Talk Art

Best known for his figurative paintings and pastels, which evoke a luminous, dreamlike reality, TM Davy conjures intimate worlds where figures glow with an almost metaphysical presence, transcending the purely visual. Light and form take on an ethereal quality, reflecting emotions, memories, and the quiet subtleties of human experience. Every brushstroke, every shift of light, seems imbued with a deeper resonance — suggesting that the figures portrayed are not mere representations but vessels of something otherworldly, carrying with them the weight of untold stories and silent truths. Blending careful realism with archetypal symbolism, Davy’s work explores love as a sphere of magic and protection — a space where human connection is not just physical, but transcendent; where bonds are forged in realms of the spiritual and the unseen. His figures often seem suspended in a state of grace, bathed in light that is both gentle and intense, creating an atmosphere of reverence and awe. His work suggests that love, in its purest form, is both a force of transformation and a quiet shield — invisible, radiant, and profound. Grounded in the belief that all of art history informs the present, Davy’s technique is marked by a virtuosic layering of colour and a masterful use of light and shadow. His attention to texture and hue draws deeply from classical tradition, while his handling of paint — confident, gestural, at times joyously loose — is unmistakably contemporary. With a lineage that stretches from Reynolds to Turner, Davy takes us to a threshold where intimacy, mystery, and the inner self converge. He stands at the intersection of classical technique and modern sensibility, drawing on the rich tradition of portraiture to create images that feel at once ancient and immediate. Through his luminous compositions, he invites us to pause and reflect — to step into a space where the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve, and where the soul’s journey is lit by love, presence, and the quiet mysteries of being. Over the past few months, Davy has been living and working in Margate, creating an exhibition deeply attuned to its elemental surroundings. Rooted in the present moment, yet echoing timeless myth, the works are shaped by the sea, the chalk cliffs, and the ancient caves that punctuate the coast. These landscapes are not just scenery but portals, inhabited by archetypal beings — Satyrs, Mermaids, White Horses — who rise from seafoam and shadow, conjured from deep cultural memory as much as from the terrain itself. The show is at once an homage to place and a meditation on the mythic — a bridge between the ancient and the now. Davy has the rare ability to render his subjects and scenes with an acute physical presence — they feel almost touchable, real — all the while keeping us fully aware that these are just paintings. He revels in paint’s materiality, with areas of sumptuous brushwork, loose rhythms, and a heightened palette that amplifies the intensity and luminosity of the image. His approach knowingly risks oversentimentality in the pursuit of a higher realm of expression: an emotional frequency that calls us to remain in the present, to feel fully, and to glimpse — even momentarily — the shared magic of human connection. Follow @TMDavy on Instagram. TM Davy's Tine Mara runs from 27th April until 22nd June 2025.Preview is Saturday 26th April 6-8pm, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK.Visit @CarlFreedmanGallery and https://carlfreedman.com/exhibition/tm-davy/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2025

Delaine Le Bas works in a transdisciplinary way: she combines visual, performative and literary practices to create an artistic oeuvre that encompasses all areas of life. In her works she deals with many facets, political as well as private and emotional, which involve belonging to the Rom*nja people, their history and rich cultural heritage. Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal. Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life as she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.' English-Romani artist Delaine Le Bas lives and works across the UK and Europe. Born in 1965 in Worthing, she graduated from Central St Martin’s and her work explores themes of nationhood, land, belonging, and gender through various media such as embroidery, painting, collage, sculpture, installation, and performance. Describing the intertwined nature of her identity and her work, Le Bas has stated “…as a Romani, my viewpoint has always been that of the outsider and this position of the 'other' is reflected in the materials and messages within my work. We live in a culture of mixed values and garbled messages. My works are crafted from the disregarded and disparate objects of the car boot sale and the charity shops." Le Bas has played a significant role in the building of a Roma/Traveller contemporary art movement and aesthetic. Her work has been featured in the 52nd and 58th Venice Biennales and the Gwangju Biennale in 2012. She co-curated the first Roma Biennale, 'Come out Now!', in Berlin in 2018. She was Delaine Le Bas was nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize, with an exhibition at Tate Britain, and is currently artist-in-residence at The White House, Dagenham; a contemporary and community art space operated by Create London. https://www.whitehouseart.org/delaine-le-bas Stranger in Silver Walking on Air by DELAINE LE BAS, is a new solo exhibition running until 27th September 2025, at The White House, Dagenham: https://createlondon.org/event/atchin-tan-by-delaine-le-bas/Step into an immersive exhibition that transforms The White House on the Becontree Estate into a dreamlike space of shifting, layered imagery with textile, sculptural objects, glasswork and interactive installations. From 31st May - 2nd August 2025, Newcastle Contemporary Art proudly presents  +Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, a solo exhibition by artist Delaine Le Bas, who continues her exploration of linguistics, mythology, and Gypsy Roma Traveller narratives through the tactile power of textiles, language, and storytelling: https://www.visitnca.com/exhibitions/delaine-le-bas Follow @DeDeLeBasVisit: https://www.delainelebas.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 17 April 2025

We meet Gary Kemp, one of the UK’s most successful songwriters of the past 40 years. As guitarist and founding member of the most influential and iconic band of the 80s, Spandau Ballet, he was responsible for writing the words and music for 23 hit singles and albums, including modern day standards like True and Gold. We discuss his passion for the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris, collecting and living with Edward William Godwin furniture, the 70s and 80s creative scene, and why art and design is so important to his life. Gary’s songs have had an extraordinary combined total of over 500 weeks in the charts and are hits all over the world. They’ve generated over 25 million recordsales and the songs were part of the soundtrack to the 80s. Last year, he received the BMIIcon Award at the 2023 BMI London Awards for his contributions to popular culture and music.He joined an elite group that includes The Bee Gees, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Ray Davies, PeterGabriel, Queen, Sting, and Van Morrison. Kemp’s songs have proven truly timeless. The ubiquitous hit single True has logged over 5million air plays in North America alone, and his songs have featured in an incredible 100feature films over the years including Sixteen Candles, The Wedding Singer, Charlie’s Angels,Pixels and Crazy Stupid Love as well as countless TV programs including The Simpsons, SpinCity, Gilmore Girls (all three times each) Euphoria, Modern Family and, Ugly Betty plus many,many more. In 2012, he was presented with the Ivor Novello's prestigious Outstanding Song Collectionaward. Gary has also won numerous awards and accolades for his work in Spandau Ballet,including an MTV award, a Brit and a Q award. In recent years, Gary has become synonymous with the Rockonteurs podcast which he hostswith fellow musician Guy Pratt, interviewing music legends and becoming the most listened tomusic podcast in the UK. Gary is a Trustee of the Theatres Trust with a passion for keeping theatres at the heart ofcommunities. Gary grew up in Islington (born October 16, 1959) and attended local grammar school DameAlice Owens and Anna Scher’s Children’s Theatre drama club, becoming a child actor in filmand TV before concentrating on playing guitar and songwriting and forming Spandau Ballet .In the 90s, Gary decided to return to acting, starring in numerous films including hugelysuccessful British crime thriller, The Krays and Hollywood blockbuster, The Bodyguard. He hascontinued to feature regularly on stage and in film and TV. Follow @GaryJKempVisit https://www.garykemp.com to learn more about his new album This Destination, out now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 11 April 2025

We meet BAFTA winning producer Susie Hall to discuss the work of late artist David Robilliard and the Documentary she made with Talk Art’s very own Russell Tovey.  Recorded live at TKE Studios, Margate, special thanks to Elissa Cray and all at the Tracey Emin Foundation. Artist David Robilliard changed Russell Tovey’s life. It was Robilliard who inspired Tovey’s love of art, his free attitude towards sex, as well as his own sexuality. He is one of the most important people in Tovey’s life, despite the fact that they never met (sadly Robilliard died of AIDS before Tovey hit double digits). In this WePresent film Tovey embarks on a highly personal and intimate journey to discover who the artist truly was through the people Robilliard drank with, worked with, slept with and laughed with. Though Russell Tovey and David Robilliard never met, Robilliard has remained a totemic presence in Tovey’s life, a source of strength, companionship and constant inspiration. In the emotional short documentary film “Life Is Excellent”, Tovey launches into a mission to track down and meet Robilliard’s friends, lovers and colleagues in an attempt to deepen his understanding of who Robilliard was and what his true legacy has become. Some of these people have never spoken publicly about him before. Although Tovey thinks he knows a lot about Robilliard, the journey throws up revelations, challenging the vision Tovey has constructed of his hero. As is often the case when trying to understand people after they’ve gone, the question of “who was this person”, becomes not quite an answer but a testament to how beautiful, complex and contradictory each of us is. Robilliard, like so many working artists taken before their time, has remained shrouded in semi-obscurity since his death in 1988 from AIDS. Tovey is rightly concerned about the risk of him being forgotten forever. “It could’ve been me, if I’d been born ten years earlier. And I feel like I’m part of a lucky generation,” explains Tovey of the loss of artists to AIDS in the film. “I feel a responsibility to make sure people know who David Robilliard is because we should put people back into history that disappeared.”Now, through all these touching interviews, performance pieces of Robilliard’s work by the likes of Bimini Bon Boulash, Harry Trevaldwyn and Self Esteem and displays of his artworks, WePresent is proud to help ensure that David Robilliard and his artistic vision is memorialized. Stream Life is Excellent documentary for free via WePresent https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/life-is-excellent-russell-tovey-david-robilliard and YouTube: https://youtu.be/U7_ic49H2gg Follow @SusieHall_23 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 3 April 2025

We meet the inimitable, spectacular, all-star David Hoyle!!!! We explore Hoyle’s prolific output from the stage to the screen to the canvas.Performance as art, art as performance! Cabaret maverick and gender defying revolutionary, the much loved David Hoyle continues to educate, enlighten and entertain in equal measure. A true national treasure. A chance to immerse yourself in Hoyle’s world, get to know the Manchester artist as we discuss his work that includes paintings, slogan works and of course, riotous, avant-garde live performance. As a cabaret star, actor and visual artist, Hoyle’s infamous alter-ego ‘The Divine David’ transported him from radical alternative settings in the '80s to the studios of Channel 4 in the '90s. For the last four decades, Hoyle has queered the boundaries between live art, performance, theatre and cabaret – conquering nightlife around the world and working extensively in film and TV. His recent retrospective Please Feel Free to Ignore My Work at Manchester's Aviva Studios powerfully shared the key themes that run through Hoyle’s output: gender, mental health, AIDS, revolution, decadence and the effects of capitalism. Tracing his career from the '80s to the present day, this body of work asks how and why we value our art and artists. Ever the outsider, David Hoyle opens the door to his outrageous and moving world. Come on in, we’ll pop the kettle on. Follow @DavidHoyleUniversal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 28 March 2025

Rothenstein’s enigmatic paintings are frequently characterised by a dreamlike quality. Mysterious figures often populate her flattened landscapes and interiors. The artist draws inspiration from found imagery, personal experience and memory, working instinctively to communicate atmosphere and psychological tension. Rothenstein’s scenes are rendered with sinuous lines and a distinctive palette built up of thin washes of oil. Often painting directly on wood panel, the artist allows grain to blend with figure and landscape. Speaking of her artistic process, Rothenstein says, “My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting, and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive. Finding a rhythm, searching for balance, alert to missteps, to what is happening, to changes of direction. I am telling myself a story much of the time and asking questions. Who is this, where is this place, what is going on? This is what I think of as the noise of a painting. And of course, what I am trying to reach is the silence … There is a wonderful Philip Guston quote: “if you’re really painting YOU walk out.” That is what I mean by reaching the silence.”  Rothenstein is self-taught and lives and works in London. Born in 1949, the daughter of the late Michael Rothenstein and Duffy Ayres, she grew up in a lively and distinguished community of artists in the Essex village of Great Bardfield. Following a foundation course at Camberwell School of Art in the mid-1960s, Rothenstein worked as an actress for over a decade before gradually returning to painting.   Rothenstein’s recent solo exhibitions include Charleston, Sussex (2024) and Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2024). Other solo shows include Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2022) and Beaux Arts Gallery, London (2021). A two-person exhibition by Rothenstein and Irina Zatulovskaya took place at Pushkin House, London in 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 21 March 2025

We meet poet, artist and filmmaker Julianknxx. We explore themes within his work of inheritance, loss and belonging as he crosses the boundaries between written word, music and visual art. Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx uses his personal history as a prism to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, history, and culture. Rich with symbolism, his work conveys the Black experience of defining and redefining the self, rejecting labels to form new collective narratives. Offering song and music as forms of resistance, the exhibition invokes new understandings of what it means to be caught between, and to be of, multiple places. Choirs and musicians from cities across Europe give voice to a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’, transforming the Curve into a collaborative space of communication. As the philosopher Édouard Glissant has written: ‘you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.’ Julianknxx’s work merges his poetic practice with films and performance; he engages in a form of existential inquiry that at once seeks to find ways of expressing the ineffable realities of human experiences while examining the structures through which we live. In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or an ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and socio-political narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces. Follow @JulianKnxx Visit #JulianKnxx’s two new exhibitions @BuroStedelijk, Amsterdam until 24th April and @CAMGulbenkian, Lisbon until 2nd June 2025. Listen to Talk Art: @Spotify or @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 14 March 2025

We meet bestselling writer Shon Faye to discuss her new book Love In Exile and artists she admires: Nan Goldin, The Bloomsbury Group, Bernini, Michelangelo, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and performers including Tom Rasmussen, Madonna and David Hoyle. Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture. Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled. In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself. Shon Faye is author of the acclaimed bestseller The Transgender Issue. Her work has been published in, among others, the Guardian, Independent, British Vogue and VICE. Born in Bristol, she now lives in London. As Frieze magazine recently wrote: Shon Faye is one of the most celebrated non-fiction authors in the UK, rising to fame for her discerning prose on culture, relationships and class. Her first book, The Transgender Issue (2021), a provocative treatise on gender identity debates in the UK, was part of her rise to fame. Not only did Faye offer a detailed survey of queer history, but she also indicated why trans-liberation is connected to liberation for all. Her new book of essays, Love in Exile (2025), explores the existential and social challenges of courtship and heartache. Rather than focus solely on the discrimination that many transgender people face, however, the text is a literary memoir that interrogates how ancient and present-day writers conceptualize and dissect love. As a Vogue contributor with her advice column ‘Dear Shon’ (2022–ongoing), host of the podcast Call Me Mother (2021–ongoing) and author of Dazed & Confused Magazine’s ‘Future of Sex’ series (2022–ongoing), she addresses the topic of romance with honesty and poise. Follow @Shon.Faye on InstagramBuy Love in Exile, published by Pengiun. You can also follow @TalkArt for images of all artworks discussed in today's episode. Thanks for listening! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 7 March 2025

We meet painter Vanessa Raw to discuss her solo show at the Rubell Museum Miami, where she was the 2024 Artist-in-Residence. Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In marks her first exhibition in the United States, as well as her first institutional show. In these newly commissioned, large-scale works, Raw’s distinctive layered brushwork and expressive use of colour depict a dream-like, all-female world—an earthly paradise where the natural world is benevolent and sentient, and where female desire is central. A former triathlete, Raw’s practiced mastery of her own body transfers to her work on canvas. Her figures are tranquil and at ease but have agency. They revel in the company of each other and in the landscape that is lush and soft and ripe with colour—paradise found. In 2022 Raw took a radical new direction with her work, shifting from traditional portraiture tropes to paint imagined, same-sex, intimate scenes of women in confected landscapes. Surrounded by flowers and trees, sometimes accompanied by fauna too, these suspended moments of blissful intense connections show naked, energised bodies part-merged with each other and the landscapes they are in. Using a heighten palette Raw conveys the intensity of the moment, as well positioning the paintings in the realm of the imaginary. Likewise, the dream-like fluidity of some areas of mark making suggest an altered state of consciousness, a deep human connectivity occurring simultaneously on a physical and spiritual plane. Photographs taken on her daily runs through local nature areas, an activity undertaken with therapeutical escapist intention, are used as source material for her background landscapes binding their confection to meaningful actualities, pulling into the paintings the remembered feeling of oneness with nature. Raw works in a semi-naturalistic style, with an intense focus on the textures of the human form. Her large scale paintings are an eclectic variety of tonal compositions, vibrant and stimulating. Some of her more explicit pieces show the human body engaged in sexual acts or reaching the point of orgasm, whilst others in a more subtle manner showcase the innate sexuality of the feminine form. Born in 1984 in Hexham, England, Raw lives and works in Margate, UK. Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In is now open in Miami at Rubell Museum.Visit: https://rubellmuseum.org/2024-vanessa-raw Follow @VanessaRaw_ and @RubellMuseumVanessa Raw is represented by Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Special thanks to the Don, Mera and Jason Rubell, and Juan Roselione-Valadez at the Rubell Museum, Carl Freedman @CarlFreedmanGallery and Elissa Cray @TKEStudios. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 28 February 2025

We meet legendary artist Peter Berlin from his home in San Francisco. Peter Berlin (born Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen-Huene) is a photographer, artist, filmmaker, clothing designer, model, and gay icon. Berlin started taking self-portraits of himself in the 1970s. By modifying his clothes, choosing various props and settings, and sometimes using double-exposure to create a second image, Berlin would photograph himself in ways that create a hyper-sexualized, overtly masculine image. We explore Mariposa Gallery's inaugural Los Angeles exhibition featuring the groundbreaking photography, art, and personal artifacts of Peter Berlin, an artist who transformed queer self-representation and male eroticism in the 1970s and beyond. The exhibition set to open at 526 N. Western Avenue—in the heart of the Melrose Hill gallery district— is curated by actor and host of Talk Art, Russell Tovey, and will showcase Berlin’s iconic self-portraits, unique painted photographs, and items from his personal archive including his own clothing designed by Berlin during his years as a self-styled gay icon. This is the first ever exhibition of Berlin’s work in Los Angeles. The exhibition offers visitors a rare view into the life and work of an artist whose influence on LGBTQ+ aesthetics endures. Berlin, born Armin Hagen Freiherr von Hoyningen Huene in 1942, gained notoriety for his daring and meticulously crafted self-portraits, often taken in public spaces across Berlin, Paris, New York, and San Francisco. These images capture Berlin in his skin-tight costumes and signature pageboy haircut, boldly challenging the boundaries of masculinity and public identity. Berlin’s focus on “cruising as career” drew him to create self-portraits that explored male sexuality and queer expression, which appeared on the covers of numerous gay publications, cementing his image as an international gay sex symbol. The exhibition will also feature selections from Berlin’s ’70s and ’80s media presence, capturing the evolution of gay aesthetics in this era. "Peter Berlin, the fearless and enigmatic, otherworldly icon of 1970s cruise culture, created work that resonates around the world—sparkling, searing, and blazing with vitality. His images burn with eternal desire, offering us the ultimate permission to stare. It’s a privilege to share his groundbreaking art with new and familiar audiences alike. Peter Berlin remains a profoundly significant yet often overlooked figure in the history of art." - Russell Tovey Berlin’s influence extended to film, including Nights in Black Leather (1973) and That Boy (1974), both now cult classics. A recent 2019 monograph on his work, Icon, Artist, Photosexual, highlights his impact, featuring insights from Michael Bullock, Evan Moffitt, and Ted Stansfield, each celebrating Berlin’s singular contribution to queer art and culture. Mariposa Gallery invites the public to step into Berlin’s world and experience the legacy of an artist who, through bold self-exploration and defiant artistry, redefined eroticism and individuality in the queer community. Materials on loan from the Peter Berlin Collection courtesy of Armin Hagen von Hoyningen-Huene and with guidance from Gerard Koskovich, the historian and dealer offering the collection for institutional acquisition. For more information, visit www.abaa.org/booksellers/details/gerard-koskovich-queer-antiquarian-books. Follow @PeterBerlinSF and @Mariposa.DriveVisit: https://www.mariposa.gallery/berlin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 21 February 2025

New @TalkArt podcast! We meet leading artist Mickalene Thomas to explore her major solo show in London’s Hayward Gallery.  SEASON 24 BEGINS!!!! Happy Valentine’s Day! Our gift to you is Episode 1 of Season 24!!!!  'All About Love' presents two decades of work by the internationally celebrated artist and pioneering portraitist Mickalene Thomas (born 1971, USA). Thomas is renowned for her large-scale paintings of Black women radically luxuriating and in repose, adorned with vivid patterns and ravishing, brilliant rhinestones, as well as her innovative use of collage techniques. Thomas’ depictions of women from her circle of friends, family, lovers and models are loving, celebratory and glamorous, with her alluring and self-assured muses exuding comfort and pleasure. References to the history of European painting abound in Thomas’ work (including to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso). Her subjects confidently claim space within this male-dominated art history from which Black and LGBTQIA+ people have largely been excluded. Featuring paintings, photographs, collages and installations, All About Love transforms the Hayward Gallery with bespoke wallpapers, textiles and furnishings nostalgically evoking the artist’s 1970s childhood.  Thomas’ art is steeped in contemporary feminist literature, and the exhibition title pays loving homage to the late American author and activist bell hooks. #MickaleneThomas’ vibrant, large-scale portraits of Black women at rest reclaim space and representation in art history, celebrating love and radical repose. Mickalene Thomas: All About Love is now open and runs until 5th May 2025. Learn more on Instagram: @Hayward.Gallery or by visiting:https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/mickalene-thomas-all-about-love/ 🔗 Follow: @MickaleneThomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 14 February 2025

We meet artist Carsten Höller for some perceptual playtime to celebrate New Year's Day! We explore Höller’s collection of odd tasks and mischievous game-play.Carsten Höller invites readers to disrupt their daily lives with 336 mind-expanding diversions. They can be played alone, in pairs or in teams, in the street, in bed, on a train, wherever. No props or materials are needed. Just one body, all senses and a willingness to try something new, that’s possibly conceptually or physically challenging, but guaranteed to entertain and to widen the player’s horizons. Some games are more obviously daring than others – unexpectedly shouting ‘bang!’ when your driver’s reversing into a parking space is sure to elicit a reaction – but that’s absolutely the point. Other games involve covertly dropping strange phrases into conversation, executing somersaults (without practice), or plucking hairs from your opponent’s head while they stay poker-faced. Höller’s scientific professional background informs his keenness to create what he calls Influential Environments. He wants to tease the brain while testing its limitations, through activity and passivity, agency and inertia. He conceived his first game with a group of friends in 1992, during a tedious dinner after an exhibition opening. Since then, he has collected and invented ideas, inspired by friends, life, the Surrealists, and Arthur Rimbaud. All games are illustrated with commissioned or pre-existing artworks and photographs. We find portraits by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, August Sander, and Nan Goldin next to paintings by Salvador Dalí; snapshots of Joseph Beuys plus son and Donna Haraway plus dog next to appointed pieces by Christine Sun Kim and Anri Sala; film stills by Chantal Akerman, extracts from Shakespeare as well as treasures from Höller’s personal archive—and his mother’s. Edited by Stefanie Hessler and Hans Ulrich Obrist, this book encourages readers to engage in playful yet cerebral experiments that will leave them with a sense of wonder, disorientation, and a subtle smirk on their face. As an artist, Carsten Höller conducts radical experiments. His “Influential Environments” explore alternative scenarios, reimagining possibilities for human behavior and interaction and have been shown in major installations and solo exhibitions internationally over the last two decades. In 2022, he opened his restaurant Brutalisten in Stockholm and presented the third iteration of The Double Club in Los Angeles in 2024. Born in 1961 in Brussels to German parents, Höller currently lives and works in Stockholm and Biriwa, Ghana. Follow @Carsten.Holler on Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 1 January 2025

It's the Talk Art CHRISTMAS SPECIAL EPISODE!! Holiday Surprise!!! We meet Russell T Davies OBE, one of the UK’s foremost writers of television drama and television producer. Davies was Head Writer, Showrunner and Executive Producer of Doctor Who when it returned in 2005 and has written many of the new series’ most memorable episodes. He was awarded an OBE in 2008 for services to drama. Born in Swansea, Wales, Davies had aspirations as a comic artist before focusing on being a playwright and screenwriter. We discuss his passion for comic strips and cartoons from Peanuts & Snoopy, Asterix and his childhood passion for drawing which has continued throughout his whole life. Davies other notable works include creating the series Queer as Folk (1999–2000), Bob & Rose (2001), The Second Coming (2003), Casanova (2005), Doctor Who spin-offs Torchwood (2006–2011) and The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–2011), Cucumber (2015), A Very English Scandal (2018), Years and Years (2019), It's a Sin (2021) and Nolly (2023). Follow @RussellTDavies63 HAPPY HOLIDAYS everyone!!! Thanks for listening us for the past 6 years. We will return on New Year's Day with another iconic guest. Until then, have a magical Christmas. Love Russell & Robert Xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 24 December 2024

We meet legendary poet Joelle Taylor. Joelle Taylor is the author of 4 collections of poetry. Her most recent collection C+NTO & Othered Poems won the 2021 T.S Eliot Prize, and the 2022 Polari Book Prize for LGBT authors. C+NTO is currently being adapted for theatre with a view to touring. She is a co- curator and host of Out-Spoken Live at the Southbank Centre, and tours her work nationally and internationally in a diverse range of venues, from Australia to Brazil. She is also a Poetry Fellow of University of East Anglia and the curator of the Koestler Awards 2023. She has judged several poetry and literary prizes including Jerwood Fellowship, the Forward Prize, and the Ondaatje Prize. Her novel of interconnecting stories The Night Alphabet will be published by Riverrun in Spring of 2024. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 2022 Saboteur Spoken Word Artist of the Year. Her most recent acting role was in Blue by Derek Jarman, which was directed by Neil Bartlett and featured Russell Tovey, Jay Bernard, and Travis Alabanza. Blue sold out its run across the UK and more dates are expected for the future. Follow @JTaylorTrashVisit: https://joelletaylor.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 6 December 2024

WeTransfer x TalkArt special episode! We meet photographer Robin de Puy. This episode is brought to you by our friends at WePresent, the Academy Award winningarts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artistssuch as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresentshowcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championingdiversity in everything it does. In this episode we'll be speaking to acclaimed photographer Robin de Puy about her newproject AMERICAN, a collaboration with WePresent, which is an unflinching portrait of adivided nation. AMERICAN shares Robin's unique perspective on the often-overlookedfaces that represent the country's incredible diversity and complexity, and poses thequestion: What does it mean to be American? Visit: https://robin-de-puy-american.wetransfer.com/ Follow: @Robin_De_Puy and @WePresent Robin de Puy’s (b.1986, the Netherlands) photographs start with a desire to tell her own story through the faces of others. Whether it’s the freckled adolescent she noticed whilst refuelling in Wyoming, the Dutch author, poet and columnist Remco Campert, or the boy Randy she met in Nevada whilst on her American road trip, de Puy sees the camera as an aid to understand the deeply personal traits and histories of each person, and how they also reveal something about herself. Many of her encounters are fleeting; a heartfelt glance into the life of someone else before time resumes its frantic pace. In others, as with Randy, those same transient experiences blossom into profound and enduring relationships. Regardless of which ending they have, de Puy’s photographs are always imbued with a sensitivity and timelessness that encourages a slow gaze on the human condition. Her images are chances for genuine human connection, and through sharing with them with the world, allow us to take part in such moments. Robin de Puy studied at the Fotoacademie Rotterdam and has been exhibited internationally at institutions and galleries including; Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2018); Museum Hilversum, Hilversum (2017); The Hague Museum of Photography, The Hague (2016); Stedelijk Museum, Breda (2016) and Photoville, New York (2016). Amongst numerous other awards, De Puy was the winner of the National Portrait Prize in both 2013 and 2019. Her work is held in major public and private collections including Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht; De Nederlandse Bank, Amsterdam; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Centraal Museum Utrecht, Utrecht; Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Hague; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam and Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Hague. View more: https://robindepuy.nl/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 3 December 2024

It's MIAMI art fair week - we are ready for Art Basel, Untitled, NADA and more! We meet legendary art collecting family THE RUBELL'S!!!! Mera, Don and Jason!!! Don and Mera Rubell started collecting in 1965 while living in New York, acquiring their first work after a studio visit and paying on a modest weekly installment plan. The Rubells grew their collection by looking at art, talking with artists, and trusting their instincts. Their son, Jason Rubell, joined them in 1982 in building the collection, extending the multigenerational family passion for discovering, engaging, and supporting many of today’s most compelling artists. The Rubells moved to Miami in 1992, and together with Jason and their daughter, Jennifer, began developing hotels and an art foundation and museum to house and publicly exhibit their expanding art collection. Since the Rubells’ first acquisition, they’ve amassed one of the most significant and far-ranging collections of contemporary art in the world, encompassing over 7,700 works by more than 1,000 artists—and still growing. The collection is further distinguished by the diversity and geographic distribution of artists represented within it, and the depth of its holdings of works by seminal artists.The Rubells are drawn to emerging and underrecognized artists. They were among the first to acquire work by now-renowned contemporary artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cecily Brown, Keith Haring, Rashid Johnson, Hayv Kahraman, Jeff Koons, William Kentridge, Yoshitomo Nara, Cindy Sherman, Yayoi Kusama, Kara Walker, Purvis Young, and Mickalene Thomas, among many others. They continue to vigorously collect by visiting studios, art spaces, fairs, galleries, biennials, and museums, and by talking with artists, curators, and gallerists. If the work grabs them, they dig deeper—conducting intensive research before they welcome it into their collection. Jason Rubell started collecting contemporary art in 1983 at the age of 14, acquiring the painting Immigrants from then-emerging George Condo via Pat Hearn Gallery. At first supporting his collecting habit by stringing tennis rackets, Jason’s early support of artists grew into a life-defining passion. Jason’s studies at Duke and experience with organizing and touring the exhibition of his collection were instrumental in the Rubell family’s decision to open their collection to the public, ensuring it would serve as a broader resource for audiences to encounter contemporary art and the ideas it explores.  In 1993, the Rubells’ passion became their mission when they opened the Rubell Family Collection/Contemporary Art Foundation in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood. The establishment of the RFC pioneered a new model for sharing private collections with the public and spurred the development of Wynwood as one of the leading art and design districts in the U.S. After nearly 30 years, the collection relocated to the Allapattah neighborhood in December 2019 and was renamed the Rubell Museum to emphasize its public mission and expanded access for audiences. The opening of the Rubell Museum DC in October 2022 further deepened the family’s commitment to sharing their collection as a public resource, providing opportunities for residents and visitors of the nation’s capital to engage with today’s most compelling artists. Follow: @RubellMuseum on Instagram. Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In, the Rubell's Artist in Residence for 2024 opens on December 2nd.Visit: http://rubellmuseum.org/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 29 November 2024

We meet our friend, the legendary artist Sir Michael Craig-Martin RA!!! Michael was the first ever Talk Art guest way back in 2018... and now 6 years later we interview him for a second time to explore his Royal Academy of Arts major retrospective. Covering his 60-year career, make sure you visit this powerful, colourful, dynamic exhibition - it will lift your soul! This is your last chance to visit as it's the last two weeks. Visit before it closes on 10th December 2024. Michael Craig-Martin depicts everyday items with a nuanced simplicity that exposes the tensions between objects and their representation. His work is distinguished by exceptional draftsmanship, vibrant color, and uninflected line; intensely visual, it is rooted in an exploration of the relationships between perception, language, and meaning. A key figure in British art, Michael Craig-Martin is one of the most influential artists and teachers of his generation. Since coming to prominence in the late 1960s he has moved between sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, prints and digital works, creating a body of work that has fused elements from pop, minimalism and conceptual art. Craig-Martin transforms the RA's Main Galleries with work from across his career. See his early experimental sculpture and his landmark conceptual work An Oak Tree alongside the large-scale, vivid colour paintings of everyday objects – from corkscrews and umbrellas to laptops and smartphones. Featuring a dramatic site-specific installation, a group of monumental sculptures and new immersive digital work by the artist, this will be the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of Craig-Martin's work ever held in the UK. Follow @RoyalAcademyArts Craig-Martin is represented by @GagosianVisit: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/michael-craig-martin Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 22 November 2024

We meet Mary Ramsden to discuss her new solo exhibition Desire Line, opening this week at Pilar Corrias, London. Captivated by the sheer range of ideas and images that a passage of paint can convey, from a tuft of grass to a soaring patch of sky, Ramsden revels in the boundless versatility of her medium. The artist brings a range of references to this new body of work, including English landscape painting, the subtle palette and chromatic intelligence of Les Nabis painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, and a keen engagement with poetry and literature. Ramsden’s title, Desire Line, refers to a phenomenon whereby a path emerges through spontaneous and habitual use, whether in a park, pasture or wilderness. Based in North Yorkshire, many of Ramsden’s recent paintings reflect the textures of the local landscape as well as the qualities of northern light. The artist considers paint earthy, modest and infinitely adaptable, with the capacity to conjure atmospheres, images and metaphors, all within a single set of brushstrokes. Dark oxygen (all works 2024) evokes a moonlit landscape, with patches of cool lilacs and silvery blues and greens. Touches of rust and warm colours mark the edges, while the whole painting seems to be embraced by a quivering penumbra. If Dark oxygen has a wintry chill, a sense of abundant, generative life characterises the surface of My desire is not a thinking. In a haze of peachy orange, as if bathed in the light of a sunrise, sections of paint emerge on the canvas like patches of lichen or moss, sedately moving with their own inner force or rhythm. Both paintings express a distilled and unearthly beauty, reminiscent of a mythical landscape conjured by Gustave Moreau, though fractured and emptied of narrative. At the same time, these are meditations on paint itself; each canvas a multivalent space for Ramsden to revel in the ambiguity and potential of her surfaces. Fascinated by how Bertolt Brecht would have his characters change costumes to foreground the drama’s illusory nature, Ramsden likewise conceives of different passages of paint as characters that might, with a simple shift of emphasis or the viewer’s perspective, become something new. The same section of a painting might evoke a stony field or a pool of dappled light, a cracked patch of ice or a window at night. Another touchstone for the artist is Robert Motherwell, who, like Ramsden, adapted many of his titles from poetry, and considered abstraction a kind of universal language capable of communicating both powerful emotions and complex thoughts. The exhibition will be accompanied by a booklet with an essay by novelist and essayist Daisy Hildyard and a poem by Danielle Wilde.Desire Line runs until 11th January 2025 and is now open at Pilar Corrias, on Savile Row, London. Free entry. Follow @MaryJRamsdenVisit: https://www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/466-mary-ramsden-desire-line/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 15 November 2024

We meet Anya Gallaccio (b. 1963, Scotland), an artist renowned for her innovative use of organic, ephemeral materials – ranging from chocolate, ice, wax, apples, flowers and chalk – and for her explorations of transformation, change and impermanence. Throughout her practice, Gallaccio has significantly reshaped understandings of contemporary sculpture. Anya Gallaccio: preserve is her largest survey exhibition to date at Turner Contemporary, Margate. The exhibition spans three decades of Gallaccio’s radical practice, restaging several iconic sculptures in addition to a new site-specific commission. It reveals the artist’s consistent rethinking of the relationship between art and the environment by presenting works that connect with Kent’s natural heritage. Due to the temporal nature of her work, much of Gallaccio’s practice is best known through documentary photographs and memory. This exhibition introduces her sculptures and large-scale installations so that a new generation can engage in their references to environmental sustainability and preserving fragile ecosystems.Renowned for her innovative use of organic, ephemeral materials such as apples, flowers and chalk, and for her explorations of transformation and impermanence, Gallaccio has reshaped our understanding of contemporary sculpture. Complementing Gallaccio’s exhibition, Turner Contemporary has developed an extensive school programme in partnership with the artist. This programme, titled An Apple a Day, aims to explore Kent’s countryside, heritage, and history through the lens of the apple and county’s apple orchards. Inspired by the work of Californian chef and food activist Alice Waters, Gallaccio seeks to embed nature across everyday teaching in primary schools. In collaboration with Kent Downs National Landscape, DEFRA and Lees Court Estate, this project underscores Turner Contemporary’s commitment to sustainability and celebrates the relationship between art, ecology, and agriculture in Kent. By engaging students with the rich heritage of the region’s apple orchards, the programme fosters a deeper appreciation for nature and promotes environmental stewardship from an early age. Anya Gallaccio: preserve runs until 26th January 2025 and is free to visit. Curated by Melissa Blanchflower, Senior Curator, Turner Contemporary.Visit: https://turnercontemporary.org/whats-on/anya-gallaccio-preserve/ Follow @TurnerContemporaryThanks to @ThomasDaneGallery Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 8 November 2024

We meet artist Jesse Darling. His multi-disciplinary practice, of sculptures, drawings and objects, considers how bodily subjects are initially formed and continuously reformed through sociopolitical influences. Darling (b. Oxford, UK) draws on his own experience as well as the narratives of history and counter-history. He explores the inherent vulnerability of being a body, and how the inevitable mortality of living things translates to civilizations and structures. Featuring an array of free-floating consumer goods, support devices, liturgical objects, construction materials, fictional characters and mythical symbols, JD’s work recontextualizes manmade objects to reveal their precarity. Simultaneously wounded and liberated shapes outwardly bare their frailty and need for care and healing. Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world.  If there is a formal theme that runs through his work it is the acknowledgement of fallibility and fungibility as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process. He has published many texts online and in print, including two chapbooks: VIRGINS, published by Monitor Books (2021), and SHOWGIRLS (Arcadia_Missa publishing, 2023, on the occasion of a Tate film commission for Site Visit). Selected solo exhibitions include Enclosures at Camden Arts Center (2022), No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford (2022), Gravity Road at Kunstverein Freiburg (2022), Crevé at Triangle France Astérides (2019), and The Ballad of Saint Jerome at Tate Britain (2018—2019). Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023. In 2024, Jesse Darling became Associate Professor at the Ruskin and full-time Tutorial Fellow at St Anne's College. Follow https://bravenewwhat.org/@ArcadiaMissa, @GalerieSultana, @GalerieMolitor and @ChapterNY Viist:https://arcadiamissa.com/jesse-darling/https://galeriesultana.com/artists/jesse-darling Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 1 November 2024

We meet Tom Rasmussen to explore their new album Live Wire. We discuss their love of art, collaborations with artists Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Shon Faye and Travis Alabanza, their love for Rene Matić, writing new songs with Romy and Self Esteem and what it was like being photographed by the legendary Tim Walker on both album covers. This episode was recorded in Los Angeles while Tom put the final touches to the Live Wire album. “Live Wire (Globe Town Records 2024) was written over a year where the last thing I wanted to talk about was violence, or what it meant to be queer. I’ve done it so much, I wanted to think about and feel about what it meant if I could live beyond that. This album is about happinness, the bittersweetness time passing, trying to live when the world is falling down both inside and out. In terms of the production, we wanted to create songs where vastness and intimacy existed in the same place like on Body, Heart, Mind; or where there was so much space for the feelings of the listener — like on There’s A Lot To Be Happy About. Other songs like Song For M and Never Look Back, with Romy, are songs which start in a dream like space and aim never to take you out of it.” Tom's debut album Body Building (Globe Town Records 2023) fused dark dance music with an aesthetic and live performance that takes influence from their past life in drag. Born and raised in Lancashire, Tom moved to London where they fell into the world of drag, performing everywhere from the Royal Opera House to Glastonbury. Although their drag alter ego Crystal was distinct for singing live, it wasn’t until Rasmussen started writing their own music that their performance persona began to change, revealing more of themselves. Thus came their debut album Body Building, an album that pierces the skin with its falsetto vocals and moments of queer euphoria punctuated by acoustic instrumentation. Having already toured with Rina Sawayama and Self Esteem, Tom Rasmussen has already made waves with audiences across the UK. Especially with their single Dysphoria, the inimitably catchy, powerful yet poignant ode to their experience with their body. Follow @TomRasmussen on Instagram. Live Wire, is OUT NOW via Globe Town Records and includes collaborations with Romy and Self Esteeem.Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/album/2e2BL8KVYFFPve2vtCmO4l Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 24 October 2024

New Talk Art special episode!!!! We meet leading artist Alvaro Barrington, presented by BMW. We explore his work since we last met him on the podcast a few years ago, his current, epic solo 'Grace' at Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries, as well as a very cool recent collaboration with BMW at Frieze Seoul. Inspired by the BMW Art Car Collection and curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist has paint over seven miniature i7s, drawing inspiration from video games and music. Barrington's practice explores interconnected histories of cultural production. Considering himself primarily a painter, Barrington’s multimedia approach to image-making employs burlap, textiles, postcards and clothing, exploring how materials themselves can function as visual tools while referencing their personal, political and commercial histories. Barrington is interested in how the vehicles of the future will have the potential to recognise our moods, emotions and schedules, and as such adapt to them accordingly. The artist explores the future of cars reimagined as self-driving entertainment units and places for meeting that can help bridge different cultures through new technologies such as instant language translation. Utilising artificial intelligence, cars will go far beyond their purely transporting function and instead help us foster new connections and fulfil our daily needs. For this project, Barrington looked into video games centered around cars, which were not only important as play and entertainment, but also as platforms for music and culture. Exploring the history of cars and other vehicles that enable travel and movement, the artist has focused on the intersection of cars and culture and the way they have influenced one another. Merging these references, the artist created 7 unique cars, each featuring a drawing from a film, music video or portraying a cultural figure, which remain influential in Barrington's life and practice. For his Tate Britain commission, Barrington's personal exploration of identity and belonging is a journey in three parts honouring his grandmother, sister and mother.He draws from personal memories across time and place, from his grandmother's Caribbean home where a thunderstorm hammers on the corrugated tin roof, to the exhilarating energy of Carnival. Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries are transformed into a space alive with sound, colour and texture. This is Barrington’s poignant celebration of the people and places that make us feel we belong. 'GRACE is the constant reimagining of Black culture and aspirational attitude under foreign conditions. GRACE here explores how my grandmother, my mother, and my sister in the British Caribbean community showed up gracefully.' - Alvaro Barrington Grace runs until 26 January 2025 at @Tate Britain, free entry. Visit: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/alvaro-barrington Follow @AlvaroBarrington and @BMWGroupCulture Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 21 October 2024

We meet leading artist Jeffrey Gibson to discuss his Venice Biennale solo and explore his inspiring and illustrious career thus far. The first Indigenous artist to represent the USA at this year’s Venice Biennale, Gibson is a painter and sculptor whose work is held in many major American collections. Incorporating murals, paintings, textiles and historical objects, Gibson’s work also weaves together text drawn lyrics, poetry and his own writing, complete with references to abstraction, fashion and popular culture. Of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, Gibson uses materials such as Native American beadwork and trading posts in his art that explores identity and labels.  Drawing influence from popular music, fashion, literature, cultural and critical theory, and his own individual heritage, Jeffrey Gibson (b.1972, Colorado; based in Hudson, NY) recontextualizes the familiar to offer a succinct commentary on cultural hybridity and the assimilation of modernist artistic strategies within contemporary art. Gibson’s Cherokee and Choctaw lineage has imparted a recognizable aesthetic to his beaded works exploring narrative deconstructions of both image and language as transmitted through figuration. Known for his re-appropriation of both found and commercial commodities –ranging from song lyrics to the literal objecthood of punching bags – repurposed through Minimalist and post-Minimalist aesthetics, speaks to the revisionist history of Modernist forms and techniques. His sculptures and paintings seamlessly coalesce traditional Native American craft with contemporary cultural production and references, forming works that speak to the experience of an individual subjectivity within the larger narrative defining contemporary globalization. Jeffrey Gibson grew up in major urban centers in the United States, Germany, and Korea, where he absorbed the transgressive soundtrack of the 1980s through limited access to MTV. Gibson graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995 and received a Master of Arts in painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1998. While in Chicago he also worked as a research assistant on the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) for the Field Museum, a formative experience that fostered an ongoing interest in questions of ownership and notions of cultural translation. Though trained as a painter, Gibson began incorporating materials and techniques that deliberately reference his heritage—such as raw hides and bead work—around 2010. A major turning point in his career, in 2012 he presented ‘one becomes the other,’ his first solo exhibition of sculpture and video, at Participant Inc. Sculpture, moving image, and sound have since become an integral aspect of his practice. He is known for his immersive, multi-sensory installations that invoke and interweave such disparate contexts as faith-based spaces of communion and night clubs. Jeffrey Gibson is represented in the permanent collections of more than twenty museums. Jeffrey Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. He holds a MA at the Royal College of Art, London, a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. Gibson is currently a Visiting Artist at Bard College, NY. Follow @JeffRune Learn more: https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/jeffrey-gibson/@HauserWirth and @SikkemaJenkins Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 17 October 2024

 It’s FRIEZE WEEK! We meet artist Fani Parali to explore his multifaceted practice. For Frieze Sculpture 2024, London-based multidisciplinary artist Fani Parali presents Aonyx and Drepan; two monumental steel armatures from which performers, as hybrid creatures, 'sing' to each other across a path in Regent's Park. In the video commissioned by Frieze, Parali describes the layered processes behind the 'lip-sync opera' she produces, 'I feel that it [the recorded voice] exists before and after everything else, and the performers then become like channels, like mediums for these voices to come through them.' Like Charon traversing the river Styx, Aonyx and Drepan represent gatekeepers guiding the viewer from one temporal zone to the next. Parali's practice is inspired by 'Deep Time', the 18th-century timescale used to plot non-anthropocentric geological events. In this ecologically destructive era, the work is a portal by which to view the vastness of geological time and think of ourselves as guardians of this, our own, brief epoch. Fani Parali (b. 1983 Greece) lives and works in London. She studied BA Sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts and completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Parali's practice includes sculpture, sound, performance, large-scale painting, drawing and moving image. Notable recent exhibitions include 'Aonyx and Drepan & The Minders of the Warm' at Southwark Park Galleries (2020). Her work is currently included in Hayward Galleries touring exhibition 'Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood' curated by Hetti Judah (2024). Frieze Sculpture returns to London's Regent's Park 18 September - 27 October 2024. The much-celebrated public art initiative coincides with Frieze London and Frieze Masters, which take place concurrently in The Regent's Park, 9 - 13 October. Curated by Fatoş Üstek, Frieze Sculpture has expanded for its 12th edition to include 22 leading international artists hailing from five continents, whose work will be sited throughout the park's historic English Gardens. Fani Parali (b. 1983 Greece) lives and works in London. She studied BA Sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts and completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Parali’s practice includes sculpture, sound, performance, large-scale painting, drawing and moving image. She is renowned for the creation of ‘lip-sync’ operas, in which performers mime synthesised audio works; ambitiously scaled installations that are at once other-worldly and deeply human. Parali’s practice reflects on the concepts of ‘deep time’, caregiving and the fragile interconnectivity of human experience. Notable recent exhibitions include ‘Aonyx and Drepan & The Minders of the Warm’ at Southwark Park Galleries (2020). Her work is currently included in Hayward Galleries touring exhibition ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’ curated by Hetti Judah (2024). Follow @Fani_Parali Visit Frieze Sculpture: https://www.frieze.com/article/frieze-sculpture-2024-fani-parali-aonyx-drepan-2020Learn more at Cooke Latham Gallery: https://www.cookelathamgallery.com/artists/65-fani-parali/biography/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 10 October 2024

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 3 October 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 26 September 2024

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 19 September 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 12 September 2024

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 @StudioLencaVisit: https://carlfreedman.com/exhibitions/2024/studio-lenca/Special thanks to @CarlFreedmanGallery (where Talk Art's Robert Diament is Partner). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 15 August 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 8 August 2024

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 Special thanks to Daniel Balice of @BaliceHertling gallery for connecting us! https://www.balicehertling.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 1 August 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 29 July 2024

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 @JeanClaracqVisit @GalerieSultana Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 25 July 2024

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 18 July 2024

We meet curator and writer Gemma Rolls-Bentley to discuss her exciting new book Queer Art, recorded in front of a live audience at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Gemma's debut book Queer Art; From Canvas to Club and the Spaces Between is out now. With nearly 200 artworks selected by leading LGBTQI+ curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley, 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. Gemma is a creative consultant and advisor for brands, organisations, and cultural projects, in addition to teaching at numerous institutions including the Royal College of Art, the Glasgow School of Art, and Goldsmiths. She spent a decade working at the intersection of art and technology, holding positions of Chief Curator at Avant Arte and Curatorial Director at Artsy. Prior to that she spent 6 years working at Damien Hirst's studio, where she learned a lot about the art world (and what she wanted to help change). 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 11 July 2024

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 4 July 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 27 June 2024

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 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 and Jenny Holzer. 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 20 June 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 13 June 2024

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, the Franco-Israeli artist Nathanaëlle Herb Elin has been invited to put her canvases and sources of inspiration into perspective. An heiress to the Nabis, 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 @MuseeOrsayThanks to @XavierHufkens and @GalerieJousseEnterprise Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 6 June 2024

We meet author/art critic Jennifer Higgie and Sotheby’s Chloe Stead to discuss an inspiring new exhibition which has just opened ‘London: An Artistic Crossroads’ runs until 5th July at Sotheby’s New Bond Street. 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 iconicComposition 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 3 June 2024

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. https://www.warhol.org/exhibition/kaws-warhol/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 30 May 2024

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 23 May 2024

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. 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] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 20 May 2024

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, 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, 2025Victoria & Albert Museum, Londonwww.vam.ac.uk Special thanks to Elton & David, their collection 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 16 May 2024

We meet writer Oisín McKenna to discuss his debut novel Evenings and Weekends which is released today! 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. 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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2024

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 2 May 2024

We meet the PET SHOP BOYS!!!! Recorded in London, we chat to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe about their love of art, collaborations with artists throguhout their 40 year career including Derek Jarman, Eric Watson and Wolfgang Tillmans. This exclusive episode celebrate today's release (April 26th 2024) of their incredible new album Nonetheless, via Parlophone Records. ‘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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2024

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 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 19 April 2024

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 has just opened 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-2024andhttps://www.houghtonhall.com/antony-gormleys-time-horizon-2/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcribed - Published: 11 April 2024