. Coniglio lives and works in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Follow @KyleFyles on Instagram and visit Kyle's official website at: https://kyleconiglio.com/

You can view images of Kyle's solo show at Taymour Grahne at this link: https://taymourgrahne.com/exhibitions/kyle-coniglio-last-summer

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Season 15 continues!!! We meet our dear friend Katy Hessel!!!! Art historian, podcaster, author and presenter. She is best known for creating and curating The Great Women Artists; under this label, she runs an Instagram account and a successful podcast named by British Vogue as one of the top podcasts of 2021. 

In 2020, Katy wrote and presented a documentary on Artemisia Gentileschi for BBC Four’s Inside Museum series, followed by a documentary on Monet in for BBC Four’s Art on the BBC entitled The French Revolutionary and an appearance on BBC Two’s Inside Culture with Mary Beard. Beyond the BBC, Katy has presented films for the likes of Dior, the Tate, the Barbican, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the National Portrait Gallery.

She has engaged in keynote speeches and panel events at the Oxford Union, Intelligence Squared, and the National Gallery, and has curated exhibitions at Victoria Miro, Timothy Taylor, and the Tate Modern. In 2021, Katy was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 in Arts and Culture. 

In 2022, Katy published her debut book, The Story of Art Without Men, to much fanfare and critical acclaim, hitting the Sunday Times’ bestseller list in its first week of publication. How many women artists do you know? Who makes art history? Did women even work as artists before the twentieth century? And what is the Baroque anyway? Discover the glittering Sofonisba Anguissola of the Renaissance, the radical work of Harriet Powers in the nineteenth-century USA and the artist who really invented the Readymade. Explore the Dutch Golden Age, the astonishing work of post-War artists in Latin America and the women artists defining art in the 2020s. Have your sense of art history overturned, and your eyes opened to many art forms often overlooked or dismissed. From the Cornish coast to Manhattan, Nigeria to Japan this is the history of art as it's never been told before.

​

Follow @Katy.Hessell on Instagram.

Thanks for listening!!!

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Talk Art is back for Season 15!!!! This special Talk Art live episode with DJ Fat Tony is brought to you in partnership with L’OR coffee for the Secret Podcast Experience.

We met artist Fat Tony live from Spring Studios London in front of a live audience for an incredible thought provoking chat about his life experiences, inspirations and interesting people he has met along the way.

Follow @DJ_FatTony_ on Instagram and his official website: www.djfattony.co.uk Thanks for listening!!! We are so excited to share this new season with you. Keeping you company through the Winter!!!

We would love to hear your feedback: https://survey.euro.confirmit.com/wix/2/p703696360272.aspx?l=9&src=1&HQLType=6&foreignID=%5BID%5D

Starting his career 3 decades ago at an age too young to mention, Fat Tony has had his say in paving the way for the UK’s current music scene. Early on he won residencies for Trade at Turnmills, Egg and Limelight while also making his mark in New York holding a weekly show at The Palladium for Steve Rubell during the height of Paradise Garage. He has also graced the main floor of Privilege Ibiza, Space, Amnesia and DC10. A regular at Ministry of Sound and Glitterbox, Tony has already in this short season of 2021 played Defected Festival in Croatia, One Out & Wilderness Festival and countless other venues with The Warehouse Project and so much more around the corner. As official DJ to the icons like Elton John, Kate Moss and Donatella Versace, he is also one of the fashion scene’s go to performers.

As one of club culture's most notorious - and best loved - figures, Tony is a complete force of nature. In his recent book I Don't Take Requests, he tells the most extraordinary stories of depravity and hedonism, of week-long benders and extreme self-destruction - and of recovery, redemption, friendship and the joy of a good tune.

'Anyone can get a party started, but no one keeps it going like Fat Tony, the energy never dips and

what a life he's lived.. He's a tosser but we still love him.' ELTON JOHN & DAVID FURNISH

DJ Fat Tony has been described as 'the closest thing that club culture has to a national treasure' and the 'unlikely cult hero of quarantine'. Few people have crammed so many lives into one: when your first line of cocaine is aged 16 with Freddie Mercury, where do you go from there? I Don't Take Requests is Fat Tony's breathtakingly candid and outrageous memoir of a life of extremes. From his childhood on an estate in Battersea where he honed his petty criminality, was abused by an older man and made friends with Boy George, to his teenage years spent parading the Kings Road in his latest (stolen) clobber, working as a receptionist for a prostitute, hanging out with Leigh Bowery and Sue Tilley and creating his drag persona, to his life as DJ to the stars and his spiral into serious drug addiction. Now, he is 16 years sober and, alongside working to help others overcome addiction, DJing for everyone from Elton John to Louis Vuitton - and running one of lockdown's most popular Instagram accounts with its wickedly funny memes.

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It's the Season 14 finale! We meet Skinder Hundal MBE who is the British Council's Director of Arts!!!! We discuss his extraordinary career in Visual Arts including recently working with Sonya Boyce, for the 2022 British Pavilion, who won the Golden Lion prize for her exhibition 'Feeling Her Way', which runs until 27th November.

Before joining British Council, Hundal was CEO/Director of New Art Exchange, a contemporary arts space in Nottingham where he worked for 12 years to create connections between the UK and overseas through arts and cultural projects. Working across art forms, his international experience includes projects for La Biennale di Venezia, TED Global, Google Cultural Institute and for the UK’s official arts programme for the First World War Centenary, 14-18 Now.

Major projects under his tenure at New Art Exchange includes Here, There & Everywhere, an ambitious international programme of artistic development, cultural exchange and artist residencies between the UK and Africa, South Asia, South Korea, Middle East, North America and Europe.

Skinder Hundal is Executive Producer and co-Artistic Director of the UK’s original South Asian outdoor festival, Nottingham Arts Mela, and a Board member at Artist News (a-n) and Tom Dale Dance Company. In 2019, he was awarded an MBE for his contribution to visual arts.

As Director of Arts, British Council, Hundal oversees multiple art forms, including: Architecture, Design and Fashion; Film; Literature; Music; Theatre and Dance; and Visual Arts. The British Council’s major arts activity includes cultural programmes for annual bilateral seasons such as UK/Italy 2020 and UK/Australia 2021-22; the British Pavilion exhibitions at La Biennale Arte and La Biennale Architettura, Venice; and the Market Focus Cultural Programme at the London Book Fair.

"Connecting, engaging and sharing knowledge through arts and culture is now more important than ever. I believe artists and cultural professionals help challenge, provoke and make sense of the world, so I’m looking to connect the unique and diverse UK’s arts scene with many brilliant artists and organisations around the world in my role at British Council.' Skinder Hundal MBE

Follow @SkinderHundal and @BritishArts on Instagram, or @SkinsBC on Twitter. Learn more: https://www.britishcouncil.org/arts and explore the British Council Visual Arts Collection here: http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/collection

Thanks for listening to Season 14!! We will be back next week with a whole new series 15!!! Plus we will be announcing some very exciting news next week. WATCH THIS SPACE!!! Enjoying the podcast? Follow us and say hello via our Instagram: @TalkArt

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We meet Alex Rotter, Chairman of Christie’s 20/21 Art Departments, to discuss Christie’s New York forthcoming auction 'Visionary: The Paul G. Allen Collection' which runs from 9–10 November 2022 at Rockefeller Center. The collection of philanthropist Paul G. Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, includes more than 150 masterpieces spanning 500 years of art history. Reflecting the depth and breadth of Paul G. Allen’s collection, the auctions connect this visionary innovator to a range of ground-breaking artists, joining Paul Cezanne with David Hockney, Alberto Giacometti with Louise Bourgeois, Georges Seurat with Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin with Yayoi Kusama. Valued in excess of $1 billion, The Paul G. Allen Collection is poised to be the largest and most exceptional art auction in history. Pursuant to his wishes, the estate will dedicate all the proceeds to philanthropy.

From 29 October – 8 November 2022, view The Paul G. Allen Collection in-person at Christie's Rockefeller Center galleries in New York. Follow @ChristiesInc and visit their official website: https://www.christies.com/en/events/visionary-the-paul-g-allen-collection/overview

From Canaletto’s famed vistas of Venice and Paul Cezanne’s magisterial vision of the Mont Sainte-Victoire to Gustav Klimt’s Birch Forest, Georgia O'Keeffe's 'Red Hills with Pedernal, White Clouds', and latterly, David Hockney’s joyful depictions of his native Yorkshire, the collection highlights landmark moments in the development of landscape painting through centuries. Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat, Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterwork Les Poseuses, Ensemble (Petite version) and Lucian Freud’s Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) demonstrate the enduring power of the human figure in art, while the polyvalent practice of artists such as Max Ernst and Jasper Johns show how artists can subvert tradition to move art forward. We explore some of our own personal favourite works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Louise Bourgeois, Bridget Riley and Barbara Hepworth.

Alex Rotter grew up in a family of art dealers in his native Austria, and studied at the University of Vienna. He currently lives in New York and is responsible for overseeing a global team of specialists spanning the full scope of 20th and 21st Century art. Rotter’s progressive approach to presenting extraordinary works of art to the market has yielded many of the most groundbreaking moments in auction history. Career highlights include the 2017 sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi , which sold for $450 million, becoming the most expensive object ever sold at auction, and Jeff Koons’ Rabbit from the Collection of SI Newhouse, which sold for $91.1 million and set a world auction record for a living artist.

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Woody De Othello (b. 1991) is a Miami-born, California-based artist whose subject matter spans household objects, bodily features, and the natural world. Everyday artifacts of the domestic tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers, et cet era—are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass. Othello’s sense of humor manifests across his work in visual puns and cartoonish figuration. “I choose objects that are already very human,” says Othello. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform; they’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things, and our bodies are indicators of all of those.” Othello’s scaled-up representations of these objects often slump over, overcome with gravity, as if exhausted by their own use. This sophisticated gravitational effect is a central formal challenge in his work. Informed by his own Haitian ancestry, Othello takes interest in the supernatural objects of Vodou folklore, nkisi figures, and other animist artifacts that inspire him. 

Woody's work is part of epic new group show at Hayward Gallery, London: Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art runs from 26 Oct 2022 –⁠ 8 Jan 2023.

Learm more here: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/strange-clay-ceramics-contemporary-art

Follow @WoodyOthello on Instagram and his official website: http://woodyothello.com/

Special thanks to @Hayward.Gallery and Karma NY and Jessica Silverman, SF.

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We meet the one and only ZACHARY QUINTO!!!! Leading actor, film producer and art collector, best known for his roles Sylar in Heroes, Spock in Star Trek, Margin Call, Angels in America and numerous seasons of American Horror Story, for which he received an Emmy award nomination.

We discuss living with art, making his own watercolours, growing up in Pittsburgh, coming out publicly as gay in 2011, meeting Cindy Sherman, his close friendship with Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock and also an accomplished artist/art collector, plus what it was like filming the latest series of AHS with none other than our very own Russell T!

We learn about Zachary's favourite contemporary artists including the photography of Pablo Zuleta Zahr, Wolfgang Tillmans and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the paintings and sculptures of Izumi Kato, Nash Glynn, Katharine Kuharic, Ross Bleckner, Wyatt Kahn, Elizabeth Jaeger, the collages of both Jens Fänge and Matt Lipps, needlepoint of Loji Höskuldsson, the carved wood panels of Zach Harris, and numerous inspiring visits to galleries and art fairs around the world including Vielmetter, Hauser & Wirth, Perrotin and Marc Selwyn Fine Art.

We also explore the power of acting on stage and the 'devotional space' of theatre. Zachary will soon take to the stage in London's West End this November alongside David Harewood, in 'Best of Enemies'.

Learn more and buy tickets for the 'Best of Enemies' play: https://bestofenemiesplay.com/

Follow @AHSfx on Instagram for details of the all-new Season 11 'American Horror Story: NYC', starring both Russell Tovey and Zachary Quinto. Learn more at FX in the USA: https://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/american-horror-story. Or Disney+ in the UK: https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/series/american-horror-story/

Thank you QUINNY, we love you!!!!

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Season 14 continues!! We remember the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century: KEITH HARING!!!

We meet GIL VAZQUEZ, Executive Director and President at Keith Haring Foundation in New York, one of Haring’s closest friends, confidants and heir. We explore how Haring attracted an audience worldwide by expressing universal concepts of birth, death, love, sex and war, using a primacy of line and directness of message. Like Talk Art’s core values, Haring's work really was, and is, the embodiment of ART FOR EVERYONE!!!!! 

Gil Vazquez was one of Keith Haring's closest friends in the years prior to his tragic passing. As Ingrid Sischy documented in her 1997 article for Vanity Fair: "Gil Vazquez, a man Haring had fallen for, was often by his side. Haring and Vazquez were never lovers, because Vazquez is straight, but by all accounts their friendship gave Haring a kind of companionship he’d been longing for." Read the full article titled 'Kid Haring' here: https://www.haring.com/!/selected_writing/kid-haring

The mission of the Keith Haring Foundation is to sustain, expand, and protect the legacy of Keith Haring, his art, and his ideals. The Foundation supports not-for-profit organizations that assist children, as well as organizations involved in education, prevention, and care related to AIDS.

Keith Haring (1958-1990) generously contributed his talents and resources to numerous causes. He conducted art workshops with children, created logos and posters for public service agencies, and produced murals, sculptures, and paintings to benefit health centers and disadvantaged communities. In 1989, Haring established a foundation to ensure that his philanthropic legacy would continue indefinitely.

The Keith Haring Foundation makes grants to not-for-profit groups that engage in charitable activities. In accordance with Haring’s wishes, the Foundation concentrates its giving in two areas: the support of organizations which enrich the lives of underprivileged children and the support of organizations which engage in education, prevention, and care with respect to AIDS and HIV infection.

Keith Haring additionally charged the Foundation with maintaining and protecting his artistic legacy after his death. The Foundation maintains a collection of art along with archives that facilitate historical research about the artist and the times and places in which he lived and worked. The Foundation supports arts and educational institutions by funding exhibitions, programming, and publications that serve to contextualize and illuminate Haring’s work and philosophy.

Visit the official website: https://www.haring.com/

Follow: @KeithHaringFoundation and @_GilVazquez

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Talk Art Special LIVE EPISODE with Ruinart!!! We meet leading artist JEPPE HEIN!!! Live from London's Frieze week, this inspiring episode was recorded in South Kensington in front a live audience.

Trustful that art can enlighten and connect us across time and places, Ruinart gives Carte Blanche to leading contemporary artists to pay tribute to the Maison’s legacy. Their artworks echo Ruinart’s values, raising awareness about climate change.

To renew the experience of nature and bring it into our daily life, Ruinart Carte Blanche Artist Jeppe Hein uses “fragments of matter and emotion” that awaken our senses and connect us to ourselves and the world.

Right Here, Right Now is a participatory installation that summons the four elements – earth/soil, water/rain, air/wind and fire/sun – essential to champagne making. It is on show now at Frieze London in the Ruinart Art Bar until 16 October. A digital extension to it can be experienced at Ruinart.com

Follow @JeppeHein and @Ruinart

THANKS FOR LISTENING!!! Special thanks to everyone who got a ticket and came to watch this episode recording Live in London!!!

We will back very soon.

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Talk Art special episode!!! We meet leading artist NIKITA GALE! It's Frieze London and we explore an incredible new art installation for BMW Open Work by Frieze. Artist Nikita Gale worked with BMW i7 designers to present the site-specific installation “63/22” in the BMW Lounge at the fair from October 12-16, 2022.

Curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini, BMW Open Work by Frieze invites an artist to develop an ambitious project utilising BMW design and technology to pursue their practice in innovative new directions. BMW Open Work offers artists the possibility of engaging in a rich dialogue with BMW engineers, designers, and experts from different fields to create unique artistic projects.

Investigating the politics of sound and its surrounding, Nikita Gale’s practice enquires themes of invisibility and audibility, recasting the complicated dynamic between performer and spectator. Within the work, notions are subverted and destabilized. Nikita Gale’s interest in the history of sound continues with “63/22”, in which the artist reflects on the relationship between automotive and sound technologies, already closely associated since the 1960s. In fact, the Gibson Firebird, one of the most popular electric guitars, was designed by a car designer in 1963. 

Emerging from an intense dialogue with BMW i7 designers and engineers whilst reinforcing BMW’s commitment to art and music, Gale presents for Frieze London 2022 a sculptural installation comprising of five customised electric guitars. The guitars will be named historically significant and iconic Black women guitarists: Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Barbara Lynn, Big Mama Thornton, and Joan Armatrading. Activated in the lounge through a series of live acts performed by musicians invited by Gale, the guitars will play through the BMW i7, transforming the car into a sound amp, amplifying the relationship between the car, sound technologies and creativity. The guitars have been created in collaboration with BMW i7 designers and realised by a UK-based luthier, Ian Malone. 

View more: https://frieze.com/bmw-open-work

Gale's work employs objects and materials like barricades, concrete, microphone stands, and spotlights to address the ways in which space and sound are politicized. Gale’s broad-ranging installations blur formal and disciplinary boundaries, engaging with concerns of mediation and automation in contemporary performance. 

Follow: @NikitaGale on Instagram. Gale is represented by Commonwealth & Council (LA), Reyes | Finn (Detroit), and 56 Henry (NYC).

Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art, more than 50 years supporting artists and culture.

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Season 14 continues with VERY special episode with one of our all-time ART WORLD ICONS!!!! We meet the legendary gallerist MAUREEN PALEY. Inspiration to many of today's international contemporary galleries, Maureen was in fact the reason our co-host Robert Diament became inspired to change careers to work full-time in a gallery!

We discover how she began her gallery programme in 1984 in a Victorian terraced house in London’s East End. Initially named Interim Art, the gallery changed its name to Maureen Paley in 2004 as a celebration of its 20th anniversary. Since September 1999 the gallery has been situated in Bethnal Green, and in September 2020 relocated to Three Colts Lane. In July 2017 Maureen Paley opened a second space in Hove called Morena di Luna. In October 2020 a third space was opened in Shoreditch, London called Studio M. From its inception, the gallery’s aim has remained consistent: to promote great and innovative artists in all media.-

Maureen Paley was one of the first to present contemporary art in London’s East End and has been a pioneer of the current scene, promoting and showing a diverse range of international artists. Gallery artists include Turner Prize winners Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2019; Wolfgang Tillmans, 2000 and Gillian Wearing, 1997 as well as Turner Prize nominees Rebecca Warren, 2006; Liam Gillick, 2002; Jane and Louise Wilson, 1999 and Hannah Collins, 1993. Represented artists also include AA Bronson, Felipe Baeza, Tom Burr, Michaela Eichwald, Morgan Fisher, General Idea, Anne Hardy, Peter Hujar, Michael Krebber, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Olivia Plender, Stephen Prina, Maaike Schoorel, Hannah Starkey, Chioma Ebinama, Oscar Tuazon, and James Welling.

Maureen Paley, the gallery’s founder and director, was born in New York, studied at Sarah Lawrence College, and graduated from Brown University before coming to the UK in 1977 where she completed her Masters at The Royal College of Art from 1978–80.

Together with running the gallery, Maureen Paley has also curated a number of large-scale public exhibitions. In 1994 she organised an exhibition of works by Felix Gonzales Torres, Joseph Kosuth and Ad Reinhardt at the Camden Arts Centre. In 1995 Wall to Wall was presented for the Arts Council GB National Touring Exhibitions and appeared at the Serpentine Gallery, London, Southampton City Art Gallery and Leeds City Art Gallery showing wall drawings by international artists including Daniel Buren, Michael Craig-Martin, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Sol Lewitt, and Lawrence Weiner. Maureen Paley also selected an exhibition of work by young British artists in 1996 called The Cauldron featuring Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Steven Pippin, Georgina Starr and Gillian Wearing for the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust which was installed in their Studio space in Dean Clough, Halifax.

Follow @MaureenPaley on Instagram. Visit the gallery's official website at https://www.maureenpaley.com/

Maureen Paley are exhibiting at Frieze London art fair next week in Regent's Park, Stand C19, 12th-16th October 2022. See works from her booth at Frieze's website: https://viewingroom.frieze.com/viewing-room/1750

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We meet leading artist Amy Sherald, one of the defining contemporary portraitists in the United States. We discuss her new works about to be exhibited in London, growing up in Columbus, Georgia, the experience of painting Michelle Obama's portrait and how New York has become her home.

From 12th October, Sherald will unveil a suite of new paintings in a major exhibition at Hauser Wirth London, marking the artist’s first solo show in Europe. Featuring a series of small-scale and monumental portraits across both the gallery’s London spaces, this presentation is the artist’s largest to date with the gallery. Sherald is acclaimed for her paintings of Black Americans at leisure that have become landmarks in the grand tradition of social portraiture—a tradition that for too long excluded the Black men, women, families, and artists whose lives have been inextricable from public and politicised narratives. In this new body of work, Sherald humanises the Black experience by depicting her subjects in both historically recognisable and everyday settings, at once immortalising them and reinserting them into the art historical canon. Sherald foregrounds the idea that Black life and identity are not solely tethered to grappling publicly with social issues and that resistance also lies in an expressive vision of self-sovereignty in the world. By subverting existing narratives, Sherald hopes to offer the viewer a reflection of themselves and the complexities of their interior lives, void of the constructs of race, gender, religion and preconceived notions.

The first widely available monograph on Amy Sherald will accompany this exhibition, published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of Sherald’s work by Jenni Sorkin, a meditation on the poetics of the Black ordinary by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie and a conversation between Sherald and author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Amy Sherald has recently donated $1 million to the University of Louisville to fund the Brandeis Law School’s Breonna Taylor Legacy Fellowship and the Breonna Taylor Legacy Scholarship for undergraduates, a gift made possible by the sale of Sherald’s portrait of Breonna Taylor made in 2020 to the Ford Foundation and the Hearthland Foundation.

Amy Sherald's major new solo show 'The World We Make' opens at Hauser & Wirth London from 12th October – 23rd December 2022.

Follow @ASherald on Instagram and her gallery @HauserWirth. Learn more at Hauser & Wirth's website: https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/11577-amy-sherald/

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING!!!

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SPECIAL EPISODE!!! Live Talk Art!!! Robert Diament meets legendary artist Ai Weiwei (*1957, Beijing) recorded at Kite Festival, Oxfordshire on 12th June 2022. Ai Weiwei lives and works in multiple locations, including Beijing (China), Berlin (Germany), Cambridge (UK) and Lisbon (Portugal). He is a multimedia artist who also works in film, writing and social media. Special thanks to Tortoise Media, Tom Macklin and the wonderful team at Kite Festival.

"Expressing oneself is a part of being human. To be deprived of a voice is to be told you are not a participant in society; ultimately it is a denial of humanity." www.aiweiwei.com

Ai Weiwei is renowned for making strong aesthetic statements that resonate with timely phenomena across today’s geopolitical world. From architecture to installations, social media to documentaries, Ai uses a wide range of mediums as expressions of new ways for his audiences to examine society and its values. Recent exhibitions include: Ai Weiwei: Resetting Memories at MARCO in Monterrey, Ai Weiwei: Bare Life at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis, Ai Weiwei at the K20/K21 in Dusseldorf, and Good Fences Make Good Neighbors with the Public Art Fund in New York City.

Ai was born in Beijing in 1957 and currently resides and works in Berlin. Ai is the recipient of the 2015 Ambassador of Conscience Award from Amnesty International and the 2012 Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation.

A global citizen, artist and thinker, Ai Weiwei moves between modes of production and investigation, subject to the direction and outcome of his research, whether into the Chinese earthquake of 2008 (for works such as Straight, 2008-12 and Remembering, 2009) or the worldwide plight of refugees and forced migrants (for Law of the Journey and his feature-length documentary, Human Flow, both 2017). From early iconoclastic positions in regards to authority and history, which included Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn and a series of middle-finger salutes to sites of power, Study of Perspective (both 1995), Ai’s production expanded to encompass architecture, public art and performance. Beyond concerns of form or protest, Ai now measures our existence in relation to economic, political, natural and social forces, uniting craftsmanship with conceptual creativity. Universal symbols of humanity and community, such as bicycles, flowers and trees, as well as the perennial problems of borders and conflicts are given renewed potency though installations, sculptures, films and photographs, while Ai continues to speak out publicly on issues he believes important. He is one of the leading cultural figures of his generation and serves as an example for free expression both in China and internationally.

Follow @aiww on Instagram and @aiww on Twitter. See more of Ai Weiwei's work at Lisson Gallery's website: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/ai-weiwei

To learn more about Kite Festival, visit: https://kitefestival.co.uk/

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Talk Art Season 14 continues with a truly special episode!!! We meet artist Jimmy Wright (b. 1944, Kentucky) who has lived and worked in New York since the early 1970s. We discuss queerness, Queer Art of the 1960s & 70s, grief, a lifetime of painting, his close friendship with the Chicago Imagists, being taught by Ray Yoshida and his extraordinary new solo exhibition ‘Flowers For Ken’, which has just opened in New York at Fierman West gallery, 19 Pike Street and runs until October 23rd 2022.

Text by Ashton Cooper: "In 1988, Ken Nuzzo was diagnosed with HIV, an official pronouncement that confirmed years of suspicion, but had long been avoided for fear of losing the insurance coverage provided through his government job. For the next three years, Ken’s partner Jimmy Wright cared for him in ways both familiar and painfully unfamiliar in their 16-year-long relationship. During that time, Wright also began work on a pair of monumental paintings titled Flowers for Ken. The first of these, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Stem, was dated 1988-1991 to reflect those “three years of horror,” as Wright described them, and the painting’s date of completion was mirrored by Ken’s death in 1991 at the age of 41. Measuring 6 feet high and wide, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Stem depicts the backside of a massively enlarged sunflower in the process of decay, its spindly petals withered but still vibrantly orange-yellow as they erupt around the rim of the top-heavy flower. Its partner, Flowers for Ken, Sunflower Head, 1989-92, was completed in the months after Ken’s passing. It renders the same blossom, but this time from the front. Also measuring six feet high, the entire canvas is occupied by the dark center of the flower’s head, its spiral-patterned disc florets rendered in somber tones of brown and gray."

Read more at: https://fierman.nyc/ and http://www.jimmywrightartist.com/

Follow @JimboAlley and @FiermanGallery on Instagram.

Wright's work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago; The Springfield Art Museum, MO; among other institutions. Recent gallery exhibitions include The Queen’s Court, Fierman, NYC (solo), LA 73 – NY 74, M&B Gallery, Los Angeles (solo) and Rachel Harrison, Albert Oehlen, Jimmy Wright, Corbett Vs. Dempsey, Chicago, both in 2019. Fierman released a limited edition publication of Wright’s tearoom drawings, featuring writing by Alissa Bennett and Alison Gingeras, published by Heinzfeller Nileisist. In 2016 Corbett Vs. Dempsey published a major monograph of his work from the 1970s entitled New York Underground. Wright stopped making this body of work as the AIDS crisis wracked the gay community and New York changed. The extant drawings from the period as such serve as a dreamlike document of an oft mythologized cultural moment. The first of Wright’s many flower works, were painted 1988-91, in homage to the artist’s partner who had recently died of AIDS. In 2018 he was named Academician of the National Academy of Design.

We love Jimmy's paintings. Thanks for listening!!!

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New Talk Art!!! SEASON 14!!!! We begin with a generous, heartfelt conversation with emerging artist Pam Evelyn who creates paintings that read as abstractions, however she incorporates a sensitivity and consideration towards figurative and landscape structures. Born 1996, Guildford, we speak to Pam from a residency in Cornwall on the southern coast of UK.

To tolerate occupying a space of unresolved.

To hover in the perpetual state of building towards.

Every step forwards feels like it’s

supported by clay.

Each application can sink.

As one element emerges another is

demolished.

– Pam Evelyn, 2022

Evelyn's recent debut solo exhibition Built on Clay at The Approach took its title from the geological composition of the city of London, which has a predominantly clay foundation. As a material, clay is volatile and unpredictable, it shrinks and expands depending on its water content, imbuing it with the capacity for collapse. Evelyn’s painting process shares similar qualities, the title becoming a comment on the work itself. From the moment she approaches the canvas, Evelyn begins with a problematic and challenging foundation, an untackled and incalculable terrain. Yet, through placing trust in her own intuition, following her own painterly impulses, Evelyn builds – brushstroke by brushstroke, layer by layer, ‘brick by brick’ – a densely rich and textured canvas. Thick layers of paint sediment atop one another; abstracted landscapes and figurations slowly emerge, disappear and reappear like changeable weather, a process which the artist likens to “a mist rising.”

On entering the main gallery, four large scale paintings hang impressively in the space. Promised Land, the largest painting in the exhibition is composed of three segments and echoes an abstracted version of Edvard Munch’s monumental painting The Sun both in scale and composition. This sublime landscape behaves like a mirage that oscillates between psychological and physical space.

In Built on Clay, waves appear to swirl, circle and crash on an open ocean. Recalling a recent essay by Martin Herbert, Evelyn’s “art is a productive meeting of two perspectives: the slower, airier time by the sea—where, as anyone who has lived there knows, you simply think differently—and its recollection amidst metropolitan tumult. In the paintings, the maritime world is infused with headlong pace and concrete clang.”

In Sweet Smelling Smoke, tangles of red and blues paint intertwine, outlines of figures emerge and fade away. Warm autumn shades evoke a woodland scene, or perhaps, more menacingly, suggest the drama of forest fires still in the throes of flame and destruction. Whilst in Routine Escape, blues and greens taken from the palette of a Turner painting move fluidly together, brushstrokes round and fold back on themselves, waves of paint settle and recede. A sailing vessel appears to drift through swells of paint and choppy patchworks of canvas. Recalling Herbert once again, Evelyn’s: “compositions themselves arise out of a process of repeated strategic wrecking and partial salvage, destruction of what was there before until a sense of vivid spontaneity is achieved, as if the painting had achieved its final form in an instant.”

Follow @PamEvelyn and @ApproachGallery

Learn more about Pam at: https://theapproach.co.uk/artists/pam-evelyn/images/

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Talk Art Season 13 FINALE!!!! And what a corker of an episode we are bringing you!!! WE MEET SELF ESTEEM!!!! Iconic pop star, singer, songwriter, producer, poet, actor, novelist, soundtrack composer... and our dear, DEAR friend!!!! We discuss sincerity and her supportive artistic community in Margate, her surprise love of making ceramics and painting, her creative process for songwriting and all art, collaborating with her longterm friend & leading artist Lindsey Mendick, visiting exhibitions and artspaces like Sheffield's S1, and how she's adapting to her recent global mega stardom!!!! We also discover her admiration for artists including Marina Abramović, Tracey Emin and Jenny Holzer.

Rebecca Lucy Taylor, known professionally by her stage name Self Esteem, is an award winning English singer-songwriter. On her recent hit album, Prioritise Pleasure, Taylor states “I suppose this record is just me going, what if this isn’t failure? What if this is actually pretty good?” Pretty good feels like a modest estimation as Taylor was nominated for a BRIT award and wins numerous other accolades including BBC Music Introducing’s Artist Of The Year and Attitude Magazine’s Music Award. Self Esteem continues to sell-out shows at ever-growing venues across the UK and plays the largest gigs of her career –in recognising herself and others, Rebecca Taylor has made countless people feel esteemed.

We love Self Esteem SO much! You can stream her award-winning album PRIORITISE PLEASURE now at Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to your music!!!

Follow @SelfEsteemSelfEsteem on Instagram and @SelfEsteem___ on Twitter.

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We meet leading artist Guy J Oliver in his hometown of Margate to discuss video art and film! Guy's award-winning interdisciplinary practice employs video as well as text, painting, collage and performance.

We discuss his major film 'You Know Nothing of My Work'. This extraordinary project is a multi-chapter rumination on the cultural dilemma of the disgraced popular icon. Considering how collective, systematic failure led to cases of abuse from powerful figures in the cultural scene, this work proposes a conflict between the enjoyment of and respect for their creative work and what we now know (or at times failed to recognise) about their behaviour. Can we erase the existence of abusive yet influential figureheads, or should we acknowledge and discuss their actions alongside their work? Through a piece that uses elements of film musical and music video traditions within the form of an experimental essay, Oliver takes the pulse of society’s reaction to this fast-evolving and contentious subject. You Know Nothing of My Work was commissioned for the Jerwood/ and Film and Video Umbrella Awards 2020. See the work online at Jerwood/FVU Awards 2020: Hindsight | Online Exhibition

We also discuss 'The Year Everyone Died', a meditative video essay that looks back at the year 2016 and explores the artist’s own feelings towards the various deaths that were announced during those twelve months. 2016 appeared to have an unusually high number of well-known figures pass away, from David Bowie at the beginning of the year through to George Michael on Christmas Day and Carrie Fisher on Boxing Day followed by her mother Debbie Reynolds the day after. 

Guy was recently nominated for the Jarman Award 2021. Inspired by Derek Jarman, the Jarman Award recognises and supports artists working with moving image and celebrates the spirit of experimentation, imagination and innovation in the work of artist filmmakers in the UK. In July 2022, Film London announced Guy was one of its Lodestars 2022, the annual list honouring innovative UK-based creators and practitioners to watch.

We also discuss Quench, a project space and gallery in Margate, Kent run by artists Lindsey Mendick and Guy Oliver. Quench was created in the pandemic with the aim of giving artists and curators an opportunity to develop new work and put on exhibitions. We are a not-for-profit venture and all possible art sales and proceeds go directly to the artists. We will also be housing one-off events within the gallery such as screenings and performances, as well as, pop-up opportunities for local practitioners.

Visit Guy's official website: GuyOliver.co.uk

Follow: @GuyJOliver

Learn more about Quench at: @QuenchGallery or visit their website at:

https://www.quenchgallery.co.uk/

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We meet leading artist Jonathan Baldock who works across multiple platforms including sculpture, installation and performance. With work often taking on a biographical form, Jonathan Baldock addresses the trauma, stress, sensuality, mortality and spirituality around our relationship to the body and the space it inhabits.

Baldock’s work is saturated with humour and wit, as well as an uncanny, macabre quality that channels his longstanding interest in myth and folklore. He has an ongoing focus on the contrast between the material qualities of ceramic and fabric in his work. Concerned with removing the functional aspects of the materials he uses, Baldock instead works in a performative way through his sculptural assemblages, bringing the viewer, the object and the space they simultaneously occupy into question as a theatrical or ritualistic act.

Jonathan Baldock was born in 1980 in Kent, UK. He lives and works in London. He graduated from Winchester School of Art with a BA in Painting (2000-2003), followed by the Royal College of Art, London with an MA in Painting (2003-2005).

In 2021 Baldock had solo exhibitions at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain and at Accelerator, Stockholm, Sweden. He participated in group shows in 2021 including ‘Threadbare’ at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; ‘Human Conditions of Clay’ at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales and ‘Right About Now’ at No.9 Cork Street, London. Baldock’s work was included in the inaugural Towner International biennial at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK in October 2020.

Baldock’s first solo exhibition with Stephen Friedman Gallery opened in September 2019 and presented a series of ceramic masks featuring bright colours and outlandish expressions. This show coincided with the presentation of a large-scale, interactive sculpture by Baldock at Fitzrovia Chapel, London during Frieze week. In the spring of 2019, Baldock’s solo exhibition ‘Facecrime’ opened at Camden Arts Centre, London following a Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship. The exhibition travelled to Tramway, Glasgow in August 2019 and Bluecoat, Liverpool in March 2020. 

Follow @Jonathan_Baldock on Instagram. Visit Stephen Friedman Gallery for more details: https://www.stephenfriedman.com/artists/25-jonathan-baldock/

Plus Jonathan's own website: https://jonathan-baldock.com/

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Talk Art Season 13 continues with a broadcasting LEGEND!!! We meet Clara Amfo, one of British radio and television’s most dynamic voices and faces. An award winning broadcaster, podcaster and television presenter best known for her work on BBC Radio 1, where she hosted the official chart and the world famous Live Lounge. She currently hosts Future Sounds, breaking the new music from rising and established musicians.

A little known fact about Clara is that she collects art and is friends with many artists. Her brother also collects art and photography and his record collection even inspired the teenage Clara to get into the artistic side of music - including the album artwork of Lauryn Hill. We discuss the art scene in Accra, the awesome capital of Ghana. We learn about Clara's art collection and why she is an advocate for living with art at home - from postcards to prints to unique paintings! We learn about her new role as Trustee of Royal Academy of Arts in London's Green Park and how she's been brainstorming about how to make art more accessible for everyone.

During the pandemic, Clara collaborated with the Serpentine Gallery during their major survey of British-Ghanaian photographer James Barnor. Clara is a big fan of Barnor's work, whose career spans six decades, two continents and numerous photographic genres through his work with studio portraiture, photojournalism, editorial commissions and wider social commentary. Clara also introduces us to the work of Ted Pearce aka Ted’s Draws known for illustrations of iconic musicians, as well as Josephine Chime, a contemporary painter who has in recent years created portraits of Clara’s mother and father.

She remembers an Inspiring studio visit to the Brixton-based artist Abe Odedina. We explore why art exhibitions are the perfect venue for dating and Clara reminisces about memorable exhibitions she's visited such as Faith Ringold, Kehinde Wiley at the National Gallery and Lubaina Himid's current solo exhibition at Tate Modern and the impact that Yinka Ilori’s 'Better Days Are Coming I Promise' public artwork had on London during lockdown.

Follow Clara on Instagram: @ClaraAmfo

Visit her official website: www.claraamfo.com

Learn more about the Royal Academy and the Summer Exhibition 2022 at @RoyalAcademyArts

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Talk Art special episode!!! We meet Andrew Moncrief (b.1987), a visual artist from Comox Valley, Canada. We speak on the eve of Gucci presenting his first exhibition in France at their Saint-Germain boutique, during the men's fashion shows in Paris.

Influenced at an early age by a rigid and immobile interpretation of masculinity, Andrew’s work explores depictions of the male identity, questioning idealism, queerness, and representation. The Canadian artist, now based in Berlin, questions masculinity and the representation of queer bodies in his surreal and powerful canvases inspired by existing images, reworked as collages where colours and shapes intermingle.

For this exhibition, Andrew Moncrief has chosen to create his 5 new paintings inspired by images photographed for this occasion. In collaboration with photographer Julien Barbès, the Canadian artist created a fashion series around five queer Berlin personalities wearing pieces from the Gucci Love Parade collection and offering a diversity of approaches to masculinity. These images, in which bodies move in soft and sensual choreographies, served as the original material for the collages in preparation for the paintings presented this summer in Paris.

”My work deals with my identity as a gay and queer man”, explains the artist. “To compose my collage-like paintings, I usually use existing nude images, but here, everything was built from fashion photos made for the occasion. I am sensitive to clothed bodies, classical drapery and Renaissance painting. Clothes generate tension and folds, as a metaphor for the body and the tensions it is capable of feeling."

In Andrew Moncrief's paintings, the male body seems to be in perpetual metamorphosis. Dislocated and intertwined, he melts into his environment and dialogues with other bodies as much as with colours, textures and clothes. The fluid and hybrid body thus escapes all the categories and norms that society imposes on it. The artist's painting forms an act of freedom and canvases are queer safe spaces where all attitudes and representations become possible. The liberated and phantasmagorical body is celebrated through a palette of delightful colours that explode across the canvas. This new work is also a reference to the famous painter Francis Bacon, and more particularly to his representation of the body crossed as much by the beauty as by the grotesque.

Since graduating with a BFA in Painting & Drawing from Concordia University in 2013, Andrew Moncrief has presented his work internationally in Canada, the U.S.A., and Europe, where he currently lives and works. He has been featured in numerous international publications, is part of respected private collections, and has received a Professional Development Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to pursue a full-time mentorship with Justin Ogilvie to study classical techniques and anatomy in 2019. Andrew has two upcoming shows at New Art Projects and Beers, both in London, UK, as well as a collaboration with GUCCI and Numero Art Magazine, all taking place in the first half of 2022.

Visit Andrew's website: http://andrewmoncrief.com/

Follow on Instagram: @an_drew_moncrief

Special thanks to GUCCI and Alex Malgouyres for supporting this episode.

Follow: @Gucci @GucciEquilibrium

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We meet leading artist Zoë Buckman from her studio in Brooklyn, NY!!! We discuss grief, trauma, her precise textile artworks and a powerful, new film titled 'Show Me Your Bruises, Then' (2021-2022) - a 3 channel video installation, written, performed and directed by Zoë Buckman, and featuring actors Cush Jumbo and Sienna Miller.

Zoë Buckman’s multidisciplinary practice incorporates sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, and large-scale public installations. Adopting an explicitly feminist approach, her work explores identity, trauma, and gendered violence, subverting preconceived notions of vulnerability and strength.

The artist regularly chooses to work with objects symbolically associated with gender. Whilst her oft-adopted boxing gloves hint at a bellicose masculinity, Buckman also incorporates vintage fabrics into her work, from lingerie to dishcloths and table linen. These textiles, traditionally used and decorated by women, recall an intimacy with the body and a proximity to the domestic space. Bearing traces of their past, vintage fabrics point to a history of patriarchal subjugation, but also to the necessity and comfort of intergenerational dialogue between women.

Indeed, both verbal and non-verbal dialogue is an integral part of Buckman’s practice. Buckman’s eclectic choice of source material, the snatches of conversation, stained tablecloths, hip-hop lyrics, and, especially, lines from her late playwright mother’s scripts, all represent mnemonic totems which, when taken together, establish a deeply personal constellation of the artist’s lived experience.

'Show Me Your Bruises, Then' is the first filmic work of London-born, Brooklyn-based artist, Zoë Buckman. The 17-minute long, 3-channel, video installation builds a portrait of the multigenerational experience of domestic violence, and explores the shame and stigma prescribed to the female body in a patriarchal society. The film depicts three women, each seated at the end of the table, reciting Buckman’s own free flowing poem by the same name that she started writing in 2018. Although excerpts of the poem have appeared as text within Buckman’s embroidery works and in the titles of pieces, this is the first time it is presented in its entirety.

In tandem with both the sculptural and wall-based works that have formed the basis of Buckman’s artistic practice to date, Show Me Your Bruises, Then, seeks to foster nuanced conversation around consent, power, and violence, as well as highlighting the intrinsic joy, pleasure, and resilience that abounds the female experience. The rhythmic pattern of the poem and the three screen visuals build this notion of the power in sharing one’s voice and story.

Visit: https://www.zoebuckman.com/ and her page at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/artists/57-zoe-buckman/overview/

Follow: @ZoeBuckman and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

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We meet Ashley Joiner, Founder & Director of QUEERCIRCLE a new public gallery space, library and home for LGBTQ+ Arts, Culture and Social Change.

QUEERCIRCLE seeks to develop an ecology of artists, curators, writers, thinkers, community organisers, grassroots organisations and charities who collectively work together to strengthen links between culture, health and wellbeing.

Set in the pioneering Design District in North Greenwich, their new gallery, library and project spaces enable us to action our ground-breaking community focused programme of exhibition commissions, collaborative artists residencies and year-long learning and participation opportunities. With the support of Greater London Authority, Outset's Studiomakers Initiative, and the generous contributions of private patrons, Queercircle is within a new site designed by award-winning David Kohn Architects.

Since 2016, QUEERCIRCLE has hosted exploratory workshops and events with artists, curators, writers and community organisers to develop a programme that is befitting to the needs and aspirations of the LGBTQ+ community. Their new home first opened its door in June 2022, providing a holistic environment which celebrates queer identity, champions arts and culture, and supports the wellbeing of our community.

Follow: @Queercircle on Instagram

Visit https://Queercircle.org/

Current show: MICHAELA YEARWOOD-DAN’S “LET ME HOLD YOU” 

Queercircle's INAUGURAL EXHIBITION runs from JUNE 8 - SEPTEMBER 8 2022

Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s “Let Me Hold You” sets the tone for our new home as we move forward - a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community. A sweeping curved mural embraces visitors, creating a sanctuary for visitors to confront their own true selves in a safe and holistic environment. Ceramic sculptures and furniture encourage visitors to rest, contemplate, and connect with others. We interviewed Michaela on Season 12 of Talk Art, so do check out her episode also!!!

Utilising flora and fauna motifs, Yearwood-Dan refutes the concept that LGBTQ+ people are “unnatural”. Instead she visualises the interconnectedness of the human and non-human experience, all the while expanding our understanding of what it means to be queer and to love. 

“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.” - bell hooks

As nature and marginalised communities continue to be exploited around the world - compounded by the effects of climate change disproportionately impacting marginalised communities - Michaela Yearwood-Dan provides a vital tonic; encouraging us to adopt love as an action against societal and ecological injustice.

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Talk Art Special Episode!!! We catch up on all things Art Basel with legendary Global Director Marc Speigler - Art Basel is the biggest art fair in the world where thousands of people flock to the city of Basel every year to discover and witness new art, new ideas and the changing of culture - this is art world insider magic.

Marc Spiegler (born 1968) is an American/French art journalist and columnist since 1998. In 2012 he became global director of Art Basel. Marc leads the organization’s development, including all three shows and our expanding artworld activities. He is ranked in ArtReview's Power 100 among the top 25 most influential individuals in the art world. 

Art Basel fair brings the international art world together. It features over 200 leading galleries and more than 4,000 artists from five continents. Many high-quality exhibitions take place concurrently in and around Basel, creating a region-wide art week (June 16 – 19, 2022).

Follow @ArtBasel and @MarcSpeigler

Visit: https://artbasel.com/

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New Talk Art! We meet leading artist Sonia Boyce. Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. Last month, she became the first Black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest international art exhibition. The work she presented in the British Pavilion won the prestigious prize, the Golden Lion. Six years before, she had been the first Black British woman to get elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.

The British Council presents Feeling Her Way by Sonia Boyce at the British Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia, running from 23 April – 27 November 2022. Boyce’s powerful exhibition explores the potential of collaborative play as a route to innovation. The installation brings together video works featuring five Black* female musicians (Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth MBE, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram and composer Errollyn Wallen CBE) who were invited to improvise, interact and play with their voices. The video works take centre stage among Boyce’s signature tessellating wallpapers and golden geometric structures, and the Pavilion’s rooms are filled with sounds – sometimes harmonious, sometimes clashing – embodying feelings of freedom, power and vulnerability.

This new commission expands on Boyce’s Devotional Collection, built over more than two decades and spanning more than three centuries, which honours the substantial contribution of Black British female musicians to transnational culture.

Artist and academic Sonia Boyce OBE RA (b. London, 1962) came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement of that time with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. In 1987, she became one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her artwork acquired by Tate and the first Black-British female artist to enter the collection. Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a significant multi-media and improvisational turn by bringing people together in a dynamic, social practice that encourages others to speak, sing or move in relation to the past and the present. Incorporating film, photography, print and sound in multi-media installations, Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. At the heart of her work are questions about the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities.

Follow @SoniaBoyceArtist and @SimonLeeGallery. Visit https://www.simonleegallery.com/artists/277-sonia-boyce/ and https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/feeling-her-way

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Talk Art SPECIAL EPISODE!!!! This week we talk to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to discuss his new collaboration with Superblue (@superblue.art) and BMW i, “Pulse Topology” presented on the occasion of this year’s Art Basel (@artbasel). The participatory artwork is composed of 6.000 lightbulbs, suspended from the ceiling at different heights, that glimmer to the heartbeat of visitors detected by custom-made pulse sensors.

The presentation is inspired by a shared vision for a sustainable future, and a desire to create experiences for retreat, reflection, joy, and social connection. Following an inspiring dialogue with BMW engineers and designers, Lozano-Hemmer’s team will use the same technology as in “Pulse Topology” to activate the BMW i7’s interior with passengers' heartbeats. This intervention can be seen as an extension of the i7’s use of light and new technology to emphasize the human-centric design of the new BMW i7.

Stay tuned to see this immersive experience come to life.

Follow @lozanohemmer on instagram to see more of his work. #PulseTopology #ThisIsForwardism

Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art.

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New Talk Art!!! JUBILEE SPECIAL with an ACTUAL QUEEN!! We meet Rose Matafeo, the BAFTA nominated comedian, writer and actor from New Zealand. Self confessed "curious nerd" who has a passion for art, craft and photography.

We discover Rose's joy for creating her own artworks including dioramas and miniature models, photography and Lomo cameras, her obsession with the Pepper's Ghost illusion technique, textile art, embroidery and crochet. We learn about her artistic family including her artist father and how she was encouraged to collect and live with art since childhood!! We explore her passion for comic book artists and fanzines!! We also discuss the work of New Zealand experimental artist Len Lye.

Rose’s critically acclaimed show Horndog won the award (formerly the Perrier) for Best Show at The Edinburgh Fringe Festival and was nominated for Best Show at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She has since recorded the show as a special for HBO MAX. 

Rose is a regular face on TV. Her own sitcom, Starstruck, which she has written and stars in was commissioned by BBC3 in the UK and HBO Max in the US. Season One premiered on BBC One and BBC Three in the UK where it became the channel’s best performing new comedy of the year with over three million requests on BBC iPlayer to date, and later on HBO Max in the US, the show was also pre-sold to over 50 territories including Australia (ABC) and New Zealand (TVNZ). The show is a critical and ratings success and has returned to BBC3 and HBO Max for a second series in 2022. 

In the US, Rose has performed a stand up slot on Conan (TBS). In New Zealand Rose was the lead writer and star of the sketch show Funny Girls (TV3), and a regular on panel show 7 Days (Three Now NZ). 2020 saw her star to great acclaim in the feature Baby, Done (Piki Films). She also co-hosts the podcast Boners of the Heart with fellow comic Alice Snedden. 

Follow @RoseMatafeo on Instagram. Watch Rose's TV show Starstruck, Series 1 and 2 (including Russell Tovey himself) at BBC iPlayer: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p09djx02/starstruck

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Talk Art SPECIAL EPISODE!!!! We travel to Somerset to have an exclusive 5am visit to Stonehenge and an art adventure to Hauser & Wirth in Bruton. We visit Henry Moore's exhibition 'Sharing Form' for a guided tour with the artist's daughter Mary Moore and curator Hannah Higham. Hauser and Wirth Somerset present a comprehensive survey spanning six decades extends across all five gallery spaces, in addition to an open-air presentation of seminal works including: ‘The Arch’ (1963/69), ‘Large Interior Form’ (1953 – 1954) and ‘Locking Piece’ (1962 – 1963).

The exhibition takes as its starting point the artist’s early fascination with the Neolithic site of Stonehenge, which Moore first encountered the prehistoric monuments under the moonlight as a young man in 1921, fifty-two years later he embarked on a series of lithographs on the subject. Moore was fascinated by the relationship between the towering masses of ancient stone, their size and siting in the landscape, and the mysterious ‘depths and distances’ evoked on his returning visits. For Moore, the power and intensity of such large forms set against land and sky precipitated career-long investigations into scale, material and volume and the juxtaposition of art and nature, which are presented throughout the exhibition.

Alongside Moore’s most celebrated works, the viewer is immersed in a deeply personal selection of artworks and objects curated by Mary Moore, set within the centre of the exhibition. The collection contains almost 100 items from her father’s studio and home, providing an insight into the working life of the sculptor and intimate memories she holds through these objects. The unique experience brings together Moore’s visual library and the vocabulary of ideas that he developed during his working life. The exhibition was organised with support from the Henry Moore Foundation.

Alongside Moore’s most celebrated works, the viewer is immersed in a deeply personal selection of artworks and objects curated by Mary Moore, set within the centre of the exhibition. The collection contains almost 100 items from her father’s studio and home, providing an immersive insight into the working life of the sculptor and intimate memories she holds through these objects. This exhibition was organised with support from the Henry Moore Foundation.

BMW has been involved in cultural projects across varied genres for over 50 years creating unique content initiatives with key partners such as artists, galleries, passionate collectors, art fairs and digital art platforms (such as Talk Art!). As a long-term partner, creative freedom is key – and as essential for groundbreaking works as it is for major innovations within our company.

Thanks to @BMWUK we had the opportunity to experience the all new fully-electric BMW i7 on our trip to Somerset. The car is BMW’s new flagship, demonstrating how an exclusive driving experience and the ultimate feeling of on-board wellbeing can be combined with an unwavering commitment to sustainability. 

Follow @HauserWirthSomerset and visit: https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/36155-henry-moore-sharing-form/ for more details on this major exhibition #HenryMooreSharingForm! Follow @BMWGroupCulture to learn more about BMW's commitment to art.

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Talk Art season 13 continues with an art icon!!! We meet leading artist Tracey Emin to discuss her return to her hometown of Margate, her new art school, her current solo exhibition in the town's Carl Freedman Gallery as well as a further new solo show in Edinburgh at Jupiter Artland.

'A Journey To Death' is a comprehensive solo exhibition of new prints, large-scale monotypes and bronze sculptures. The show runs until 19th June 2022 and has been widely critically acclaimed. Free entry, and we strongly recommend visiting Margate for this extraordinary exhibition of new works.

Tracey Emin’s first Scottish show since 2008, 'I Lay Here For You' opens on 28th May and runs until 2nd October. It offers an intimate encounter with love and hope set against the domestic architecture and informal woodland of Jupiter Artland. Imbued with connotations of both warmth and vulnerability, resonating with Tracey Emin’s belief of the ‘personal as political’ the exhibition will feature brand new work by the artist reflecting on the possibility of love after hardship.

Tracey Emin’s participation in Jupiter Artland’s 2022 season begins with the unveiling I Lay Here For You, a six metre bronze sited personally by the artist in an old-growth beech grove. Larger than life, powerful and at ease, the sculpture presents a radically different view of woman’s place in nature, as well as creating a dialogue with the new work presented by the artist across Jupiter’s indoor gallery spaces.

Tracey Emin, CBE, RA is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. She was awarded the honour of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts in 2012. Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture.

Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous. In 2020, a major solo exhibition entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, opened at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition then toured to the new Munch Museum, Oslo in Summer 2021 to critical acclaim. This summer, Emin will unveil her largest artwork to date, The Mother, a permanent public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island. I Lay Here for You at Jupiter Artland will be Tracey Emin’s first solo exhibition in Scotland since her 2008 major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK.

Visit: www.carlfreedman.com and www.jupiterartland.org

Follow on Instagram: @TraceyEminStudio, @CarlFreedmanGallery, @JupiterArtland

Thanks for listening!!!

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Talk Art series 13 continues!!! We meet British sculptor and contemporary visual artist Hew Locke. The artist shares the inspiration behind his decades of work and reflects on the process of making his new and exciting large-scale installation 2022 Tate Britain Commission, The Procession.

A procession is part and parcel of the cycle of life; people gather and move together to celebrate, worship, protest, mourn, escape or even to better themselves. This is the heart of this ambitious new project. The Procession invites visitors to ‘reflect on the cycles of history, and the ebb and flow of cultures, people and finance and power.’ Tate Britain’s founder was art lover and sugar refining magnate Henry Tate. In the installation Locke says he ‘makes links with the historical after-effects of the sugar business, almost drawing out of the walls of the building,’ also revisiting his artistic journey so far, including for example work with statues, share certificates, cardboard, rising sea levels, Carnival and the military.

Throughout, visitors will see figures who travel through space and time. Here, they carry historical and cultural baggage, from evidence of global financial and violent colonial control embellished on their clothes and banners, alongside powerful images of some of the disappearing colonial architecture of Locke’s childhood in Guyana.

The installation takes inspiration from real events and histories but overall, the figures invite us to walk alongside them, into an enlarged vision of an imagined future.

"What I try to do in my work is mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort – colourful and attractive, but strangely, scarily surreal at the same time." Hew Locke.

Locke was born in Edinburgh, UK, in 1959; lived from 1966 to 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana; and is currently based in London.  He obtained a B.A. Fine Art in Falmouth (1988) and an M.A. Sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London (1994). In 2000 he won both a Paul Hamlyn Award and an East International Award.

His work is represented in many collections including those of the The Government Art Collection, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Tate Gallery, The Arts Council of England, The National Trust, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 21c, The New Art Gallery Walsall, The Victoria & Albert Museum, The Imperial War Museum, The British Museum and The Henry Moore Institute, Leeds.

Follow @HewDJLocke on Instagram and visit his official website: http://www.hewlocke.net/

Visit his galleries PPOW Gallery in New York and Hales Gallery in London. Learn more about his new installation at Tate, it's free to visit until 22nd January 2023: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/hew-locke

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Talk Art is back for SEASON 13!!!! Woohooo!!!

We meet leading artist Caroline Walker.

Walker’s paintings reveal the diverse social, cultural and economic experiences of women living in contemporary society. Drawing on her own photographic source material, Walker provides a unique window into the everyday lives of women. 

Blurring the boundary between objectivity and lived experience, Walker highlights often overlooked jobs performed by women and the psychologically charged spaces they inhabit. Walker explains: “The subject of my paintings in its broadest sense is women’s experience, whether that is the imagined interior life of a glimpsed shop worker, a closely observed portrayal of my mother working in the family home, or women I’ve had the privilege of spending time with in their place of work. From the anonymous to the highly personal, what links all these subjects is an investigation of an experience which is specifically female.”

Caroline Walker was born in 1982 in Dunfermline, Scotland. She lives and works in London.

Blurring the boundary between objectivity and lived experience, the artist highlights often overlooked jobs performed by women and the psychologically charged spaces they inhabit.

Previously encompassing locations such as Los Angeles, Palm Springs and the UK, Walker’s scenes hint at the complexity of her subjects’ lives whilst completely avoiding narrative resolution. Recent works have seen Walker cast her eye to her immediate surroundings in East London, reflecting on her wider community and the significance of encounters with anonymous individuals who are nevertheless integral to our daily existence. Often exploring the notion of ‘women’s work’, the artist captures specific spaces such as pharmacies, tailors, beauty salons, laboratories, bathhouses and modernist apartments.

Walker presented a new body of large-scale paintings at the historic Fitzrovia Chapel in February 2022. The works were created following her residency at University College Hospital's maternity wing, during which the artist shadowed female midwives, nurses, doctors and cleaners. Sketches from the series were displayed by UCLH Arts at Street Gallery, London and the project was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.Examples will also be included as part of a two-person presentation with Laura Knight at Nottingham Castle in March 2022.

KM21, The Hague hosted ‘Windows’, a significant solo exhibition of the artist’s work in August 2021. An expansive show of Walker’s preparatory studies and large-scale paintings titled ‘Women’s Work’ opened in May 2021 at Midlands Art Centre (MAC), Birmingham, UK. She features in the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition ‘British Art Show 9’ in 2022. Walker’s first solo show at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London will take place in April 2022, focussing on the artist’s sister-in-law Lisa and her experience of motherhood. 

Walker obtained an MA in painting from Royal College of Art, London in 2009 and a BA (Hons) from Glasgow School of Art in 2004. Walker is also represented by GRIMM, Amsterdam / New York and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

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We meet Lily van der Stokker (b. ‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands, 1954), one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated contemporary artists at the installation of her first institutional solo exhibition in London at Camden Art Centre.

The exhibition brings together a group of works made by van der Stokker between 1989 and 2021, which address ideas of society, home, friendship, work, finances, illness and care; as well as speaking to this extraordinary contemporary moment. While some works have previously been realised in other contexts and spaces, others are presented across Camden Art Centre’s galleries for the first time. The exhibition will also include a number of original drawings on paper and works on canvas produced over the last 30 years.

Van der Stokker draws her images with an exacting care and precision, configuring them against one another for the specifics of each space, before scaling them up and executing them directly onto the gallery walls. Her monumental wall paintings – with their distinctive colour palate and highly decorative motifs, including flowers, clouds, patterns and curlicues – play on apparently clichéd stereotypes of femininity, but her work has a depth and toughness that belies its saccharine aesthetic. For more than 30 years she has immersed herself in the supposedly mundane material of everyday life, taking seriously the intricacies of the small, the personal and the overlooked, while at the same time forging a radical feminist practice in a language she has made entirely her own. Behind its apparent softness and sincerity – once described as ‘so sweet it can kill’ – her work remains both provocative and radical.

Optimism, joy, gossip and the petty trials and tribulations of everyday life are given a wide birth in most artistic practices, whilst work which centres the domestic and decorative has traditionally been seen as the antithesis of serious contemporary visual art. Van der Stokker’s work disrupts such hierarchical considerations, challenging conventional conceptions of artistic value and merit, whilst firmly positioning itself within the legacies of feminist, post-minimal and post-conceptual art. Despite its exuberance and frivolity, its disarming humour, and its bold celebration of the ugly, the sweet, the beautiful and the silly, her work takes itself and its subjects seriously; reclaiming themes and aesthetic languages that have been routinely devalued, derided and disparaged for centuries by a patriarchal culture that has consistently denigrated the feminine and feminised what it considered superfluous or ‘other’.

At a time when we have all been forced to make drastic and once unthinkable changes to our lives, van der Stokker’s longstanding engagement with the supposedly ‘little’ themes of family, relationships, work, home and the domestic, feel more appropriate, more timely and more important than ever.

Lily van der Stokker 'Thank You Darling' is now open and runs until 18 September 2022 at Camden Art Centre. Free entry! Follow @CamdenArtCentre & @LilyVanDerStokker

Visit: https://camdenartcentre.org/lily-van-der-stokker-thank-you-darling/

Lily van der Stokker lives and works in Amsterdam & New York. Selected solo exhibitions: Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015); New Museum, New York (2013); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2010); and Tate St. Ives (2010).

Visit Lily's galleries Kaufmann Repetto, New York and to Air de Paris, Paris.

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New Talk Art!!! We meet London icon PHILIP SALLON at his home in St John's Wood!!! A legendary British club promoter, event organiser, socialite, style innovator, impresario, and clothing designer. He was born in London, England where he still lives and works today in his 70th year. He is particularly known for being a prominent member of the Punk sub-cultural and New Romantic pop cultural movements during the 1970s and 1980s.

We discuss how he witnessed the birth of Punk, his friendship with Vivienne Westwood, the Blitz Kids and Boy George, more than 5 decades of his drawings, invitations and designs, supporting young graffiti artists back in 1983 all the way to more contemporary street artists like Stik and Ben Eine.

Philip Sallon was born in London in 1951, the grandson of Polish Jewish immigrant tailors who moved to the UK in 1904. His father, Ralph Sallon, was a well-known caricaturist who married his mother Anna Simon in 1945. They had one son (Philip) and three daughters. He was educated at Harrow County School, later renamed Gayton school. In 1970 he enrolled on an arts foundation course at East Ham College. In 1975 he applied and was offered a place at Saint Martin's School of Art to study fashion.

He then left St Martins to pursue a career in theatre and later club promotion. Sallon founded the Mud Club in Tottenham Court Road in the 1980s and is best known for his style and outgoing personality. Admirers describe how during one club night in the 1980s he wore a dress made entirely of pound notes; by the end of the evening, after fellow clubbers had helped themselves, he was practically naked.

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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New Talk Art!!! We meet Sharon Walters, a London-based artist who creates hand-assembled collages celebrating black women. 'Seeing Ourselves', Sharon's ongoing series, is an exploration of under-representation in many arenas in particular, the arts and heritage sector and mainstream western media. The work encourages us to "'take up space', be seen and create our own spaces."

Sharon's ongoing series ‘Seeing Ourselves' is an exploration of identity, beauty standards, and race through celebratory papercuts and hand-assembled collages, which are available in limited edition print form. These pieces are created using images from women’s magazines, as well as photographs taken by the artist herself, or provided by others. Each carefully constructed collage features a black woman, and is a celebration of natural afro hair and its beauty. 

Sharon's celebratory approach extends through to her workshop and curatorial work, which continues to explore the representation of black women in many arenas, including arts, heritage and media. Sharon reframes these representations to share her experiences as a black woman in a celebratory, uplifting light. So often blackness is represented as 'other'. Sharon provokes an alternative narrative of empowerment. Each piece is a reaffirmation of the right to ‘take up space’ even when you don’t see yourself in certain settings.

Since graduating with a degree in Fine Art from Central St Martins (University of the Arts) in 2011, Sharon has developed her practice and continued her work with community arts organisations and museums, using them as platforms to explore and collaborate with the voices of those who are often unheard.

Follow Sharon on Instagram: @London_Artist1 and visit her official website: https://www.londonartist1.com/

Sharon Walters: Seeing Ourselves major new solo exhibition is now open! The show runs until Sun 26th June at MAC Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham and Is FREE ENTRY!!!! So what you waiting for? Visit: https://macbirmingham.co.uk/exhibition/seeing-ourselves

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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It's the Venice Biennale 2022!!! We meet Pavlo Makov who is representing Ukraine at the Ukrainian pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale.

Makov presents The Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta (1995–2022). This kinetic sculpture, which speaks to infrastructural ruins, cultural erasure, climate collapse, and war, is the focal point of the pavilion in Venice. Made possible with the support of the pavilion’s curators: Lizaveta German and Maria Lanko, co-founders of the Kyiv art space Naked Room, and Borys Filonenko, chief founder of IST Publishing. The Fountain of Exhaustion is currently paralleling the lives of those involved in its exhibition—rapidly adapting and responding to uncertain circumstances caused by war.

Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Аlta project for the 59th Biennale di Venezia is first and foremost an attempt to address the present from within the Ukrainian context in order to retrace and reveal how a local concern eventually grows to echo the global conversation.

The Pavilion exhibits the works of Pavlo Makov, whose artistic practices in the early 1990s focused on exploring the parallels between the human body and urban space and have since then largely shifted to elaborating the theme of “the world without us”. The artwork Fountain of Exhaustion is a serene and reflective project, which serves as a conscious extension of the original story of Fountain of Exhaustion (at once providing for the particularities of the exhibition location) and comes as a natural response to the theme Milk of Dreams.

Makov was born in 1958 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Lives and works in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He graduated from the Crimean Art College, Painting Department (Simferopol, Ukraine) in 1979, Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1978 and Kharkiv Art and Industrial Institute (Graphic department) in 1984.

Since 1988 he is a member of the National Union of Artists of Ukraine, since 1994 – is a member of the Royal Society of Painters-Printmakers (London, England) and a correspondent member of the Ukrainian Art Academy, since 2006.

Pavlo Makov is a participant and winner of many graphic art exhibitions, among them “Biennale of Graphic Art" (Kaliningrad, Russia, 1990, 1992 and 1998), VI International Biennale of Print and Drawing (Taipei, Taiwan, 1993), “Osaka Triennale 94" (Osaka, Japan, 1994), “National Triennale of Print 97" (Kyiv, Ukraine, 1997), “International Print Triennale" and others. In 2009 he was awarded with the Silver Medal of the Ukrainian Art Academy. Author and participant of many projects in Ukraine and abroad. The artist's works are in museums collections in Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, the USA and other countries.

Follow on Instagram @UkrainianPavilionInVenice

Visit the Pavlo's website: makov.com.ua and visit the Ukraine Pavilion website: https://ukrainianpavilion.org/

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We meet leading artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan to discuss her solo show The Sweetest Taboo, which runs until 26th April at Tiwani Contemporary, London. Recently the artist has been thinking about the priorities for affirming spaces of self and collective actualisation, specifically BIPOC and queer space(s), community needs and desires, that include her own. 

Projected and inscribed upon the large-scale paintings, extracts of Yearwood-Dan’s experiences, influences, personal thoughts and questions commingle with abstracted and botanical gestures and marks that border, lead towards and give way to speculative clearings; spaces and gaps that have the capacity to be filled with utopic imaginings. The works remain vested in holding and debating the real-life politics and cultural demands of femme, black and queer individuals in the world coming together as communities, manifesting and nurturing critical, safe and joyous environments. 

Drawing solely from her own experiences, throughout this body of work, the artist continues to explore the multifaceted nature of love through a theoretical and uncomplicated lense, whilst holding space for elements of humour and nostalgic glances. The Sweetest Taboo is a semi-immersive experience that migrates from the canvases into the space of the gallery, creating a topographic installation of ceramic sculptures and furniture that encourages visitors to contemplate, project and spur plans to dream potential spaces into existence.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s work reflects on subjectivity and individual identity as forms of self-determination. Whilst her work may be underpinned by an expansive and multivalent repertoire of cultural signifiers borrowing freely from blackness, healing rituals, flora, texting, acrylic-nails, gold-hoops, carnival culture, these reference points enable her to present and privilege the variance of her own individual experience. As such, her work refuses to be framed by narrow expectations of racial or gendered notions of collective identity and history. She defamiliarizes many of those reference points in her work resisting the clichés and strictures of representation.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan lives and works in London. Follow @ArtistAndGal and her gallery and @TiwaniContemporary on Instragram.

To view images of her new solo show visit: https://www.tiwani.co.uk/exhibitions/68-michaela-yearwood-dan-the-sweetest-taboo/overview/

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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New Talk Art! We meet leading British artist Daisy Parris to discuss their recent solo show 'I See You In Everyone I Love'. We discuss text, rough gestural brushstrokes, large-scale canvases and their punk aesthetic that led to painterly abstraction.

Daisy Parris is a painter of psychological space. Direct text-based works and abstract paintings are made up of a vernacular that has developed through experience, relationships and through the depths and the peaks of their human existence thus far. Parris brings intimacy, insight and integrity to their paintings with great psychological and emotional force. The work is imbued with the sensitivity of one who feels everything, taking us through unflinching narratives and moments of reflection and tenderness. An ode to human existence, their work is sometimes silent, sometimes savage, with paintings that construct self portraits of personal battles and triumphs in a fast moving yet contemplative assault on the canvas.

Daisy Parris (b. 1993, Kent, UK) lives and works in London, UK and holds BA (Hons) Fine Art from Goldsmiths University, London. Recent exhibitions include Pain For Home, M+B, Los Angeles, USA (solo), Star-Studded Canopy, Sim Smith, London, UK (solo), Talk Like Strangers, with Nico Stone, Sebastian Helling and Jesse Littlefield, Part 2 Gallery, Oakland, California, What Kind Of Spirit Is This?, Sim Smith, London, UK and Poem, Las Palmas Project, Lisbon, Portugal.

Follow @DaisyParris and their official website https://daisyparris.com/ Visit their gallery @SimSmith_ and https://www.sim-smith.com/

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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We meet leading British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo to discuss her solo exhibition of self-portraits in Lagos at Tiwani Contemporary, her giant public mural for Brixton underground station and her major institutional solo show at Chapter Gallery, Cardiff.

Joy Labinjo’s large-scale figurative paintings often depict intimate scenes of historical and contemporary life, both real and imagined and often based on figures appearing in personal and archival imagery that include family photographs, found images and historical material. In the past, she has explored themes including but not limited to identity, political voice, power, Blackness, race, history, community and family and their role in contemporary experience. 

Exploring multiple modes of representation including abstraction, naturalism, flatness and graphic patterns, Labinjo’s ‘collage aesthetic’ comprises an eclectic visual vocabulary and mixed painterly techniques which echo her experience of multiple identities – growing up Black, British, Nigerian in the 90s and early 00s. 

Comprising a series of nude self-portraits – her only works of such kind to date, the exhibition unfolds an interest in the significance of the nude in the history of visual art and contemporary public practices of sending nude digital imagery for example to lovers. These large scale works translate images that Labinjo took using her phone. Each work comprises loose geometric color blocks where her body can be likened to a variegated landscape. Capturing a range of poses, the works are resolutely frank and unapologetic. In this way, they assert an acceptance of self that is divergent from performative nudity and highlight self-love as erotic and feminine and at odds with patriarchy and sexism. Labinjo’s figure is emphasized by muted and simplified backgrounds, distinct from the dense compositions of her earlier paintings. Departing in colour and composition from previous works, these works present muted earth tones alongside a solitude that dominates each image and contrast with the vivid, saturated colours and social exchanges shown in earlier paintings. She continues to hone distorted renderings that percolate between abstraction and representation. Each work positions Labinjo’s body against a new beginning or a space to be populated by unforeseen content.  

In the context of historical and contemporary events in Nigeria, the works also recall the significance of female nudity and its link to collective action in the West African country. In the early 20th century, numerous accounts emerged of women using their nude body to dissent against onerous taxation structures and unfair laws during the country’s colonial period. More recently, Nigerian women have threatened and used naked protest against a range of happenings in the country including the abduction of school girls in Chibok in the north-east and, in the north, anti-violence in Kaduna respectively. 

As such, Labinjo’s work presents the body as a political agent and platform. By portraying herself nude, she invites the viewer to consider the artist’s position, and the cultural loads that cover the body. Labinjo obscures reference to place, time, and social affiliation and prioritizes her self-perspective, removing much of the representational content that took precedence in earlier work. These works imitate a personal relationship between Labinjo and her body and present a point through which the artist is able to build associations that inform her interpretations of her surroundings and crucially, her own body. 

Follow @JoyLabinjo and @TiwaniContemporary.

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New Talk Art! We meet ARRAY COLLECTIVE. For this AWESOME new episode, we meet a record five guests - all members of the collective: Clodagh, Jane, Thomas, Sighle and Emma.

Winners of the 2021 Turner Prize, Array Collective are a group of individual artists rooted in Belfast, who join together to create collaborative actions in response to the sociopolitical issues affecting Northern Ireland. Array’s studios and project space in the city centre acts as a base for the collective, however the participating artists are not limited to studio holders.

Array are based in one of the last remaining inner-city studio buildings in Belfast, and have been working together since 2016. The group maintain independent practices but come together regularly to protest the most urgent social justice issues particular to Northern Ireland: mental health, language rights, abortion, workers’ rights, social housing, gentrification and LGBTQ+ rights.

The Turner Prize jury awarded the prize to Array Collective for their hopeful and dynamic artwork which addresses urgent social and political issues affecting Northern Ireland with humour, seriousness and beauty. The jury were impressed with how Array Collective translate their activism and values into the gallery environment, creating a welcoming, immersive and surprising exhibition. The jury commended all five nominees for their socially engaged artworks, and how they work closely and creatively with communities across the breadth of the UK. The collaborative practices highlighted in this year’s shortlist also reflect the solidarity and generosity demonstrated in response to our divided times.

Array Collective eleven members are: Sighle Bhreathnach-Cashell, Sinead Bhreathnach-Cashell, Jane Butler, Emma Campbell, Alessia Cargnelli, Mitch Conlon, Clodagh Lavelle, Grace McMurray, Stephen Millar, Laura O'Connor, Thomas Wells

Read the Elephant Magazine article we mentioned in this episode at this link: https://elephant.art/does-the-turner-prize-deserve-better-art-no-but-array-collective-deserves-better-critics-15122021/

Follow @ArrayStudios on Instagram. Learn more at: http://www.arraystudiosbelfast.com/

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Bonus Talk Art! We meet teacher, and Talk Art Book editor, Ella Parsons. This special episode of Talk Art is brought to you in partnership with Get Into Teaching.

Ella was the inspiring editor of our Talk Art book in 2021, published by Octopus Publishing, and after our book became a Sunday Time's Bestseller, she decided to change career and become an English teacher. We find out why she decided to switch careers, her passion for education and why 'Every Lesson Shapes a Life'.

If you’ve listened to this episode and are now inspired or thinking of a career where every lesson shapes a life - then search Get Into Teaching now to find out more!

Follow @Get_Into_Teaching on Instagram. Learn more by visiting: https://getintoteaching.education.gov.uk/

TALK ART BOOK is OUT NOW! Visit Waterstone's or The Margate Bookshop to buy our brand new book in the UK or Amazon or Bookshop.org in USA & Canada. Full list of links in our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/TalkArt

For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email [email protected]

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We meet leading artist Elad Lassry (b. Tel Aviv, 1977) who defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives. Tapping the visual culture of still and motion pictures, he engages traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that persist in images long after they have been lifted out of their original contexts. Elad Lassry creates or rediscovers images from a vast array of sources, redeploying them in a variety of media, including photography, film, drawing and sculpture. Despite the diversity of his approach, Lassry has developed one of the most distinctive visual idioms in contemporary art and a rigorously focussed practice that investigates the nature of our perception and the meaning of the contemporary image. 

Lassry describes his 'pictures', which are all exactly the same scale, as ‘something that’s suspended between a sculpture and an image’. The artist achieves this through a play of virtual and actual space. The image in each picture proposes a virtual space, while the frame, which is not a supplement to the image but an extension of it, carves out an actual space for the object to occupy. The images might be found – anything from a magazine snapshot to a Hollywood headshot – or photographed in studio conditions that reflect many of the concerns of traditional still life. Lassry then deploys the image as an ambiguous, free-floating signifier, which combines with the frame to create a new set of conditions. This hybrid entity becomes a kind of epistemological puzzle, engaging the viewer’s perceptual faculties. How does its objecthood affect our reading of the image? How does the subject matter of the image affect our perception of the object? 

This disruptive play between image and object extends into his film and sculpture. In the 16mm film Zebra and Woman, the camera begins at the animal’s tail before panning across its striped hide, examining the nuances of colour and form as if it were a mid-century abstraction. Passing the animal’s head, the viewer is plunged, briefly, into blackness before the incongruous appearance of an attractive woman again dislocates the pictorial space. This set of conditions is typical of the artist’s concerns: close-looking, the indistinct space between abstraction and figuration, the combination of flatness and depth, all combining to examine how the mind reacts to different visual stimuli. Lassry brings this set of concerns to bear on a body of sculptural work based on cabinets that further explore a range of perceptual paradoxes. Produced on a scale that reflects the unchanging dimensions of his pictures, the cabinets look both utilitarian and ornamental, both a functional object and its representation.  

Lassry lives & works in Los Angeles. He has exhibited internationally including solo shows at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (2020); Le Plateau, Paris (2018); Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada (2017); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2014); Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2012) and Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2010).

Follow Elad's galleries: @MassimoDeCarlo, @GalerieFrancescaPia, @WhiteCube & @303Gallery.

Special thanks to Francesca Sabatini at Massimo de Carlo.

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We meet Berlin based artist Navot Miller on the eve of his first solo exhibition at WESERHALLE in Berlin. His new show presents 'Colourful, homo, great.', a series inspired by the artist’s recent travels interwoven with the artist’s multilayered identity. Navot makes large-scale, vibrant coloured canvases, electric compositions fueled by the flamboyant use of colours and the intensity of the exploration of flatness through the means of collage.

Growing up, Miller experienced the many facets of life between the rural vastness of his hometown Shadmot Mehola in the north of Israel and the bustling metropolis—such as New York and Paris—where he travelled regularly to visit relatives. In his visual language his traditional religious upbringing as an orthodox jew and his contemporary life do not oppose each other but are brought to a sensible equilibrium.

His work process starts with his own experiences documented as photographs or videos. Friends, acquaintances, lovers and everyday situations find their way onto his blank canvas, layered into a carefully composed collage of memories. For instance, the work Angelo & Sergio in Casa Biulú, focuses on two figures in a vibrant blue pool—strangers he got to know during his holidays in Mexico—while the background is drawn from a detail of another photograph from the same trip – the red and white stripes of a popcorn bag. Miller balances the components of space and colour to emit a sense of melancholy and voyeurism that charges the vibrant pieces with an unexpected intimacy. Miller describes how during his trip he was taking medications to treat a fungal infection on his face. Because of this, instead of taking part in social situations as he usually would, he played the role of an observer, watching and documenting interactions unfold. He explains further: “This vacation in Mexico was in many ways like the so-called “window shopping” where we see things we desire however, for a reason, cannot have for the moment.”

With a strong interest in architecture, Miller has a naturally heightened consideration towards the arrangement of the individual elements and manages to bring the powerful characteristics of his dream-like scenarios and his own identity into balance that allow for delicate relations to unfold, which are often colourful, homo and pretty great.

Navot Miller is a Berlin based artist from Israel. He studies at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee. His works have been exhibited most recently in Elektrohalle Rhomberg in Salzburg, Austria 2020 and at MISA in Berlin, Germany 2021.

Follow @NavotMiller on Instagram. Visit Navot's solo @Weserhalle in Berlin, show runs from 18th March until 15th April 2022: https://Weserhalle.com/event/colourful-homo-great/

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Talk Art speaks to Mark Neville, the award winning British photographer. Since 2015, Neville (born 1966) has been documenting life in Ukraine, with subjects ranging from holidaymakers on the beaches of Odessa and the Roma communities on the Hungarian border to those internally displaced by the war in Eastern Ukraine. Through his community-based projects, Neville explores the social function of the medium, using still and moving images as well as photo books. His projects have consistently looked to subvert the traditional, passive role of social documentary practice to activate social debate and change beyond the boundaries of cultural institutions.

Employing his activist strategy of a targeted book dissemination, Neville is committed to making a direct impact upon the war in Ukraine. He will distribute copies of this volume free to policy makers, opinion makers, members of parliament both in Ukraine and Russia, members of the international community and those involved directly in the Minsk Agreements. He means to reignite awareness about the war, galvanize the peace talks and attempt to halt the daily bombing and casualties in Eastern Ukraine which have been occurring for four years now. Neville's images are accompanied by writings from both Russian and Ukrainian novelists, as well as texts from policy makers and the international community, to suggest how to end the conflict.

Shortlisted for Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2020, Mark Neville works at the intersection of art and documentary, investigating the social function of photography. He makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces, slideshows, films, and giveaway books. His work seeks to find new ways to empower the position of its subject over that of the author. Often working with closely knit communities, in a collaborative process intended to be of direct, practical benefit to the subject, his photographic projects to date have frequently made the towns he portrays the primary audience for the work. Points of reference for his practice might include the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, or the art works of Martha Rosler, John Berger, or Hans Haacke.

"What changes people’s minds about a conflict is a poem, a song, or a photograph. It’s people’s feelings that need to be changed. To my mind, that’s the role of the artist." Mark Neville speaking to The Guardian, February 2022.

To contact Mark, follow @MarkNevilleStudio on Instagram and his official website is: http://www.markneville.com/

If you are able, please help by supporting @SaveChildrenUK Emergency Fund today or text CRISIS to 70008 to donate £5. Your donation will allow their teams to help children in crisis.

🇺🇦❤️ Further organisations: @razom.for.ukraine Razom for Ukraine, Help for Ukraine, @sunflowerofpeace Sunflower of Peace, and @revivedsoldiersukraine Revived Soldiers Ukraine are four organisations which use donations to fund medical aid for the people of Ukraine, including the purchase of first aid kits, backpacks stuffed with medical supplies, and medical rehabilitation for injured soldiers.

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Talk Art continues!!! We meet ActionSpace's Sheryll Catto and Charlotte Hollinshead to discuss the inspiring art of Nnena Kalu!

Nnena Kalu (b.1966) is a prolific artist working from ActionSpace’s supported studio within Studio Voltaire since 1999. Over two decades Kalu has created a vast body of sculptural and 2D artworks and developed a live, performative element to her art practice. She is driven by an instinctive urge to build repeated marks and forms, creating intensely layered, visually impactful artworks with dense colours and compacted, flowing lines.

ActionSpace is London’s leading development agency for artists with learning disabilities. Established in the 1960s, ActionSpace advocates for diversity within the contemporary visual arts sector by supporting artists with learning disabilities to develop their artistic practice, sell and exhibit work, amongst other creative projects.

Nnena's drawings and sculptures are currently on view in Margate at Carl Freedman Gallery until 3rd April 2022. The exhibition is titled TO ALL THE KINGS WHO HAVE NO CROWNS curated by Jennifer Gilbert (previous Talk Art guest!) of the Jennifer Lauren Gallery. Free entry! A group show curated by @J_LGallery.

Sheryll Catto joined ActionSpace as Co-Director in 2008, having worked in the creative sector for over 25 years. She has a personal and professional interest in supporting the development of creative practices and was attracted to ActionSpace because of our commitment to providing people with learning disabilities with the same opportunities as their peers in the contemporary visual arts sector.

Charlotte Hollinshead has led the ActionSpace South London Studio at Studio Voltaire for over 21 years. She supports artists with complex disabilities to develop their individual arts practice and delivers an extensive range of commissions, projects, events and exhibitions including Nnena Kalu’s solo exhibition for Studio Voltaire elsewhere in 2020. Charlotte manages ActionSpace’s innovative participatory programme, including TUBELINES at Tate Exchange where ActionSpace artists created ambitious, interactive installations, artworks and live art happenings that invited participants to create alongside them and share their creative processes. Charlotte also has her own inclusive participatory practice Wild City, developing interactive sculptural works and installations for outdoor public events.

Follow @ActionSpace on Instagram! Learn more about ActionSpace at their official website: https://ActionSpace.org/

See Nnena's drawings and sculptures in Margate at Carl Freedman Gallery until 3rd April 2022. Follow @CarlFreedmanGallery for more details.

Learn more about Nnena Kalu's work at these websites: https://actionspace.org/artists/nnena-kalu/ and https://www.studiovoltaire.org/whats-on/nnena-kalu-2/

THANKS FOR LISTENING!!!! We love ActionSpace, thanks to their team for this wonderful episode. Special thanks to Jennifer Gilbert.

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New Talk Art!!! We meet a GLOBAL LEGEND, our dear friend, the iconic recording artist, three-time Grammy winner, and global R&B superstar, MAXWELL!!!!!! 

We discuss Maxwell's musical journey, collecting art, visiting Frieze New York art fair where he first expeirenced Hans Op de Beeck's Silent Library (2016) immersive installation, his love for artists Nina Chanel Abney, Steve McQueen, Seydou Keita and Jon Key, covering the iconic Kate Bush song 'This Woman's Work'. We discover his passion for drawing and amazing advice his art teacher gave him in his childhood. His admiration for Tracey Emin’s neons and a trip to the Whitney with Robert where they met Tracey. We explore the text works of Massimo Agostinelli and Max's admiration for the artistry of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen and his memories from visiting his major retrospective at the Met. We discuss his deep respect and friendships with icons Prince, Harry Belafonte, Alicia Keys. We also hear about the passionate motivation behind Maxwell’s new fundraising sunglasses collection. Finally, we remember Russell’s epic 1990 Heinz ketchup TV advert and our mutual LOVE for our pal & leading British actor Lydia West.

Maxwell has artfully managed to transfix music lovers for more than two decades, releasing five studio albums, all in his own time and all duly anointed as classics. The soul singer redefined soul music in April of 1996 when he released his critically acclaimed debut on Columbia, 'Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite.' It earned Grammy nominations, double platinum status and RIAA gold for the single, "Ascension (Don't Ever Wonder)." The platinum albums 'Embrya' (1998) and 'Now' (2001) followed. After eight years, 2009's 'BLACKsummers'night' debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won two Grammys, including Best R&B Album.

To date, Maxwell has achieved 4 platinum album certifications from the RIAA. His last album ‘blackSUMMERS’night,’ the second instalment of his musical trilogy, earned Maxwell his third Grammy (Best R&B Song for “Lake By The Ocean”) an NAACP Image Award (Outstanding Male Artist), and a Soul Train Award (Best R&B/Soul Male Artist). Recently honoured with the “Legend” Award at the 2021 Soul Train Awards, Maxwell’s upcoming ‘blacksummers’NIGHT’ is one of the most-anticipated R&B events of 2022 and will cap off a journey he first embarked upon over a decade ago. 

In Feb 2022, STATE Optical Co. launches their collaboration on limited-edition sunglasses designed with Maxwell! The STATE x Maxwell BLACK_SUMMERS’_NIGHT titanium sunglasses will be available for exclusive pre-sale starting Monday, February 14th, Valentine’s Day. Its wide launch will be on March 1st. More here: https://store.musze.com/collections/sunglasses

Maxwell can be seen flaunting the new style in the music video for his current Top 10 R&B single, “OFF,” an exciting preview of what’s to come for the highly-anticipated release of ‘blacksummers’NIGHT,’ the final chapter in his critically acclaimed album trilogy. Also keep an eye out for the style as Maxwell kicks off his 25 date NIGHT Arena tour in March 2022. STATE Optical Co. Expands Limited Edition Collab with Global R&B Superstar Maxwell Launching March 1 (Exclusive Pre-Sale to Launch February 14) | Portion of Proceeds to Support the Opening Your Eyes Scholarship. Maxwell's highly anticipated new album blacksummers’NIGHT will be released in Spring 2022.

Follow @Maxwell on Instagram for latest details on his new album and tour, as well as Maxwell's official website: https://Musze.com/

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