Talk Art

Robert meets Christian Levett, a British collector, philanthropist, and former investment fund manager. He is the founder of FAMM (Female Artists of Mougins Museum)(opens in a new tab), the first museum in the world outside of the USA to hold a permanent collection dedicated to A+ female artists from impressionism to contemporary art.

Opened in 2024, FAMM reflects his long-standing commitment to addressing structural gender imbalance in art history through exhibitions, research, and public programming.

Christian Levett began collecting at the age of seven, initially focusing on medals and coins. Christian Levett began collecting Old Master paintings and antiquities early in his life, developing a particular interest in Greek, Roman and Egyptian archaeology. In 2011, he founded the Mougins Museum of Classical Art (MACM), where antiquities were displayed in dialogue with modern and contemporary works.

Since 2016, his collecting has focused primarily on women artists. His collection today comprises nearly 2,000 artworks, including over 700 works by women artists, among them approximately 150 works by key figures of Abstract Expressionism, making it one of the most significant private holdings in this field.

Over the past decades, Levett moved towards the wider art market and began building an important collection of 20th and 21st century art. This includes, amongst others, post-war American art, Zero movement art and African contemporary art. In the last few years, he has built a significant collection of abstract works by female artists.

This is now displayed in his home in Florence, an Italian palazzo transformed into an inspiring gallery in its own right, having hosted private tours for museum patrons and university groups, including Harvard, Stanford, and New York University, the Palazzo Strozzi, the Bargello Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Tate.

His Florentine palazzo, hung exclusively with works by women artists, regularly hosts museum patrons and academic groups from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and NYU. He has commissioned three major scholarly books: Abstract Expressionists: The Women(2023), the FAMM museum catalogue Female Artists of Mougins Museum, France(2025), and In Their Own Words, which brings together the letters and writings of more than 100 women artists.

A committed philanthropist, Christian Levett has supported over 50 exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, including the British Museum, The Met, the Royal Academy, Tate, and Palazzo Strozzi, as well as archaeological excavations and restoration projects. He has served on the boards of the Ashmolean Museum and The Met, is currently a board member of Palazzo Strozzi, and is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford.

Follow: @FAMM_Mougins

Visit: https://famm.com

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Robert meets Harold Offeh, an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture.

We discuss Harold Offeh’s TRUSTFUL STRANGERS INDUCE FEARLESS WALKS, the third iteration of the Paddington Square x The Showroom annual billboard commission. The project developed from a series of workshops and conversations between Offeh and a group of young people from The Showroom’s Imagining Futures programme.

Through a process of gathering materials, collage, role-play and writing, they explored the idea of public space and the importance of building communities that care and look out for each other, fostering trust in strangers.

In generating the phrase ‘Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Walks’ they created a statement that speaks to their hopeful desire to increase empathy and mutual trust between anonymous passers-by as they encounter each other in London’s streets and public spaces.

The work is presented on a giant billboard at Paddington Square on the corner of Tanner Lane and Praed Street, extending beyond the billboard’s physical borders via audio clips of spoken-word, poetry, streams of consciousness, reflections and song by the young collaborators. These are accessible via a QR code onsite.

The billboard stands in dialogue with Offeh’s exhibition at The Showroom TRUSTFUL STRANGERS INDUCE FEARLESS ALIENS which brings together a selection of works from Offeh’s 25-year practice; confronting dominant histories and present-day cultural norms. The exhibition runs until 15 August.

Together the two presentations look back and look forward, positioning imagination as a powerful tool for creating more hopeful futures.

He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito.

He studied Critical Fine Art Practice at The University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and recently completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and works in London, UK. He previously held the role of Reader in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and was a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Art, UCL, London. He is currently the Head of Programme in MA Contemporary Art Practice and a visiting lecturer in MA Print at the Royal College of Art.

Follow: @Harold_Offeh

Visit: https://haroldoffeh.com

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Robert meet artist Emii Alrai to explore

her new exhibition Lures at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate.

Emii Alrai is an artist whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins.

Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Her practice weaves in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. The installations physically weave together hand built clay vessels which are patinated to look like ancient artefacts, steel braces and polystyrene hewn into amorphous landscapes.

Mimicry and theatricality are at the heart of the work, with forms covered in gypsum, sand, tar and various pigments to create monumental environments that replicate the ideas of a romanticised past and the histories of archaeological excavation. In this material exploration in relation to bodies of research, Alrai’s practice allows for conversations around memory, nostalgia and language to surface critiquing current structures of rigidity and how these may stem from the lasting shadow of imperialism.

Beyond merely critiquing or reproducing these structures, the work’s bending of time and space imagines ways in which to go forward in our understanding of history, its retelling and its romanticism and opens dialogue with the ways we engage history in our construction of the future.

In 2026, Alrai completed residencies at the Tracey Emin Foundation, Margate and the Pilchuck Glass School, Tacoma (founded by Dale Chihuly).

Lures, a solo exhibition by Emii Alrai, runs @CarlFreedmanGallery from 27th September until 8th November 2026. Open from Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5 pm

🔗 Follow @EmiiAlrai

#EmiiAlrai

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Robert meets legendary musician Johnny Marr to celebrate the launch day of his brand new album The Age Of Everything, out today!!!

Johnny Marr is one of the most creative, singular and influential guitar players in the history of pop music. He created a shimmering sonic framework for 1980s indie in his visionary work in The Smiths that continues to be foundational and endlessly emulated to this day.

He’s been a member of The The, teamed up with New Order’s Bernard Sumner to form the electronic pop outfit, Electronic, and has also had stints in bands such as Modest Mouse, The Pretenders, The Cribs as well as contributing guitar for Pet Shop Boys. But despite a lifetime of collaborations, Marr is in something of a new chapter of his career as a solo artist. In the last 13 years he has released five albums, with the latest undoubtedly his best yet: The Age of Everything.

The Age Of Everything is Johnny Marr's fifth full length studio record. 10 new songs that he describes as the most cathartic songwriting of his career. Written in London, developed live on the road across the East Coast of North America and recorded in Manchester, The Age Of Everything captures the energy and tensions of the city. Sharp, fast and dynamic, filled with ideas and possibilities.

Introducing the album, Johnny Marr said: “This is the record that’s been the most cathartic. The title came to me early in the process and became an inescapable idea.It seemed to sum up the way I think a lot of people are feeling. It’s all encompassing, but it's not necessarily a negative statement. There’s a sense of overwhelm in the culture brought about by technology, but looking at it with a different light, there could also be a sense of possibility.”

It is the unique dialogue that exists between Johnny Marr and his audience that has turbo-charged the sound of The Age Of Everything. Whilst touring the East Coast of North America in late 2025, more than half of the set consisted of brand new and unheard music. This research and development in the field brought a new energy to the songs, something inspired by what Johnny describes as a preoccupation with perception. How we perceive things as we move through life. Considering the possibility of everything: good and bad. Choosing the promise of the future, with defiance and resistance.

Few artists remain as relentlessly creative as Johnny Marr. Since launching his solo career he has scored five UK Top 10 albums, released a Sunday Times bestselling autobiography Set The Boy Free, recorded the James Bond theme for No Time To Die with Billie Eilish, received the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award, an Academy Award nomination for his work with Hans Zimmer on Inception, NME's Godlike Genius honour, and played sold-out tours and major festivals across the world. The years that have elapsed since the release of 2022's Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 album signalled a new era, bringing the career-spanning collection Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr, the acclaimed photobookMarr's Guitars, full orchestral concert A Night With The Johnny Marr Orchestra, the Look Out Live! album, as well as writing and recording with Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and performing on the HELP(2) album with Grian Chatten (Fontaines DC) and Kae Tempest - the latest in a long line of exciting and unexpected collaborations.

Listen to The Age Of Everything here. The new album is available on CD, black vinyl and limited edition red vinyl.

Follow @JohnnyMarrGram

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New Talk Art podcast episode! Robert meets artist Lewis Hammond to explore his first museum presentation in the UK, featuring a new body of paintings developed specifically for The Hepworth Wakefield.

A graduate of the Royal Academy School in 2017, Hammond’s practice reflects a fascination with the materiality of oil paint and the evocative power of dark, earthy tones. His charged, fantastical paintings interweave mythological elements with contemporary themes and explore the interplay between personal relationships and global socio-political events. Drawing inspiration from Old Masters like Caravaggio, Velåzquez, and Goya, he creates haunting, statuesque figures that traverse boundaries between the individual and the archetypal.

At The Hepworth Wakefield, Hammond explores the theme of home and what defines a place of belonging. He examines how various states of existence can strip us of this sense, leaving us to confront the dislocation and alienation that arise from being without a place to call home. Hammond’s paintings serve as love letters to both notions of home and to those who are without one.

As an artist who has spent several years based in Berlin – and is now returning to the UK to establish his studio – this exhibition serves as both a homecoming and a reflection on themes of disconnection and ways of coming together.

🔗 Follow @LewisLHammond

🖼️ Lewis Hammond: Crystal in the Shade is open now at The @HepworthWakefield, running until 1st November 2026.

Visit: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/lewis-hammond/

Special thanks to Rozsa and the team at @ArcadiaMissa, who represent Lewis in London.

📻 Listen to @TalkArt podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! Hosted by @RobertDiament.

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Robert meets Lykke Li to discuss her new album The Afterparty, collaborating with artist Monty Richthofen on the cover artwork, and her powerful, ongoing creative partnership with experimental filmmaker and director Theo Lindquist. We explore her friendship and duet with the late David Lynch, and also look back to when Lindquist, Lykke Li, and artist Nick Verstand created their immersive, hyper-sensory multimedia installation at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition projected Lindquist's visual loops in high-resolution spatial audio to simulate a "cathedral of female romantic fantasy".

We learn about the inspiration Lykke finds in the work of artists includingHelen Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Pina Bausch, Tracey Emin, Marina Abramović, Jordan Wolfson, as well as Patti Smith, Joan Didion, Claire Denis and Isabelle Huppert. Plus, this week also sees Lykke Li perform live at The Met museum in New York, just as her song I Follow Rivers reached one billion streams on Spotify.

Lykke Li is a singular force in Swedish pop, where fragility hits the bullseye every time. She makes music as if it were both a diary and a spotlight, an intimate confession and a cold, unblinking stare straight back. They

She broke through with her debut album Youth Novels in 2008, in which the echoes of 60s girl-group pop took on a new kind of electric solitude. Her second album, Wounded Rhymes, tightened the rhythm and the shadow until it started to glow. In that era, I Follow Rivers became an international breakthrough moment. This song escaped into clubs, festivals, and headphones as a shared language and found a second life through remixes.

Her third album, I Never Learn, made heartbreak big, bare, and unflinching. Then came a turn toward a shinier present on the so sad so sexy era, and Eyeyequieted everything again until even a whisper feels like bass. Now she is already pointing toward what comes next. New music is now here, with the new album, Afterparty, and its monumental first single Lucky Again.

Lykke Li is an artist the whole world watches, but she refuses to pose for that gaze. She creates a space where pop is art, emotion is physical, and beauty is allowed to be a little ugly. It is confident, a bit ruthless, and dangerously addictive at the same time. The kind of music you dance to, only to realise later that something went straight under your skin.

And even though attitude does not need metrics, the scale is still there. She is not just a critic’s secret favourite, but a maker who has taken major Swedish honours, moved across the world’s biggest stages, and written songs that stay alive in a way very few can manage. This is the point where she stops explaining herself and simply owns the room.

Follow @LykkeLi

The Afterparty is out now on Vinyl and CD via Neon Gold Records. Buy the limited blue or clear vinyls from LykkeLi.com

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Robert meets painterEileen Cooper RA to discuss her new London solo exhibition Learning to Fly, whilst also exploring her evolution across numerous bodies of work made across the past 5 decades. World renowned for her work as a painter and printmaker, Cooper also embraces drawing, collage, ceramics, and sculpture in her expansive practice.

Eileen Cooper was born 1953 in Glossop, in the Derbyshire Peak District. Having studied at Goldsmith’s College, Cooper completed her Master of Arts in Painting at Royal College of Art in 1977. Throughout her career Cooper’s work has contained a strong autobiographical element. However, her vision is always more allegorical and poetic than anecdotal, her concerns and experiences as relevant and timeless as those of the human spirit itself.

A strong colourist and described as a magic realist, Cooper brings an unapologetically female perspective to her subject matter, encompassing sexuality, motherhood, life and death. Her images, simultaneously bold and tender, reveal a range of feeling that is both deeply engrossing and readily accessible, yet very much part of contemporary art practice.

During the 1980s she became a major figure, well known and regarded for her strong and passionate figuration. Cooper has always taught part time in numerous institutions including St Martins, Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. She became a Royal Academician in 2001 and served as Keeper of the Royal Academy between 2010 and 2017, making her the first woman in the history of the Academy to do so.

Sometimes described as a magic realist, Eileen Cooper brings an unapologetically female perspective to her subject-matter, which encompasses sexuality, motherhood, life and death. Her richly diverse images, simultaneously bold and tender, reveal a range of feeling that is both deeply engrossing and readily accessible, yet still very much part of contemporary art practice.

An oversized woman floats in the sky as if dropped from a plane or whipped up in a hurricane, her limbs caught up in currents of air. Below her are rolling mountains, a river, skeletal trees with new leaves on their branches – a sign of spring, fresh beginnings, a period of becoming. This is Learning to Fly, the titular painting of Eileen Cooper’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellgjerde Gallery, Tower Bridge, which leads us through spaces – and states – of transition and creativity. 

Learning to Fly, a new solo exhibition by Eileen Cooper is now open runs until 3rd October 2026 at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery in London’s Tower Bridge.

Follow: @Eileen_Cooper_RA

Visit: https://kristinhjellegjerde.com/exhibitions/582/overview/

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New Talk Art podcast! Robert meets Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL, a British Jamaican poet, educator, and writer. His work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory. 

Born in Hackney, London, Antrobus was diagnosed as deaf at age six. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

His writing reflects a lived experience shaped by both mainstream and deaf schooling, and a profound engagement with questions of communication and belonging.

The Quiet Ear tells his story - from childhood to fatherhood - and the stories of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers - the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity Antrobus did not have growing up.

Told with the electrifying prose of a poet, this groundbreaking and moving memoir explores family, identity, history and language, and what it means to be in a world saturated with noise.

Widely celebrated, his poetry has earned the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2019, he became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. His poems have been added to the GCSE syllabus in the UK, and his children’s book Can Bears Ski? was the first book to be read using BSL on the BBC, by Rose Ayling-Ellis.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021. This year, Antrobus served as a judge for the Booker Prize 2026.

The Quiet Ear, his first work of prose, is a groundbreaking memoir and cultural history of deafness. Raymond currently lives and works between New Orleans, US and Margate, UK.

Follow @Raymond_Antrobus

Buy Raymond Antrobus’ new paperback here, out now in the UK and worldwide.

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It’s Season 28!!! New Talk Art podcast hosted by Robert Diament.

Robert meets painter John Currin, recorded at his solo show Opening Credits at Sadie Coles.

Currin is widely recognised for his figurative oil paintings in which themes of sexual personae and historical painterly genres appear in surreal and at times, disconcerting guises. Oscillating between a graphic sexuality and playful symbolism, Currin captures the tones and textures of everyday life with an acute sensitivity and a meticulous attention to detail.

John Currin’s show at Sadie Coles’ Savile Row gallery focuses on a new series of paintings that set pairs or triplets of women with exaggerated physiques in ornamental, Arcadian landscapes. In the sequence of twelve mid-size paintings, performative models, reinterpreted from the pages of 1970s clothing catalogues, are poised in a confident display that provides Currin with the means to explore classical painting. In his rendering of the tension of fabric stretched tight across breasts, the light on feathered leaves and gnarled trunks, the radiant softness of flesh and hair, and the self-conscious assembly of limbs, these tableaus allow Currin to make masterful paintings that replace a disappointing contemporary world, with a ‘lost golden world’ that holds his nostalgia for the past. A group of five new drawings in ink on washed paper interpret the paintings in a new medium and sketches from his process are shown alongside the finished works. 

Currin was the opening exhibition of the gallery in 1997, and in the nearly thirty years since, his combination of academic virtuosity and contemporary fetish has unapologetically progressed his painterly agenda. His male and female figures are an endlessly exciting architecture for paint; these new works show bodies that are various and imperfect, that perhaps suggest the ageing process and remind us that Currin has always made works that are in some way autobiographical. There is surprise in the dimensions of these bodies, an affectionate gag on the changing physiognomy of age, when shapes slip from the ideal to the fantastic.

However, these imagined inhabitants of Arcadia present the easy confidence of maturity, of serenity and luxury, and capture the mutual misunderstanding of a child’s view of adults and an adult’s view of childhood. Pairing an imaginary landscape familiar in Poussin or in Watteau’s romanticised and fantastical Journey to the Isle of Cythera, 1717, with the reality of Acadia National Park in Maine, Currin gives us an ornamental landscape bearing the animated actors, hilltops, weather and clouds of both the idealised past and the current self.

John Currin Opening Credits runs until 12th September 2026 at Sadie Coles, 17 Savile Row W1S.

Follow @SadieColesHQ and @TalkArt for

imsges of all artworks discussed in this episode.

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New @TalkArt podcast episode! Season 27 finale!

Robert meets Matthew Slotover OBE, legendary publisher and entrepreneur. This episode was recorded live from Maison Estelle in London.

Matthew Slotover co-founded the art magazine Frieze in 1991 and grew into a major media and events company that has a focus on the art scene and since 2003 produces the annual Frieze Art Fair in London, later joined by fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul.

In 2021 he opened Toklas, a Mediterranean restaurant in London, and in 2022, he launched Fort Road Hotel in Margate.

Matthew is currently chair of Turner Contemporary, Margate, and a board member of Sadlers Wells and the Walpole Group.

He is a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, and a founding board member of Murmur, an environmental charity dedicated to using the Arts to combat climate change. Matthew served as a trustee of the Arts Foundation until 2024.

Follow @MSlotover

Thanks for listening to Season 27. I will return soon for a whole new series!!!!

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Robert meets Luis Felber, a London based South-American multi-instrumentalist best known as Attawalpa. His meticulous production, melodies and honest lyrics evoke the future as much as the past.

We explore his love of art and growing up with an artist mother Alma Laura de Felber, a prominent Peruvian painter and artist. The Lima-born painter makes colorful, emotionally resonant oil paintings often explore themes of identity, the feminine, and human connection.

Born in Winchester, England, Felber spent his earliest years in Peru and Chile before moving back to Britain at age 7. At 17, he skipped university and began pursuing a career in music, playing guitar with several different bands and co-founding influential club night and record label Young Turks.

Felber actively incorporates his creative roots into his projects. His mother's art has been featured in his work, and he frequently collaborates with his wife, Lena Dunham including on the soundtrack for her film Catherine Called Birdy and by co-creating and scoring the Netflix comedy series Too Much.

Recording and performing under the name Attawalpa (his middle name, after the 16th-century Incan ruler Atahualpa), his albums Experience and Presence are both available now on vinyl and at all streaming platforms.

Follow: @Attawalpa

Visit: https://attawalpa.com/

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Robert meets Belfast-born Kathryn Ferguson, an Emmy and BAFTA nominated, BIFA and IFTA winning director whose innovative and boundary-pushing documentary work has screened globally. We explore art as activism and how film has the power to reveal, and amplify, untold stories. Kathryn studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and in 2022 was awarded the inaugural BFI & Chanel Award for Creative Audacity. 

In 2018, Kathryn's short documentary Taking the Waters about Margate’s open water swimming premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest, and was long-listed for a BAFTA. Then, in 2021, Kathryn worked with Passion Pictures on the short Space to Be for The Guardian's acclaimed documentary series. 

After a decade of short-form work centred on identity, gender politics, and community, Kathryn recently completed her debut feature documentary Nothing Compares - which takes as its subject Sinéad O'Connor's artistry and activism. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 then toured the international festival circuit, where it picked up multiple awards, before hitting cinemas in October 2022. It has received over thirty award nominations internationally, including Emmy, Critics Choice, IDA, and PGA Awards, and was awarded winner of Best Feature Documentary at BIFA 2022 and IFTA 2023. Nothing Compares is now available to watch on Showtime and Sky. 

Her second feature, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Universal), was released in US cinemas in 2024. 

In 2024 she also co-founded Tara Films with producer Eleanor Emptage; their latest, Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story, premiered at TIFF 2024, and the company is currently developing a slate of non-fiction and drama projects. Alongside her film work, Ferguson has directed campaigns for Nike, Selfridges, Amnesty International, and Air France, and collaborated with artists such as Lady Gaga and Neneh Cherry. 

Nostalgie, Kathryn's first drama short starring Aiden Gillen, about a faded 80's pop star, has recently been nominated for a BAFTA and won Best Short Film at the IFTAs 2026. The film is available to watch on Channel 4. 

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Robert meets Mariane Ibrahim, leading gallerist and curator, whose mission is dedicated to the elevation and advocacy of diverse global artistic practices, with a particular spotlight on Africa and the diaspora. We explore her galleries in three cities: Mexico City, Paris and Chicago, and the artists she has championed over the past 15 years.

Currently representing artists from across the world, Ibrrahim is driven towards expanding the confines of the creative landscape. Ibrahim’s program compels her to act as something of an ambassador for nuance and complexity in an art world still prone to generalisation. While several of the emerging artists she represents hail from African countries or are members of the African diaspora, Ibrahim emphasises that they – and by extension, her gallery – have much more to offer than simplistic regional or heritage based labels could ever contain.

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery is a highly influential contemporary art gallery that focuses on supporting and championing artists from the African diaspora and diverse global backgrounds. Founded in 2012 by Somali-French art dealer Mariane Ibrahim, the gallery has experienced a phenomenal international expansion, establishing a presence across three different continents.

Follow @MarianeIbrahimGallery

Visit: https://marianeibrahim.com/

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Robert meets legendary photographer ANTON CORBIJN to discuss his major retrospective opening this weekend in Berlin at Fotografiska museum.

The story of Anton Corbijn begins in the quiet corners of a small Dutch island, where he grew up as the son of a vicar. For a young Corbijn, music was an escape, a passion that consumed him. His camera soon became both a tool and a companion, a way to channel his fascination with music and, perhaps more importantly, a means to navigate his own shyness.

When Corbijn moved to London in 1979, the city was electric with the energy of bands like The Clash, The Jam, and Joy Division. Within ten days of arriving in England, he managed to photograph Joy Division claiming he was on assignment for a major Dutch magazine, even though he hadn’t been officially commissioned.

Now, having celebrated his 70th birthday last year, Corbijn looks back on over five decades of work that spans photography, music videos, and film. Corbijn, Anton celebrates his 50-year career and revisits his extensive body of work. Here, you will encounter nearly 150 pieces: iconic portraits of legends like Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, and Marlene Dumas, as well as German icons Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wim Wenders. His signature black-and-white grainy aesthetic became a defining visual language in his work.

A polymath in photography, music videos, feature films, graphic design, and commercials, Dutchman Anton Corbijn is perhaps best known for immortalizing some of the greatest artists of our time. His iconic portraits of musicians, directors, and artists, such as Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Marlene Dumas among others, are praised for the way they capture the soul and charisma of his subjects.

Effortlessly moving in the early 80s from photography into music videos, Corbijn has since made over 80 promos for people like U2, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Coldplay, and The Killers. He is the Artistic Director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode. For U2 he has done the principal promotion and sleeve photography for four decades.

In 2006 Corbijn started working on his first feature film Control about the life, and death, of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s lead singer. The film won many awards worldwide, including 5 BIFAs and the Camera d’Or Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival 2007. Corbijn has since made The American starring George Clooney (2010), A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John Le Carré and featuring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (2014), and Life, about James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock, which stars Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan (2015).

In 2023, Corbijn released his first feature documentary Squaring The Circle about the iconic album art design studio Hipgnosis. In 2025, he directed his fifth feature film titled Switzerlandstarring Helen Mirren.

Follow: @AntonCorbijn4Real

Visit the exhibition: @Fotografiska.Berlin

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Robert meets MEEK, an emerging singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose newEP Fabulous has become a favourite of the art world, and global queer community, since debuting in February. We discuss how art has inspired her creativity and life, including the work of Magritte, Tracey Emin, Georgia O’Keefe and her passion for the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A and visiting museums in London.

We explore her devotion to artistry within her music, visuals and costumes including recent collaborations with filmmaker Sophie Muller and performance artist Theo Adams on her debut music videos, and sold out live shows at the Garage and SXSW.

MEEK is not a work in progress. She is fully formed, earned her stripes, comes from nothing, nepo-baby baiting execution of timeless pop brilliance. While sounding directly descended from the DNA of famed countercultural misfits and bona fide pop aces, all strewn across the decades, her music is a no messing, straight shoot for the top. Georgia Meek understands that people like her only get one chance to make a first impression.

Frequently, her songs will open out with a stringent big note, a walloping guitar figure, the best hook in her almanac of songwriter-ly resources. Because they have to. “I’ve never had the option to ask,” she says. “I’ve always had to take. I’ve always had to force my way through closed doors. That’s what shapes my sound. Yes, we will start with a huge vocal note to make people turn around and listen. Yes, I will say in the studio, give me some hair-raising guitar windmills. Let’s do that. You waste thirty seconds and you’ve lost it.”

Equally, MEEK’s visual aesthetic is once seen, never forgotten. She wants to reclaim dressing up for everyone, not just those that can afford to indulge in the monied whimsy of high fashion. “I have a clear visual thing for myself, which is basically prom outfits for poor people.” She’s the Cinderella who flipped a finger at the Ugly Sisters, then invited them along to join in the fun, too. “It’s about being absolute glam-trash and owning it. That pink tulle over a stained Adidas jacket? Throw it on. I just want it to feel like something anybody can put together themselves, a sustainable way to look fucking wild. Why not?” 

The best thing about MEEK? There is a point to her. She is as if the comedy queen, Daisy May Cooper stumbled into a charity shop, found a bunch of glittering second hand couture, dolled herself up shamelessly in it, injected the raw spirit of Freddie Mercury and emerged, Mr Ben style, as a fully-fledged MEGASTAR in the making out of the changing rooms, then lead a troubadour of misfits singing down the high street. There is not what you might call a shortage of self-confidence in MEEK. As she sings herself, on a calling card anthem which is sure to become the earworm of the nation once unleashed upon its airwaves: “I’m so f*cking fabulous.”

This week sees MEEK performing live on numerous TV shows including Saturday Night Live UK, with Aimee Lou Wood as well as her USA TV debut with Jimmy Fallon.

Follow @MustBeMeek

Listen to Meek’s new EP Fabulous out now:

https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/meek/1784432868

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Robert meets painter David Dawson to discuss his new large scale landscape paintings, part of an ongoing body of work created en plein air in the artist's county of Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales.

From April 25 – October 11, ‘Land, Sky, Light’ is a solo exhibition at Gainsborough’s House featuring fifteen of David Dawson’s (b. 1960) recent large-scale paintings of his native Welsh countryside. 

Having left Wales for London where he was a student at the Chelsea School of Art and later becoming a model and assistant to Lucian Freud, these paintings represent an artist returning to their childhood home to explore the nature and solitude of its surroundings.

The canvases possess a deeply autobiographical nature, being representative of Dawson's formative childhood years in the country side, and his continued experiences of solitude and connection.

Initially painted outdoors during each season of the year, the artist continues to work on them in his London studio to then complete them back in the countryside. About this creative process, which can take years, the artist states: 

“Painting to me is about the reality of being in the land and making marks that correlate to me reacting to that experience. You paint what you think you know. When I’m in the land, I always get surprised by what I see, even if I thought I knew the landscape in which I grew up so well. That’s why I need to be there, en plein air. Painting to me is very much about being in the presence of the land”.

Forcing the artist to be alone in the fields, exposed to the elements, Dawson’s canvases are deeply autobiographical as they connect him to his formative years growing up in the countryside, when the artist learned about solitude.

Dawson describes his practice in almost meditative terms: painting the Welsh landscape and its waterfalls, “being in the presence of the land”, becomes a way of getting rid of his ego, to reach a feeling of connection and communion with nature. 

Follow @DavidEliDawson and @GainsboroughsHouse

David is represented by @GalleriaLorcanONeill

Visit the exhibition: https://gainsborough.org/event/land-sky-light-new-landscapes-by-david-dawson/

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Robert meets Nick Willing at the studio of his mother Paula Rego (1935–2022) to discuss a major exhibition of drawings and works on paper by Rego, opening this week at Victoria Miro in London. 

The most comprehensive exhibition of Rego’s drawings to date, Story Line features works from the 1950s until the artist’s death, shining new light on Rego’s evolving use of line in media from pen and ink to pastel, conté, charcoal and pencil, and how it was driven by her unique approach to storytelling throughout her life. The exhibition is

accompanied by a new book written by the artist’s son, Nick Willing.

‘When you write your story… invention comes when you do a drawing. As you are drawing something, it very often turns into something else, and you can go with it. It develops in a completely different way, it’s organic and it’s done with the hand. The hand makes it change and so on.’ – Paula Rego, The White Review, 2011

Paula Rego considered herself first and foremost a ‘drawrer’ (her word). From political protest to personal introspection, activism to domestic power games, subversive humour to challenging family relationships, it was through drawing that she understood herself and the world around her, discovering ways of expressing complex

ideas through a single image. As Nick Willing comments, ‘A Rego drawing is never just one thing, but many feelings working together to reveal the truth. They not only helped her understand the world but can also help us understand it too.’Driven by her distinctive approach to storytelling, this exhibition demonstrates how Rego adapted her line to

emphasise the emotional nuance of the stories she told, and how her drawing techniques also reflected her interior emotional narrative. The works reveal the unique development of an artist whose visual storytelling, drawn from a wide variety of sources, spoke directly to us about the essential human traits of desire, loss, violence and power.

The works on show vary from intimate drawings which have never been exhibited before to studies for some of Rego’s most recognisable paintings. These are accompanied by notes, letters, sketchbooks, photographs and other archival material from throughout Rego’s life – among myriad rarities is a drawing Rego made when she was nine years old of her grandmother, while the exhibition concludes with works including a drawing she made of her own granddaughter.

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@TalkArt continues with an in-depth interview on the work of GWEN JOHN with curator @Lucy.C.Wood to explore a major exhibition Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Museum Cardiff. Hosted by @RobertDiament.

This once-in-a-generation exhibition brings together over 200 oil paintings, drawings and watercolours from public and private collections across the world with rarely seen works on paper from the artist’s studio collection to celebrate her 150th birthday. Born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 1876, Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art in London and was one of the first British women to receive a formal art education. She later moved to Paris, where she became part of its vibrant artistic community, forging an independent path in a male-dominated art world.

Gwen John is one of Wales' most extraordinary artists. She saw the world differently — quietly, attentively, and with extraordinary depth. That difference shaped everything: her subjects, her method, her colours, her words, her work. 

It is the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist's work in over forty years. It tells Gwen’s story — revealing new ways of seeing her life and art and celebrating an artist whose vision still feels strikingly modern today. This is an invitation — to see the world through Gwen’s eyes — to slow down, look closer and discover the wonder in her work. Unmissable — for both newcomers and devoted admirers alike.

Listen to Talk Art podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Lucy Wood is Senior Curator of Art at Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales. She is co-curator of Gwen John: Strange Beauties (2026) and co-editor of the accompanying monograph with Rachel Stratton, Yale Center for British Art.

Follow @MuseumWales

Visit: https://museum.wales/cardiff/whatson/12640/Gwen-John-Strange-Beauties/

#GwenJohn 

Exhibition organised by Amgueddfa Cymru in partnership with National Galleries of Scotland, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and Yale Center for British Art.

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Robert meets Sir Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro gallery in London to explore 4 decades of making art. We also meet Julien’s long term collaborator Mark Nash to explore his major five-screen film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, 2025 and new photographic works. 

All That Changes You. Metamorphosisis a vivid, sweeping, visual poem about change, what it means to transform, to adapt and to survive. Commissioned to celebrate 500 years of Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy (where it is currently on view) and exhibited here for the first time as a five-screen installation, Julien’s latest work moves between science fiction, philosophy, ecology and art, imagining new forms of life and identity beyond the human.

All That Changes You. Metamorphosis draws inspiration from thinkers who explore how transformation shapes who we are and how we live, including writers Octavia Butler, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin and philosopher Donna Haraway. Their ideas weave through the film’s layered images and lyrical dialogue. Two protagonists are at the heart of the film, played by internationally acclaimed actors Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie.

Isaac Julien is as acclaimed for his fluent, arresting films as for his vibrant and inventive gallery installations. One of the objectives of his work is to break down the barriers that exist between different artistic disciplines, drawing from and commenting on film, dance, photography, music, theatre, painting and sculpture, and uniting them to construct a powerfully visual narrative.

Julien came to prominence in the film world with his 1989 drama-documentary Looking for Langston, gaining a cult following with this poetic exploration of Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. During the past three decades he has made work largely, though not exclusively, for galleries and museums, using multi-screen installations to express fractured narratives exploring memory and desire.

Julien’s major film installations include Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die), 2022, commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in celebration of its centennial, an immersive five-screen installation exploring the relationship between Dr Albert C. Barnes, who was an early US collector and exhibitor of African material culture, and the famed philosopher and cultural critic Alain Locke, known as the ‘Father of the Harlem Renaissance’; Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass, 2019, a meditation on the life, words, and actions of Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the visionary African American abolitionist and freed slave, and on the issues of social justice that shaped his life’s work; Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement, 2019, reflecting on the iconic work and on the legacy of the visionary modernist architect and designer (1914–1992); PLAYTIME, 2014, which explores the dramatic and nuanced subject of financial capital; Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, exploring China's ancient past and rapidly transforming present through a series of interlocking narratives. 

Mark Nash is an independent curator, film historian, and filmmaker with a specialisation in contemporary avant-garde and world cinema. He is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he founded the Isaac Julien Lab@with his partner and long-time collaborator, artist Sir Isaac Julien. He has a PhD from Middlesex University and an MA from Cambridge University. 

Follow @IsaacJulien

Isaac Julien’s major retrospective opens in Bergamo at gresart671 on 10th April 2026 and he will also showing a single screen version of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis at The Cosmic House in London from 22nd April, learn more here. 

Special thanks to Victoria Miro gallery.

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Season 27 @TalkArt continues with TRACEY EMIN. Hosted by @RobertDiament. 

An exclusive new interview recorded in Margate within Crossing Into Darkness, a group exhibition curated by Dame Tracey Emin including works by 21 international artists.

Crossing Into Darkness brings together a group of artists whose works confront the darkness inherent in human experience, not as something to be feared but as a necessary threshold toward renewal. In times marked by upheaval and uncertainty, this journey feels both universal and deeply personal.

Featuring works by David Altmejd, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Laura Footes, Antony Gormley, Francisco Goya, Gilbert & George, Celia Hempton, Anselm Kiefer, Joline Kwakkenbos, Mark Manders, Danielle Mckinney, Lindsey Mendick, Juanita McNeely, Edvard Munch, Hermann Nitsch, Janice Nowinski, Anna Pakosz and Johnnie Shand Kydd.

The title of the show is very self explanatory, especially for the times we are living in. But even so we have always had our own journeys. And I feel that we have to cross into darkness to find light. I’d like this show to be very emotionally immersive and people to feel the strength and vibrations within the works. I want people to know that art isn’t just something that you look at. That it has a deeper purpose and can penetrate all souls. I love the idea of people coming to Margate on the greyest of winter days with gale force winds and crashing waves to make the pilgrimage to see the show.

– Dame Tracey Emin

Follow @TraceyEminStudio

Special thanks to @CarlFreedmanGallery

This powerful group show runs until Sunday 12th April at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Free entry, no booking required.

Tracey Emin’s major solo exhibition A Second Life runs until Sunday 31st August 2026 at Tate Modern, London. Tickets available from Tate. 

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Talk Art Season 27 continues with COLLIER SCHORR.

Over four decades, Collier Schorr has used photography to scrutinise the conditions and realities of contemporary subjectivity and what it means to visually represent a body - and a self. Motivated, in part, by an underlying search for alternatives to the desirous heterosexual gaze; her work has remained focused on several key themes including beauty, desire, selfhood, and masculinity and its discontents. Schorr’s early work was made in the 1980s and 1990s in New York and Germany, during the coalescence of postmodernism and identity politics. 

Her work from that period navigated the tension between documentary and fiction, and tested out the capacity of photography to unveil desire and repression, explore taboo identities, and highlight the contradictions inherent in subjectivity, especially in relation to gender norms. In more recent times, the artist has incorporated dance into her practice predominantly through adapting Chantal Ackerman’s film, ‘Je Tu Il Elle’ (1975), into a full-length filmed ballet performance featuring Schorr as Ackerman and a core group of professional dancers collaborating to create a multi-channel video installation.

Schorr’s new exhibition in Paris is now open. ‘Problems and other stories’ brings together photographs, collages, notes, drawings and video produced over the past seven years that reconsider who an artwork is for, the multitude of places people belong and the way Schorr encounters different worlds. The title is drawn from John Updike’s collection of short stories written over the 1970s. For Schorr, the ‘problem’ opens out into a place of resistance and exploration, rather than a limitation or constraint. Runs until 4th April at Modern Art, Paris.

Follow @CollierSchorrStudio

Visit: https://www.modernart.net/en/exhibitions/collier-schorr-2026

Special thanks to @StuartShaveModernArt & @303Gallery 

Listen to Talk Art podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!

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Talk Art Season 27 continues with sculptor Nicolas Deshayes whose works explore the form and materiality of bodies and what happens below their surfaces. Hosted by Robert Diament.

Process, or processing, is the impetus for Deshayes’ sculptures, which manage to convey states of liquid, hardness, hot, cold, and mechanically produced objects and systems. Vital processes of ingestion, and circulation, are evoked by elegantly utilitarian forms. Deshayes’ surfaces are consistently impermeable – recalling the architecture of public amenities.

Using predominantly casting methods with bronze, iron, or earthenware, Deshayes tends to seek out artisans and factories who specialise in techniques of production; their historical lineages and geographical particularities converging within his conceptualisation of the work as it develops.

Extreme heat is used in these casting processes commonly and the materials rely on changes in temperature in order to come alive. But molten metal rapidly hardens into a solid form, its movement as if suspended in time. Deshayes has recently rendered some of these sculptures functional again, plumbing hot water around a room, or pumping water into public ponds.

In his 2016 installation Thames Water, he recast the gallery as an organism by installing a series of interconnected radiators, in doing so concretising an analogy of the body and its systems to the plumbed and networked city. It is in these works that we are reminded of how their organic forms are not only reminiscent of the bodies of humans, but also of domestic, civic and biological circulatory systems.

Nicolas Deshayes was born in Nancy, France, in 1983, and lives and works in Dover. 

Follow: @NicolasDeshayes

Pillow Talk, a joint exhibition with Nicolas Deshayes & Paloma Proudfoot, runs at @QuenchGallery in Margate until 22nd March 2026.

Thanks to Stuart Shave Modern Art. Learn more: https://www.modernart.net/en/artists/nicolas-deshayes

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Catherine Chinatree is a socially engaged multi-disciplinary artist based in Margate. She works in various contexts, including in the public realm. Her work focuses on the idea of shared “reality,” with an emphasis on identity, dualism, and cultural fluidity. This exploration is supported by research in anthropology, social surrealism, and human behaviour.

Being of Welsh, Caribbean and Irish descent, she is deeply rooted in hybrid culture and seeks inspiration from the outside world of everyday life, our daily activities, symbolism, rituals, and the people she meets.

Chinatree’s recent series of works invites the viewers on a visual journey through the realms of personal and subcultures exploring ideas of youth, class, memory and nostalgia, it highlights optimism & transformative moments that can alter society.  

Chinatree aims to evoke a palette that reflects the bass-heavy underground movement, artificial lighting and a sense of the unknown going hand in hand with the uncertainty of teenage years. At that time, pioneers of a new music genre looked to the future, with nods to outer space, and ideas of otherworldly beings, all of which are reflected in this work. 

The Crystallisation of the urban experience is layered and sampled, reconnecting it with the present. Working-class youth - black, brown and white united to dance is a testament to sound system culture and the creation of a new reality reflecting urban Britain, black roots & experimental sounds. 

With close ties to Leicester, Chinatree’s hometown, the work is supported by research and recordings from original attendees, event organisers, the venue’s history and future plans. Blending new footage, lived experiences and digital memories. Described by many as one of the darkest raves attended “Some shadow demon business”, the work illuminates its legacy. 

Catherine Chinatree studied at Wimbledon College of Arts, graduating with a Masters in Fine Art. She was awarded the Ferdynand Zweig Arts travel Scholarship award, and set up a collaborative engagement project between the UK and Havana, Cuba. She has been shortlisted for the Mercury Music Arts Prize, Nasty Woman NYC and The Griffin x Elephant New Graduates Arts Prize. She completed an artist residency with Elephant Magazine and has been sponsored by Liquitex Paints. She was commissioned by Artquest for their 20th anniversary, which was subsequently displayed at UAL in Holborn, London.

Recently she was commissioned by Artist Globe for The World Reimagined project, which is on permanent show at the World Museum in Liverpool. She created a mural for Rise Up Residency Mural in Margate and as part of the Commemorative Installation Campaign, created a Tapestry for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. She recently co created a billboard Artwork with Kent Refugee action network, and is a panelist for Artcry, supporting artists to make work in response to social and political events.

Follow @CatherineChinatree on Instagram.

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Talk Art season 27 continues with British painter GEORG WILSON!!! Hosted by Robert Diament.

A spirit of place informs #GeorgWilson’s practice. Drawing inspiration from ancient English folklore, poetry and painting, the artist depicts bountiful landscapes that exceed the natural; devoid of human presence, they are instead inhabited by wildling creatures that live harmoniously with the land. Wilson’s world-building is enriched by her unique approach to texture and mark-making that unifies all surfaces, forms and beings.

Painting with the seasons, Wilson’s work captures the cyclical rhythm of our existence, where birth meets growth, growth meets death and death awaits resurrection. Vibrant reds and bright greens shift to vivid yellows and deep browns as the seasons turn, and the land that was once overflowing with abundance is ready to lie dormant as the year comes to an end. 

This new series of paintings explores the folklore and historic uses of uncultivated poisonous plants, species such as henbane, thorn-apple and nightshade that grow abundantly across the UK, that have long but frequently forgotten histories in both folk and modern medicine. Drawing on historic texts about poisonous flora, Wilson highlights the gradual erosion of plant knowledge in Britain, a process that began as early as the fifteenth century, following the enclosure of common land and the subsequent rise of industrialisation. 

Against Nature,a solo exhibition of new works by Georg Wilson, runs at Pilar Corrias until 7th March on Savile Row, London, and Georg’s debut institutional exhibition The Earth Exhalesruns until 1st March at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh.

🔗 Follow @Georg.Kitty

Thanks to @PilarCorriasGallery and @Jupiter.Artland

📻 Listen to Talk Art podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts!

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Season 27 begins! This new season is hosted by Robert Diament.

Robert meets Holly Blakey, one of the foremost choreographers of her generation and one of the few female choreographers in the UK creating large-scale work.

Her practice attends to the honest entanglements of embodied vulnerability, grief, and joy, always rooted in an intersectional feminist frame. Her live performance work has been presented at major cultural institutions Southbank Centre, Hales Gallery and Théâtre National de Chaillot.

As a director and choreographer, she has collaborated with music stars including Robyn (for her new Sexistential album), Rosalía, Harry Styles, Celeste, and Florence + The Machine, alongside visual artists Linder Sterling, Jeremy Deller and Tai Shani,and with fashion houses such as Vivienne Westwood, Burberry and Dior, and in films including Urchin (2025) directed by Harris Dickinson and Harvest directed by Athina Tsangari, interweaving live and commercial contexts, much of her practice often plays on the relationship between these distinct but not wholly separable worlds.

We explore her 2026 collaboration with the Rambert dance company, as well as a new collaboration with artist Tai Shani, her 2025 ambitious double bill (for the Southbank Centre) titled Phantom, and A Wound with Teeth, which took her choreography to a new level of intensity, intimacy and international visibility. Holly Blakey’s new full-length work Lowill premiere in 2026. Both works develop Blakey’s fascination with social and folk dance forms, which began with her use of line dance in the Cowpuncher series and continues into Phantom and Lo with exploration of collective responsibility and euphoria through this form. For the first time, they both begin from a highly personal place and are developed through close collaboration with the dancers, drawing on their own experiences of grief and estrangement on the one hand, and pleasure and self-assertion on the other.

A Wound with Teeth:

How can loss of memory be a site of potential? In this excerpt from the new full-length work, Lo, Blakey uses her own experience of forgetting to create a work that questions our ability to remember, and also to imagine and invent, at the border of the rational and the irrational. In a world that is sometimes terrifying and perverse, fighting for our own survival also means creating stories, and our own monsters and beasts.

Phantom:

Carried by ten dancers engaged in a choreography on the verge of ritual, Holly Blakey explores with tenderness, honesty and strength a particularly painful episode of her personal journey: her miscarriage. In collaboration with Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, creators of the Chopova Lowena brand and on a composition by the musician Gwilym Gold.

We also learn about her work in film including Harvest (2024) directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, where the entire movie revolved around choregraphy and movement.

Follow @HollyTBlakey and visit https://www.hollyblakey.co.uk/

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It’s the Talk Art Christmas special! We meet Alison Goldfrapp, the creative force behind some of the most captivating music of the past two and a half decades!!! We celebrate Alison’s new reinterpretation of David Bowie’s Heroes which she has just released with Lorne Balfe for The War Between The Land and The Sea soundtrack, the new TV series starting our very own Russell Tovey.

Having set a towering bar for synth-pop in the 21st century, Alison Goldfrapp– the magnetic British songwriter, vocalist, performer & producer – is recognised for approaching each iteration of her stellar career from an innovative new position. With the release of Alison's debut solo album The Love Invention — an electrifying dance-pop suite — her multi-faceted musicianship reaches a new peak. “It feels like a new time, and a new era,” Alison says decisively.

The momentum towards her journey into solo music was solidified back in 2021, when she was collabored with Röyksopp on the shimmering track “Impossible”. This led to Alison signing with legendary Skint Records and recording 'The Love Invention' which marks Alison’s reawakening as a dancefloor priestess, featuring an intoxicating showcase of the disco and house influences that have always been at the heart of her musical DNA.

Alison's previous seven albums with Goldfrapp were fuelled by an unfailing modernity & a sixth sense for sounds that were more timeless than any trend. The band's 1999 debut album 'Felt Mountain' was nominated for a Mercury Prize and over their career they produced 3 #1 US dance singles & received multiple Grammy nominations incl. Best Electronic/Dance Album. The multi-platinum selling band have won prestigious awards including 2 Ivor Novellos, ASCAP/PRS, Music Week, MTV Europe and Music Producers Guild award. They were also nominated for two BRITs and a Mercury.

Follow @Alison_Goldfrapp and @GoldfrappMusic.

Alison’s new album FLUX is out now.

Watch @TheWarBetweenTV now on BBC iplayer.

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Russell & Robert meet Barbara Dawson for a behind the scenes visit to Francis Bacon’s Studio, installed in Dublin’s iconic Hugh Lane Gallery. The gallery is currently closed to the public for major renovations so we thought it would be a great opportunity to bring the studio and galleries to life with this exclusive audio tour, while closed to public.

A visit to Francis Bacon’s Studio at Hugh Lane Gallery gives a unique opportunity to experience the working process of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists.

Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon grew up in county Kildare. He left home at the age of sixteen and eventually settled in London where he established himself as one of the leading international artists of his generation. Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews, London, in 1961 where he lived and worked until his death in 1992 (in Madrid).

We also loved seeing photographer Perry Ogden's iconic documentation of artist Francis Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, London. 

In 1998, director Barbara Dawson secured the donation of Francis Bacon’s studio from the artist’s heir, John Edwards, and Brian Clarke, executor of the Estate of Francis Bacon. Her vision was to remove the entire studio including all of the items without exception, as well as the architectural features, and relocate the studio as it was, to the Hugh Lane Gallery.

In the August of that year, as project manager, she assembled a team of conservators, curators, and archaeologists to carry out the move. The archaeologists made survey and elevation drawings of the small studio, mapping out the spaces and locations of all the objects, while the conservators prepared the works for travel and curators tagged and packed each of the items, including the dust. The walls, doors floor and ceiling were also removed.

Barbara Dawson is an Irish art historian, gallery director, curator and author. She has curated numerous significant exhibitions including retrospectives by notable artists including Francis Bacon, 2009. Dawson is the first female director of the Hugh Lane Gallery, a municipal art space and "the first known public gallery of modern art in the world" in Dublin. She has been the gallery's director since 1991.

Follow @TheHughLane and visit: https://hughlane.ie/arts_artists/francis-bacons-studio/

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We are delighted to announce the first ever Irish episode of Russell Tovey and Robert Diament’s acclaimed Talk Art podcast, recorded live at the National Gallery of Ireland Lecture Theatre on Saturday November 8th for Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025.

Isabel Nolan, Ireland’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike.

These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs illuminated with striking cosmic imagery, to drawings and paintings using humble gouache or colouring pencils. In concert, they feel equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection as well as its startling achievements in art and thought.

Driven by “the calamity, the weirdness, horror, brevity and wonder of existing alongside billions of other preoccupied humans”, her works give generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the chaos of the world is made beautiful or given meaning through human activity.

In 2026, Nolan will represent Ireland at the 61st Venice Biennale, with Georgina Jackson and The Douglas Hyde Gallery of Contemporary Art as the curator and Cian O’Brien as producer. In 2025, Nolan participated in the 13th Liverpool Biennial, Bedrock, curated by Marie-Anne McQuay. 

Isabel Nolan lives and works in Dublin.

Follow @NolanIsabel and @KerlinGallery.

Thank you @DublinGalleryWeekend, we loved visiting! We can’t wait to return to beautiful Ireland.

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This episode is a special partnership with BOSS. Special episode recorded during Miami Basel week, December 2025. #AD

Russell & Robert catch up with Marco Falcioni, Creative Director of HUGO BOSS. We discuss the Art Basel Awards which BOSS have been partnering with.

The BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement was presented at Art Basel Miami Beach to Meriam Bennani for her work entitled “For My Best Family.”

The BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement celebrates work that embodies the BOSS values of boldness, personal authenticity, ambition, and responsibility. It honors a singular work, produced within the last 18 months, that has catalyzed change at the intersection of art, technological innovation, social dialogue, and identity. 

Moroccan-born and New York-based, Meriam Bennani uses a broad range of artistic mediums that include video, sound, animation, sculpture as well as large-scale installations, among others. She’s known for mixing humor, pop-cultural aesthetics and digital language in her storytelling to create immersive, playful yet critical pieces that resonate with the viewer. 

The BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement has a prize of US$100,000 and empowers the awardee to amplify voices beyond their own, allowing them to allocate a reward of US$50,000 to a community or cause of the artist’s choosing. The remaining US$50,000 will be invested in a project, commission, or cultural activation by the artist that will be co-developed with BOSS.

Introduced earlier this year in May, the Art Basel Awards recognized 36 Medalists across nine categories within the contemporary art world. These categories included iconic, established, and emerging artists, as well as cross-disciplinary creators, curators, institutions, patrons, media and storytellers, and allies shaping the future of cutting-edge artistry. Through a peer-driven process, the Medalists then selected 12 Gold Medalists from among their ranks, who were honored with the highest distinction at last night’s ceremony.

BOSS has supported art for 30 years and is known for timeless and sophisticated style, and commitment to culture, sport and sustainability, underpinned by technical innovations developed over its century-long history. Russell explores his inspirations and design approach, including runway collections, collaborations with David Beckham, Aston Martin, and reimagining classics with a modern twist.

Follow @FalcioniMarco and @BOSS

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We meet curator Kate Bryan and artist David Shrigley to explore their new book How To Art. Recorded live in London, in front of a sold out audience.

What is art, where do I find it, and once I’m in front of it, what am I supposed to think about it? Kate Bryan is a self-confessed art addict who has worked with art for over twenty years. But before she studied art history at university, she’d visited a gallery just twice in her life and had no idea she was entering an elitist world. Now, she’s on a mission to help everybody come to art.

Like playing or listening to music, or cooking and eating great food, reading or watching films, making art or looking at other people’s deserves to be an enriching part of all our lives. How to Art provides a nifty way to ingest art on your own terms.

From where it is to what it is, to tips on how to actually enjoy famous artworks like the Mona Lisa, to how to own art and make art at home, to vital advice for making a career as an artist and even how to make your dog more cultural, How to Art gives art to everyone—and makes it fun. Laced throughout with original artworks by the very down-to-earth artist David Shrigley.

Follow @KateBryan_Art and @DavidShrigley

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#AD - Cork Street Galleries special episode!

We meet art critic Louisa Buck to explore 100 years of Cork Street!

Cork Street Galleries this year celebrates its centenary as a pioneering force in the art world, 

with 2025 marking 100 years as the iconic London art destination. A specially curated programme honours its rich legacy as the historic and enduring home of modern and 

contemporary art in London.

In tribute to the centennial year, a first-of-its-kind initiative, a group exhibition entitled Fear Gives Wings to Courage was staged across all 15 galleries on Cork Street in the Summer, with each gallery presenting a response to a central theme conceived by Tarini Malik, curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Fear Gives Wings to Courage has been commissioned in three parts as a response to the curatorial theme conceived by Malik. This is comprised of Fear Gives Wings to Courage Part I; a new edition of the Cork Street Galleries Banners Commission forming an outdoor element of the 

exhibition on view until the end of 2025; Fear Gives Wings to Courage Part II; a presentation 

of works within each participating gallery space, on view from 11 to 25 July 2025; and Fear 

Gives Wings to Courage Part III; CATALOGUE Issue 8:0, guest-edited by Malik, which coincided with Frieze London 2025.

Taking its title from Jean Cocteau’s seminal 1938 work La peur donnant des ailes au courage

(Fear Giving Wings to Courage), the exhibition celebrates 100 years of Cork Street and the 

transformative potential of artists' voices both within gallery spaces and outside of them. 

Gesturing to the street's long-established cultural history, the exhibition's theme recalls Cork 

Street’s pioneering role in transforming London into a hub for international art practices in 

the twentieth century, while also making it one of the key platforms in Europe for the 

expansion of Surrealist and Dadaist movements.

13 years after Freddy Mayor established the first gallery on Cork Street in 1925, Peggy 

Guggenheim opened her 'Guggenheim Jeune' gallery in 1938. While hosting her first show 

with the famed polymath Jean Cocteau, the gallery stirred up significant controversy due to 

his painting La peur donnant des ailes au courage (Fear Giving Wings to Courage), which was 

confiscated by British customs authorities upon arrival in the United Kingdom. Similarly, this 

exhibition nods to the necessity of the gallery ecosystem in encouraging, upholding and 

presenting artists' practices that are assertions of agency in the face of societal and political 

pressures. The galleries on Cork Street were asked to respond to the theme with artists’ work 

that can be thought of as emblematic of Cocteau’s unabashed vigour and Guggenheim’s 

abiding belief in supporting artists. The galleries were also encouraged to profile artists who 

continue to draw from the legacies of Surrealism, not as a mere style or movement within the 

Western canon, but rather as a state of mind; a fluid, boundless approach of navigating 

notions of the self and society that transgress borders and temporalities. 

Follow @CorkStreetGalleries and Visit http://CorkStGalleries.com to discover more about this history of Cork Street as well as current exhibitions! Follow Louisa Buck on her Instagram @LouBuck01

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New @TalkArt podcast episode! We meet legendary artist, potter and author @EdmunddeWaal at his studio in South London!!

We explore more than 40 years of making pots, and learn about the first major exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), considered one of the greatest masters of 20th-century ceramic art. This epic new show curated by #EdmunddeWaal (b.1964, Nottingham) is now open at the Hepworth Wakefield, including a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence.

Salto was a radical polymathic figure who crossed boundaries from one discipline to another, producing an extraordinary body of ceramic work alongside paintings, wood- cuts, drawings, book illustration and textiles. Salto is internationally renowned for his highly individual and expressive stoneware inspired by organic forms, characterised by budding, sprouting and fluted surface textures that appear to ripple and burst with life.

In his own visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal uses objects as vehicles for human narrative, emotion, and history. His installations of handmade porcelain vessels, often contained in minimalist structures, investigate themes of diaspora, memory, and materiality.

De Waal’s sculptural practice, writing, and art historical research are deeply intertwined, as he works across mediums and collaborates with museums, poets, performers, musicians, and other visual artists, both living and deceased. Much of de Waal’s work is concerned with collecting and collections—how objects are kept together, lost, stolen, or dispersed. 

His ceramics and writing expand upon conceptual and physical dialogues among minimalism, architecture, and sound, imbuing them with a sense of quiet calm. Manifest across de Waal’s practice is a distinct aesthetic philosophy that puts the hand, the sense of touch, and thus the human above all else. His work is about connecting people by reviving and telling stories that matter.

Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto 

is now open and runs until 4th May 2026 at Hepworth Wakefield.

Follow @EdmundDeWaal and @HepworthWakefield on Instagram.

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We meet gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel to discuss the work of Diane Arbus, recorded live in London at David Zwirner.

— Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy

Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is now open at David Zwirner, London until 20 December 2025, before travelling to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition.

Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without judgment.

Arbus’s desire to know people embraced a vast spectrum of humanity. Her subjects in Sanctum Sanctorum include debutantes, nudists, celebrities, aspiring celebrities, socialites, transvestites, babies, widows, circus performers, lovers, female impersonators, and a blind couple in their bedroom.

The exhibition brings together little-known works, such as Girl sitting in bed with her boyfriend, N.Y.C. 1966; Ozzie and Harriet Nelson on their bed, Los Angeles 1970; and Interior decorator at the nudist camp in his trailer, New Jersey 1963, alongside celebrated images like Mexican dwarf in his hotel room, N.Y.C. 1970 and A naked man being a woman, N.Y.C. 1968. 

While many of Arbus’s photographs have become part of the public’s collective consciousness since her landmark retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1972, seen in this context, viewers may discover aspects of even familiar works that have previously gone unnoticed.

Sanctum Sanctorum follows two recent major exhibitions of the artist’s work: Cataclysm: The 1972 Diane Arbus Retrospective Revisited at David Zwirner New York (2022) and Los Angeles (2025), and Diane Arbus: Constellation at LUMA, Arles (2023–2024) and the Park Avenue Armory, New York (2025).

Follow @FraenkelGallery @DavidZwirner

With special thanks to the Estate of Diane Arbus.

#DianeArbus

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Russell and Robert meet leading artist Chantal Joffe in her East London studio. We explore I Remember, Chantal Joffe’s fourteenth solo exhibition for Victoria Miro gallery. I Remember takes its title from Joe Brainard’s iconic memoir and is inspired by the late American writer’s poetic prompts that evoke the atmosphere and time of memories. Joffe’s paintings attempt to capture the fleeting yet enduring nature of memory and how it shapes our sense of self. This evocative new series of large-scale paintings explores themes of memory, nostalgia and personal history to offer a reflective and deeply personal journey into the artist’s childhood and family life. The exhibition is accompanied by a new text, entitled Time Transmission, by Olivia Laing.

‘Joe Brainard’s book always makes me list for myself the things I remember and the atmosphere and time that they conjure. These paintings are a sort of memoir of my childhood and of my family, an attempt at a kind of time travel. When I am making them, it’s almost as if I am existing in that past.’ – Chantal Joffe

Chantal Joffe’s paintings are always attentive to narratives about connection, perception and representation, alerting us to the endless intricacies of bodily expression, the complexities of emotion and attachment, and how these change over time. This evocative new series explores themes of memory, nostalgia and personal history to offer a reflective and deeply personal journey into the artist’s childhood and family life.

A new book published by MACK to coincide with this new show, Painting Writing Texting chronicles the friendship between Chantal Joffe and writer Olivia Laing, which began in 2016 when Joffe approached Laing to ask if they would sit for a portrait. From this unexpected encounter, the two embarked on an expansive and ranging collaboration, fuelled by conversations about art, books, and their shared attempts to understand the world. Combining ten essays by Laing with a sequence of paintings by Joffe, Painting Writing Texting explores the strange and risky process by which everyday life is converted into art.

Born in 1969, Chantal Joffe lives and works in London. She holds an MA from the Royal College of Art and was awarded the Royal Academy Wollaston Prize in 2006. Chantal Joffe brings insight and integrity, as well as psychological and emotional depth, to the genre of figurative art. Defined by its clarity, honesty and empathetic warmth, her work is attuned to our awareness as both observers and observed beings, bold and expressive in style yet always questioning, nuanced and emotionally rich. A primary focus throughout Joffe’s career has been on the women and children in her life, captured at various stages of their own lives. Joffe has talked about her paintings in terms of transitions, those associated with growing and ageing, as well as her attempts to mark a life’s milestones. The complex relationship between mother and child over time has been a significant theme, while self-portraiture, which Joffe considers ‘a way of thinking about time passing’, remains one of the cornerstones of her art. Whether drawing inspiration from art history, popular culture or personal experiences, Joffe’s paintings are always attentive to narratives about connection, perception and representation. They alert us to the endless intricacies of bodily expression and the myriad ways in which we reveal ourselves and communicate emotion, consciously or otherwise, even in the most private of moments.

Chantal Joffe: I Remember runs until 17th January 2026 at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road. Follow @VictoriaMiroGallery

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We meet Ginny and Hartley Neel, Executive Directors of the Estate of Alice Neel, and the artist’s daughter-in-law and son. We explore her current exhibition in Belgium at Xavier Hufkens.

Alice Neel is widely recognised as one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. Her success, however, has largely been posthumous. In the past decade, interest in her work has grown exponentially, with a series of landmark exhibitions and art historical studies firmly cementing her position on the international stage.

Neel’s oeuvre is fascinating on two counts: not only was she an incredibly gifted painter, but also an astute and idiosyncratic chronicler of some of the most tumultuous decades in American history. While she also painted landscapes and still lifes, Neel is best known as a painter of people. Her sitters included artists, writers, intellectuals and family members, as well as people living on the margins of society, particularly immigrants. Deeply committed to equality and social justice, Neel was interested in the human struggle for survival, and in mankind’s capacity for resilience in the face of hardship and deprivation. With her distinctive brushwork and remarkable feel for colour, Neel succeeded in capturing the inner psychological depths of her sitters. Her commitment to truth and dedication to figuration—unfashionable during her lifetime—ensured that her work remained permanently out of kilter with avant-garde movements such as abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism. Yet her uncompromising approach gave rise to a unique and highly individualistic body of work that continues to exert an influence on contemporary artistic production.

Alice Neel Still Lifes and Street Scenes runs until  22 November 2025 at Xavier Hufkens, Van Eyck, Brussels, Belgium. Follow @XavierHufkens

The first retrospective dedicated to the artist in Italy, ’Alice Neel: I Am the Century’ is now open @PinacotecaAgnelli at in Turin, Italy – on view through 6 April 2026. 

Special thanks to the Estate of Alice Neel and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels for making this conversation possible. #aliceneel #xavierhufkens #pinacotecaagnelli

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We meet Katy Hessel to discuss her incredible new book How To Live An Artful Life. The year ahead is a gift that has been given to you. What might you do with it?

Dive into the year with the wisdom of artists. Gathered from interviews, personal conversations, books and talks, How to Live an Artful Life moves through the months of the year offering you thoughts, reflections and encouragements from artists such as Marina Abramovic, Nan Goldin, Lubaina Himid, Louise Bourgeois and many more.

With a thought for every day of the year, whether looking for beginnings in January, freedom in summer, or transformation as the nights draw in, this is a book of words to cherish. The year is full of the promise of work that has yet to be written, paintings that are yet to be painted, people who have yet to meet, talk, or fall in love. With this book in hand, pay attention, and see the world anew. Go out and find it, taste it, seize it, and live it – artfully.

Katy Hessel is an art historian and the author of The Story of Art without Men, the international bestseller and Waterstones Book of the Year 2022. She runs @thegreatwomenartists on Instagram, hosts The Great Women Artists Podcast, interviewing artists such as Tracey Emin and Marina Abramovic, and is a columnist for the Guardian. Hessel is a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and a Trustee of Charleston. In 2024, she launched Museums Without Men, an audio series highlighting works by women artists in museum collections worldwide, such as The Met and Tate Britain.

Follow @Katy.Hessel on Instagram.

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Happy 80th birthday to Maggi Hambling, our guest this week! We meet Maggi in her studio to discuss her 6 decades of making painting and sculpture.

Maggi Hambling CBE was born in Suffolk in 1945. She studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1960 under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, then at Ipswich School of Art, Camberwell, and finally the Slade School of Art, graduating in 1969.

In 1980 she was the First Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, and in 1995 she won the Jerwood Painting Prize (with Patrick Caulfield). Public sculpture includes A conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998) at Adelaide Street, London, facing Charing Cross Station and Scallop (2003), a sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten, at Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk and for which the artist was awarded the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in Newington Green, London in 2020.

Hambling’s work is held in public collections including at Tate, British Museum, CAFA, Beijing and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Visit: http://maggihambling.com/

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We meet Rose Blake an illustrator and artist making drawings and pictures in London who has just illustrated Russell & Robert’s first children’s

book Art School (In A Book).

Rose Blake studied at Kingston University and the Royal College of Art. She was awarded the D&AD Best New Blood Award and was shortlisted for the AOI prize and The World Illustration Awards.

She shows with the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, and has had two solo show there; ‘Now I Am An Artist’ in 2015 and ‘Sing Swim Ok Moon’ in 2018. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Kingston University on the Illustration and Animation BA.

Art School (In A Book)is out on Thursday 23rd October 2025. Pre-order now from Amazon, Waterstone’s and Bookshop.org

An exciting introduction to the world of contemporary art for young creatives from the makers of hit podcast Talk Art, actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament.

Do you love art and want to know more but don't know where to start? Introducing Art School (in a book), a virtual gallery where you can see the most exciting contemporary artists of today, as well as some of the greatest from the twentieth century, including Henri Matisse, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frida Kahlo.

And who are the visionaries, the icons, the ones to watch now? With works by Tracey Emin, Antony Gormley, and David Hockney, study the art of 20 key artists working today, find out what inspires them, how they work and the meaning behind their art.

With Russell and Robert as your guides you will also discover the artist within you, with tips on new ways of seeing and reacting to the world around you and guidance on how you can develop your own creativity.

Buy Art School from Waterstone’s: https://www.waterstones.com/book/art-school-in-a-book/russell-tovey/robert-diament/9781510231412

Follow @IAmRoseBlake on Instagram.

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We meet writer Damian Barr to discuss his new book The Two Roberts.

This intoxicating, brave and compassionate novel from the author of Maggie and Me reimagines one of the stongest and most passionate love stories of modern British art, following Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde from their encounter at Glasgow Art School to partying with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in London as the Second World War draws near.

'He will stay like this forever, Robert's arm draped round him. They will be forever twenty.'

Scotland, 1933. Bobby MacBryde is on his way. After years grafting at Lees Boot Factory, he's off to the Glasgow School of Art, to his future. On his first day he will meet another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls - and never leave his side.

Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow - its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city - all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.

Stunningly reimagined, The Two Roberts is a profoundly moving story of devotion and obsession, art and class. It is a love letter to MacBryde and Colquhoun, the almost-forgotten artists who tried to change the way the world sees - and paid a devastating price.

We also discuss the new exhibition curated by Damian. Explore the lives and work of the ‘Two Roberts’ — Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, two Ayrshire artists who first met at Glasgow School of Art in 1933. This infamous duo, both lovers and creative partners, played a vital role in mid-20th century British art influencing contemporaries including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and John Minton.

This exhibition, the first in England since 1962, surveys their remarkable creative journey from 1930s Glasgow to wartime Europe, through London during the Blitz, ending in tragedy in 1962. This exhibition traces their spectacular rise and fall and puts them back where they were—at the centre of an extraordinary creative landscape in a rapidly changing world.

Visit the exhibition Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun: Artists, Lovers, Outsiders, from 15 October 2025–12 April 2026, at Charleston in Lewes: https://www.charleston.org.uk/exhibition/robert-macbryde-and-robert-colquhoun-artists-lovers-outsiders/

Follow @MrDamianBarr

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We meet Sean Ono Lennon to explore his music and life with art, plus we discuss the forthcoming box set Power to the People, that Sean has produced, of his parents’ Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1972 fundraising live New York concert. We consider activism in art, especially the legacy of John and Yoko’s timeless work together (as also documented in the recent One to One documentary).

Recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York City on 30 August 1972, the Power to The Peoplebox set includes 31 Live Tracks from John & Yoko's two historic sets at the One To One Concert backed by Plastic Ono Band, Elephant’s Memory and Special Guests. They were John Lennon’s only full-length concerts after leaving The Beatles and the last two full-length concerts that John & Yoko performed together. Released from 10th October 2025. Learn more: https://www.johnlennon.com/news/power-to-the-people-deluxe-box-4lp-2lp-2cd-1cd-preorder-now/

Sean Ono Lennon is a world renowned musician, songwriter, and producer. “He has always chosen his own musical path, following it deftly as he splits the difference between pop and experimental pursuits. He came of age in the kaleidoscopic '90s, working with Cibo Matto and issuing his first solo album, 1998's Into the Sun, on the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label, while beginning a long stint playing in his mother Yoko Ono's band. In the following decade he formed the psychedelic duo the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and the improvisational prog group Mystical Weapons. As his musical interests expanded further, he teamed with Les Claypool to form the hard-to-categorize project the Claypool Lennon Delirium, branched out into film scoring, explored more mainstream territory as he worked with artists like Lana Del Ray, Lady Gaga and Lily Allen, and delved into jazz as well. His first foray into that style was 2024's Asterisms, a fully instrumental album of electronics-fused jazz and psychedelic soundscape music. 

The son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon was born in New York City in 1975. During his childhood, he was educated in Swiss boarding schools, but occasionally appeared on his mother's albums and sang on the 1984 Ono tribute Every Man Has a Woman. In his early teens, he was occasionally seen decked out in a plastic Thriller jacket and hanging out with Michael Jackson, but his first official step into the spotlight was in the form of filmed interviews for the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon. Three years later, he organized -- with Ono and Lenny Kravitz -- a star-studded re-recording of his father's "Give Peace a Chance" as a protest to the Gulf War. That year, he also appeared on Kravitz's album Mama Said.” Biography by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi.

In 2025, Sean is working on a new Claypool Lennon Delirium album (their 3rd) and is directing a documentary film on the crazy genius fashion designers 3as4, who have designed outfits for Bjork and Yoko among many others. 

Follow: @Sean_Ono_Lennon, @YokoOno and @JohnLennon

Visit:

johnlennon.com

imaginepeace.com

citizenofnutopia.com

escapetonutopia.com

http://theclaypoollennondelirium.com

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This episode is a special partnership with BOSS. Special episode recorded in Milan, September 2025. #AD

Russell meets Marco Falcioni, Creative Director of HUGO BOSS. We discuss the Art Basel Awards which BOSS have been partnering with, Marcos' beginnings discovering fashion in the clubs of Rome, how art is intrinsic to his designing, and the importance of his weekly practice of visiting art exhibitions including Venice Biennale. Collaborations and partnerships are very important to him and the integrity and respect he has for his close team at BOSS. We discuss Cretto di Burri and Land Art, the paintings of Katharina Grosse, Nicola Samorì, Lucio Fontana, Spatialism, Jannis Kounellis, Arte Povera, and how their art, and the art movements they were part of, opened up his mind to the power of art.

BOSS is known for timeless and sophisticated style, and commitment to culture, sport and sustainability, underpinned by technical innovations developed over its century-long history. Russell explores his inspirations and design approach, including runway collections, collaborations with David Beckham, Aston Martin, and reimagining classics with a modern twist.

Follow @FalcioniMarco and @BOSS

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For six decades American artist Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction through her paintings, drawings and prints. She first garnered widespread recognition in the early 1970s with her Stroke paintings that dissect the most fundamental of painterly gestures: the brushstroke. Fuelling abstraction with autobiography, she consciously worked against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. ‘I wanted more in painting, not less,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell a story, have a beginning, a middle, an end... to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex.’ Building a vocabulary of recurring personal motifs – from roses and breasts, to ponds and mud, totems, screaming faces, grapes, scrawled words, cherry trees and moons, pumpkins and sunflowers – she pushes the formal possibilities of paint while developing a complex materiality through an additive process of collaged materials. Snyder’s rigorous interrogation of abstraction is underpinned by her feminist outlook, as she centres ‘the essence of feelings of a female body’ to carve out new terrain in contemporary American painting.

Love from an Abstract Artist is an exhibition spanning over six decades of American artist Joan Snyder’s work on paper. Featuring nearly 50 new and historical works, dating from the mid-1960s to the present day, it bears witness to the important position drawing has always held in Snyder’s practice. Often diaristic and autobiographical, these varied works encompass Snyder’s grids, symbols, landscapes and strokes, and incorporate collaged materials including fabric, rope, berries, herbs and hand-pressed paper pulp, among others. Snyder has continually expanded the possibilities of drawing. Her works on paper are, as the American critic and art historian Faye Hirsch writes, ‘independent and self-sufficient objects’.

Snyder is recognised for developing a new, distinctly embodied language of abstract painting at a time when legacies of Abstract Expressionism loomed large and Minimalism espoused new conditions of sterility and mechanical facture in American art. In this male-dominated climate, she dissected the ‘anatomy’ of painting to its constituent parts and, in the mid-1970s, began adding personal motifs to her work such as bodies and breasts, vulvas and hearts, totems and fields of flowers. ‘It seemed to me that in order to go forward, I had to push back hard,’ she reflects. ‘To again embrace ideas that were at the very foundation of all my thinking about painting – about structure, about application, about meaning, about materials.’ The earliest works in the exhibition including Stripes/Mounds and Green Strokes (both 1968) reveal how drawing offered the artist a framework, outside of painting, through which to deconstruct its most fundamental elements. ‘My drawings are the skeletons upon which I plan to add muscle and bones and flesh,’ she has said. Presenting a series of reduced marks – blobs, lines, stripes and strokes – these works contain the pictorial discoveries that would catalyse one of the artist’s major bodies of work, the Stroke paintings.

Joan Snyder: Love from an Abstract Artist at Thaddaeus Ropac, runs til 4 October 2025: https://ropac.net/online-exhibitions/210-joan-snyder-love-from-an-abstract-artist/

Follow @Joan_Snyder_Art and @ThaddeusRopac on Instagram

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Talk Art Live in Berlin. Season 26 of Talk Art begins!!!!

This episode is a special Paid Partnership collaboration with Berlin Art Week, who flew Russell & Robert to Berlin.

Recorded live, in front of an audience, outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in September 2025. Special guests Peaches @peachesnisker (musician, producer, director, performance artist) and Klaus Biesenbach @klausbiesenbach (Director, Neue Nationalgalerie) join the conversation about art, music, and the Berlin art scene.

An iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent nearly two decades pushing boundaries and wielding immeasurable influence over mainstream pop culture from outside of its confines, carving a bold, sexually progressive path in her own image that's opened the door for countless others to follow. She’s collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Kim Gordon and Major Lazer, had her music featured cultural watermarks like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid's Tale, and Broad City among others, and seen her work studied at universities around the world.

Dubbed a “genuine heroine” by the New York Times, Peaches has released five critically acclaimed studio albums blending electronic music, hip-hop, and punk rock while tackling gender politics, sexual identity, ageism, and the patriarchy. Uncut has raved that her work brought together "high art, low humour and deluxe filth [in] a hugely seductive combination,” while Rolling Stone called her “surreally funny [and] nasty.”

An equally prolific visual artist, Peaches has directed over twenty of her own videos, designed one of the most raw and creative stage shows in popular music, and has appeared at modern art’s most prestigious gatherings, from Art Basel Miami to the Venice Biennale. On top of it all, she mounted a one-woman production of 'Jesus Christ Superstar’—redubbed ‘Peaches Christ Superstar’—which earned international raves, composed and performed the electro-rock opera 'Peaches Does Herself,' which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and sang the title role in a production of Monteverdi's epic 17th-century opera 'L’Orfeo' in Berlin. Visit: https://www.teachesofpeaches.com/

Klaus Biesenbach began his career in Berlin 30 years ago aged 25, when he was one of a group that set up the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in a former margarine factory. In 2004, he became a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he rose to the position of chief curator and founded a new department for media and performance art. In 2010, he became director of MoMA PS1, the museum's outpost in Queen's. At MOCA in Los Angeles, he introduced free admission, expanded the collection and navigated the museum through the pandemic.

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WePresent x TalkArt special episode recorded live at Whitechapel Gallery. 

Recorded in front of a sold out live audience at @WhitechapelGallery we speak with @DominicJohnson and Jamal Butt to explore the current HAMAD BUTT exhibition: his life, art and legacy. 

❤️ And published on @WePresent today to accompany our podcast is previously unseen artworks by Hamad Buttto feast your eyes on.

Apprehensions is the first major survey of #HamadButt (b. 1962, Lahore, Pakistan; d. 1994, London, UK). One of the most innovative artists of his generation, Hamad Butt was a pioneer of intermedia art, bringing art into conversation with science, whilst also referencing his Queer and diasporic experiences. He offered a nuanced artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the UK, taking a conceptual rather than activist approach.

Butt’s conceptually and technically ambitious works seamlessly interweave popular culture, science, alchemy, science fiction, and social and cultural concerns, as forms that are simultaneously poetic and provocative. They imagine sex and desire in a time of ‘plague’ as seductive yet frightening, intimate yet isolating, compelling yet dangerous – literally, in some cases, threatening to kill or injure.

Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in East London, Butt was British South Asian, Muslim by upbringing, and Queer. A contemporary of the Young British Artists, and their peer at Goldsmiths’ College, London, Butt was described by art critics as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s, as his works often imply physical risk or endangerment.

Follow: @WhitechapelGallery and @WePresent and check out WePresent today to see the series of never-before-seen artworks by Hamad, generously shared by Jamal. Visit: https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/hamad-butt-talkart-whitechapel-gallery

This episode is brought to you by our friends at WePresent, the Academy Award winning arts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artists such as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresent showcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championing diversity in everything it does.

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Talk Art live! As part of the Nevill Holt Festival 2025, Talk Art hosted a live podcast recording with special guest Harland Miller. From the Nevill Holt Theatre, the world-renowned artist Miller joined Russell Tovey and Robert Diament in conversation to discuss his paintings and lifetime of art making.

The Nevill Holt Festival is an annual celebration of arts and culture held in the Leicestershire countryside. Recorded on 12th June 2025, in front of a sold out audience.

Artist and writer Harland Miller’s (born 1964) polychromatic and graphically vernacular paintings have garnered a devoted following. Infused with irreverent northern English humour and refined by his lifelong love of language, Miller’s work synthesises references from both high and low culture, spanning literature, music, self-help manuals and medieval iconography.

Attesting to his deep-rooted engagement with the narrative, aural and typographical possibilities of language, Miller expressed, ‘People read before they can stop themselves, it’s automatic. Words offer a way into what you’re looking at, but no matter how integrated the text is, no matter how much you might think it’s synthesised into the painting, there is this imbalance in terms of how much the words are doing as words.’

Follow: @NevillHoltFestival

Visit: https://nevillholtfestival.com/

Learn more about Harland’s paintings: https://www.whitecube.com/artists/harland-miller

Follow us on Instagram: @TalkArt

📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts

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We meet painter Charlotte Keates within her new installation ‘Inner Landscapes’. We discover the inspiration behind her epic new commission and explore her lifelong passion for drawing and painting.

Keates’ work is inspired by interiors, travels, and architectural composition, in seamless communion with elements from the natural world. Trees push through flat concrete, while perspectives unfold in sheets of glass. These images of modernist leisure leave one with the feeling of having entered a space only recently vacated, dramatizing stillness without surrendering movement. These are environments that suggest, technically as well as artistically, indistinct human activity and motion.

Her paintings gently weave together impressions of space and structure with subtle narratives, often emerging through the interplay of distinctive colours and carefully placed objects. These scenes do not depict real places but rather reflect traces of memory and quiet moments of perception. The spaces she constructs are imagined, yet the emotions they carry feel genuine and immediate. Without relying on overt storytelling, her works convey a calm presence and a quiet tension. As art historian Marco Livingstone observed, “the highlighted area acquires a hypnotic presence, as if spotlit into existence from within an atmosphere of ambiguous limitless space.”

Keates was born in 1990 in Somerset, United Kingdom, and currently lives and works in Guernsey and London. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Falmouth University. She will show new work in a forthcoming group exhibition at the Ju Ming Museum in October 2025, Taipei, Taiwan.

Follow @CharlotteKeates on Instagram.

📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts

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We meet iconic painter Sean Scully on the eve of his 80th birthday at his studio in North London.

Over the course of his 50-year career, Sean Scully has created an influential body of work that has marked the development of contemporary abstraction. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, his work combines painterly drama with great visual delicacy. Often structured around stripes or layered blocks of colour arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, the layers in his paintings attain a fine balance between calm reflection and an intrinsic vitality. 

A forceful, physical artist, Scully creates intentionally compelling spaces, and his art is defined by acute concentration and care, involving constant negotiation between the monumental and the intimate. While giving primary importance to the physicality of the materials he employs, his art is commanded by the idea of humanity’s betterment, and at the heart of each rigorously composed work lies a near-infinite number of expressive, emotional fluctuations.

During a trip to Morocco in 1969, Scully was strongly influenced by the rich colours of the region, which he translated into the broad horizontal stripes and deep earth tones that characterise his mature style. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, he permanently relocated to New York. In the early 1980s, he made the first of several influential trips to Mexico, where he used watercolour for the first time in works inspired by the patterns of light and shadows he saw on the stacked stones of ancient walls. The experience had a decisive effect on him and prompted his decision to move from Minimalism to a more emotional and humanistic form of abstraction.

Follow @SeanScullyStudio

‘Sean Scully: Stories' at Bucerius Kunst Forum @BuceriusKunstForum, Hamburg, Germany is now open and runs until 30th November 2025.

Thanks to Faye at Sean’s studio in Tappan, NY and to all of his galleries: @KerlinGallery @ThaddaeusRopac @Lisson_Gallery

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We meet John Cameron Mitchell, groundbreaking American actor, writer and director best known for creating, directing and starring in the Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), a film adaptation of the off-Broadway stage production he co-wrote with composer Stephen Trask. We discuss Claude Cahun, David Bowie and the power of art, ahead of his major live show this Tuesday 8th July at the Adelphi Theatre in London.

In 1998, he co-created Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a genre-defying rock musical about a genderqueer East German singer navigating identity, love, and fame. The show became an off-Broadway sensation, earning a cult following. In 2001, Mitchell directed and reprised his role as Hedwig in the film adaptation, which won the Best Director Award and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. The film’s success cemented his status as a visionary filmmaker.

Following Hedwig, Mitchell directed Shortbus (2006), a provocative indie film exploring sexuality and relationships through an ensemble cast. In 2010, he directed Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, a deeply emotional drama about grief, which earned Kidman an Academy Award nomination.

Marking 25 years since the London premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, theatrical icon John Cameron Mitchell presents a spectacular one-night-only celebration of his career and of the cult classic that rocked the foundations of music theatre forever. On Tuesday 8th July, the two time Tony Award-winning star of stage and screen will take to the West End stage for the very first time, joined by a host of incredible special guests including Boy George, Divina de Campo, Michael Cerveris, Nakhane, Martin Tomlinson and Mason Alexander Park.

Expect the unexpected – from the glittering glam that rocked him as a boy living in early 70’s Scotland, to gut-punching ballads spanning Off-Broadway, Broadway, Hollywood and beyond — as Mitchell opens his heart and history to the city that first embraced Hedwig a quarter-century ago.

Dress to Express as we celebrate the transformative power of music, love and radical self-expression. London, it’s been a long time coming, are we ready to ‘Pull that wig down off the shelf’?!

Visit: https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/john-cameron-mitchell/

Follow: @JohnCameronMitchell

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New @TalkArt podcast episode. We meet Ann Carrington @anncarringtonart at her studio in Margate! 

Ann Carrington sculpts fantastical metal sculptures that evoke the age of aristocracy. She gathers found and discarded objects to shape her artworks, which often take the form of bouquets, vases, and oversized busts. 

The use of discarded, found and multiples of objects is a fundamental element of Ann’s sculptures and wider practice. All objects are saturated with cultural meaning which, as an artist, she seeks to explore, unravel and investigate. 

Mundane objects such as knives and forks, barbed wire, pins and paintbrushes come with their own readymade histories and associations which can be unravelled and analysed if rearranged, distorted or realigned to give them new meaning as sculpture.

Carrington’s chosen medium of manipulating, forging, and sculpting metal is laborious and intricate. She works with heating techniques like soldering and welding, the latter of which she learned about a decade ago specifically so she could fuse her metal flowers into elaborate, formidable bouquets. There’s an added complexity as well: Because she uses found objects and scrap metal, initially she doesn’t always know what is under the surface of the material she’s working with.

The internationally known Carrington, who lives and works in Margate, England, has created artwork for the United Nations and the Royal Family as well as having works in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, and numerous private collections including Elton John, Paul Smith, and Lulu Guinness. Among her best known commissions is a 2012 banner for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, which she painstakingly constructed out of half a million gold buttons. Carrington also has an official license to produce replicas of royal stamps of the Queen that she similarly constructs with buttons.

Follow: @anncarringtonart

#AnnCarrington

Visit: https://anncarrington.co.uk/

Listen to Talk Art podcast free: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts

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We meet Gary Schneider to discuss his photography, and his collaboration printing for Peter Hujar and other aritsts. Born in South Africa, Gary Schneider is a photographer whose early practices in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual. He was raised during apartheid, emigrating to New York in 1977 at the age of 22, and much of his work is informed by the racial issues he grew up with. Genetic Self-Portrait (1997-1998), for example, is a series of images of his own genetic material in which nothing identifies race. Also included in this exhibition are forensic images that use the strategies he developed in Genetic Self-Portrait.

These include body imprints of himself and John Erdman, his muse since 1977, and a handprint portrait of the South African artist Senzeni Marasela. It is from a project produced between 2011-2015 funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship which realized Gary’s desire to meet and make portraits of the community of South African artists thriving post-apartheid. He has been making handprint portraits since 1993 and considers them to be as expressive as any portrait of a face, more private, and perhaps more revealing.

In other portraits (face and figure), made since 1988, the person lies under an 8x10-inch camera in the dark. The exposure is made by the artist slowly exploring their features with a small flash-light, over a long period of time. This traces both his and their performances and produces distortions in color and form that he further manipulates during the printing process.

As mentioned in a recent Frieze article: Artist and master printer Gary Schneider was a close friend and occasional subject of Peter Hujar, the New York-based photographer famed for his empathetic photographs of artist and writer friends, drag performers, nude lovers, farm animals and cityscapes. Since Hujar’s death in 1987, Schneider has been entrusted with making prints of his late friend’s work, a process he describes in engrossing detail in his recent book Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom (2024). More than three decades spent poring over Hujar’s photographs has given Schneider an unrivalled insight into how their austere elegance was achieved. Here, he remembers what it was like to work with Hujar, the ‘eccentricities’ of his prints and how their years of friendship and collaboration inspired his co-curation, with John Douglas Millar, of ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row in London – the first comprehensive UK survey of Hujar’s photographs to date.

Follow @GarySchneider7

Visit www.garyschneider.net/

and https://ravenrow.org/exhibitions/peter-hujar-eyes-open-in-the-dark

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We meet artist Joe Bradley, on the eve of his new solo show of new paintings in London.

Animal Family is Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023. His celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, was presented in spring 2024. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.

In these new paintings, figurative elements—which Bradley had begun to develop in previous works—emerge as central compositional structures. ‘I have never really felt comfortable calling myself an abstract painter,’ says Bradley. ‘There have always been flashes of figuration in my work. For whatever reason, at this moment, I feel ready to let it all come to the surface.’ 1A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of colour, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution.

In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of colour momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky. While related to those paintings, several vertical canvases represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a broad organising principle. Shades of mid-century deconstructed figuration and other art-historical references and associations come through in these large, frontally oriented figures.

Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creation itself. In some of these paintings, the figure is quite discernible. In others, the formal elements share only a general relationship to the human form with eyelike ovals or leglike protrusions suggesting bodily architectures. Like the animal associations in the horizontal canvases, these roughly human-scale paintings reinforce such bodily associations, reflecting Bradley’s sensitivity to the formal, compositional, and material qualities of his medium.

Joe Bradley (b. 1975) is widely recognised for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has constantly reinvented his approach to his art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements to refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.”

Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He presently lives and works in New York.

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We meet Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye (b. 1938, Istanbul, TR) is a ceramic artist known for her refined, monochrome stoneware bowls, which she has been producing for nearly sixty years. Working with the ancient coiling technique and a traditional wooden kick wheel, Ebüzziya Siesbye creates vessels that bear the intimate marks of her hand, balancing density and spaciousness, firmness and fragility. Fired at high temperatures, her bowls possess a stone-like solidity, while their sharp-edged lips and small, recessed bases lend them an impression of levitation. Though often unadorned, some pieces feature delicate horizontal lines along the rim to, as the artist describes, “prevent them from lifting off the ground.”

Ebüzziya Siesbye studied sculpture at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts before working at ceramic studios in Höhr-Grenzhausen, DE, and Istanbul. In 1963, she moved to Denmark to join the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory, later founding her first independent studio in Copenhagen in 1969. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1987. She has been awarded many honors, including the 2022 Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation Honor Award and the Aydın Doğan Award, and her work has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul (TR), and the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK).

Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramics are held in numerous museum collections, including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New-York (NY); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FR); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL); the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK); the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE); the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, (SCT); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), among others.

Follow @Salon94 on Instagram.

Alev’s current solo show ‘Vibrations’ which runs in New York at Salon 94 until 8th August 2025, address 3 East 89th Street: https://salon94.com/exhibitions/alev-ebuzziya-siesbye-vibrations

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We meet Misan Harriman, photographer, social activist and Oscar Nominated filmmaker.

He is one of the most widely-shared visual storytellers of this age. He is also the first black person in the 104 year history of British Vogue to shoot the cover of its September issue. In July 2021 he commenced his appointment as Chair of the Southbank Centre, London.

His strong reportage style and unique eye for narrative has captured the attention of editors and celebrities around the world. From documenting historic moments in history to photographing high profile celebrities, including Meghan Markle & Prince Harry, Angelia Jolie, Jay-Z, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Giorgio Armani, Rhianna, Cate Blanchett and Olivia Colman, Misan is a photographer of extraordinary range. His striking images have featured in Vanity Fair, Vogue UK, Harpers Bazaar, People Magazine and The Telegraph among others.

His first film, the After starring David Oyelowo is the first Netflix UK original Short and has been nominated for an Academy Award.

Misan is an outspoken activist supporting Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace, he is also a mental health campaigner with a keen interest in Dyslexia and Neurodiversity. He is currently exploring how web3 can help democratise merit based opportunity for disadvantaged artists on a global scale.

He is the founder of Culture3 whose mission is to explain and explore what web 3.0 means for culture, commerce, and society.

Nigeria born, Misan was educated in England where he developed a life-long love for the arts. This led him to picking up a camera and honing his craft. He is completely self-taught, his work is inspired by Gordon Parks, Sally Mann, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Norman Parkinson and Peter Lindbergh.

SXSW London presents: Misan Harriman: Shoot the People Part of SXSW London 2025. British-Nigerian photographer Misan Harriman investigates how protest movements shape social change. Following his debut White Nanny, Black Child, director Andy Mundy-Castle turns the camera on Oscar-nominated British-Nigerian photographer and activist Misan Harriman, who became the first Black man to shoot a cover of British Vogue in 2021 and has captured modern icons such as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, Rihanna, Stormzy, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Cruise. In Shoot the People, Harriman examines how protest and organised movements can lead to social change, all while capturing the resilience of activism through his lens. 

In July 2025, Harriman will have his debut solo exhibition of his photography in London at Hope93 gallery.https://hope93.com/

Follow @MisanHarriman

Visit https://www.misanharriman.com/

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Season 25 begins! We meet Juergen Teller, one of the world’s most sought-after contemporary photographers, successfully straddling the interface of both art and commercial photography.

We discuss childhood, touring with Nirvana, Agnès Varda, Tracey Emin, William Eggleston, Kate Moss, Pope Francis, Kristen McMenemy, Zoe Bedeaux, collaborating with @DovileDrizyte and breakthroughs with Marc Jacobs. 

Juergen Teller’s new exhibition of his photographs taken at Auschwitz Birkenau is now open Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany until 1 June 2025 @KunsthausGoettingen. An accompanying photobook is published by @SteidlVerlag. 

7 ½, Teller’s concurrent exhibition runs at Galleria Degli Antichi, Sabbioneta, Italy until 23 November 2025 @VisitSabbioneta.

Juergen Teller (b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany) studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, before moving to London in 1986. Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, Teller has successfully navigated both the art world and commercial photography since beginning his career in the late 1980s. Working across different genres of photography, Teller has shot fashion campaigns for luxury brands as well as editorials for prominent art and fashion publications.

In 2003, Teller was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography, London, and in 2018, he received the Special Presentation Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2013); Bundeskunstalle, Bonn (2016); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2017); Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris (2023); Triennale, Milano (2024).

Teller’s photographs have been acquired by numerous international collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Le Louvre, Paris and National Portrait Gallery, London. Teller has published over sixty books and was a Professor of Photography at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg 2014–2019.

Follow @JuergenTellerStudio and https://www.juergenteller.co.uk/

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We meet artist Chris Levine, a British contemporary artist renowned for his pioneering work with light and lasers. His innovative approach transcends traditional mediums, integrating technology and spirituality to create immersive art installations that challenge and expand human perception.

Levine's multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, photography, performance, fashion, music, and design. He employs lasers and sound frequencies to craft environments that engage viewers on both sensory and contemplative levels. This synthesis of technology and art positions Levine's work within a broader historical context, aligning with movements that seek to transcend the physical and delve into the metaphysical.

A seminal piece in Levine's portfolio is "Lightness of Being" (2004), a holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This work has been lauded for its spiritual depth and technical mastery, with the National Portrait Gallery describing it as "the most evocative image of a royal by any artist." The portrait captures the ethereal quality of light and presence, reflecting Levine's ability to merge artistic expression with technological innovation.

Beyond portraiture, Levine has engaged in numerous projects that bridge various artistic disciplines. In 2012, the artist partnered with Anohni and the Johnsons for their "Swanlight" performance at Radio City Music Hall, commissioned by the MoMA, New York, integrating laser with musical performance and creating a multisensory experience. 

Levine’s site-specific large scale installations have pushed the boundaries of light art, taking diverse settings from the historic Durham Cathedral to the contemporary landscape of Hobart, Tasmania. Aligned with the traditions of public art inspiring communities, Levine’s works make immersive art accessible to broader audiences. 

In 2021, Levine's exhibition at Houghton Hall, 528 Hz Love Frequency, featured "Molecule of Light," a monumental 25-meter-high sculpture that transformed the landscape and cemented his innovative approach to light art. This installation not only showcased the artist’s technical prowess but also his ability to harmonize art with architectural space, creating a dialogue between the artwork and its environment.

Through his multidisciplinary practice, Levine continues to explore the infinite possibilities of light in art, contributing to the ongoing dialogue on the intersection of technology, spirituality, and visual expression. His work stands as a testament to the transformative power of art, inviting viewers to experience the world through a lens of heightened awareness.

Follow @ChrisLevine on Instagram

Visit: https://chrislevine.com/

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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/

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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 Airby 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  +FabricatingMy 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 @DeDeLeBas

Visit: https://www.delainelebas.com

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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 in London, 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 record sales and the songs were part of the soundtrack to the 80s. Last year, he received the BMI Icon 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, Peter Gabriel, Queen, Sting, and Van Morrison.

Kemp’s songs have proven truly timeless. The ubiquitous hit single True has logged over 5 million air plays in North America alone, and his songs have featured in an incredible 100 feature 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, Spin City, 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 Collection award. 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 hosts with fellow musician Guy Pratt, interviewing music legends and becoming the most listened to music podcast in the UK. Gary is a Trustee of the Theatres Trust with a passion for keeping theatres at the heart of communities.

Gary grew up in Islington (born October 16, 1959) and attended local grammar school Dame Alice Owens and Anna Scher’s Children’s Theatre drama club, becoming a child actor in film and 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 hugely successful British crime thriller, The Krays and Hollywood blockbuster, The Bodyguard. He has continued to feature regularly on stage and in film and TV.

Follow @GaryJKemp

Visit https://www.garykemp.com to learn more about his new album This Destination, out now.

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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

Thank you to WePresent and Damian Bradfield.

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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

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New @TalkArt podcast! We meet artist @AnneRothenstein whose 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.

🔗 Follow @AnneRothenstein

🖼️ Visit #AnneRothenstein’s solo show which runs until 12th April 2025 at @StephenFriedmanGallery, 5-6 Cork Street, London.

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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

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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 Instagram

Buy Love in Exile, published by Pengiun.

You can also follow @TalkArt for images of all artworks discussed in today's episode. Thanks for listening!

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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 Inis now open in Miami at Rubell Museum.

Visit: https://rubellmuseum.org/2024-vanessa-raw

Follow @VanessaRaw_ and @RubellMuseum

Vanessa 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.

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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.Drive

Visit: https://www.mariposa.gallery/berlin

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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

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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.

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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

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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 @JTaylorTrash

Visit: https://joelletaylor.co.uk/

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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 winning

arts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artists

such as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresent

showcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championing

diversity in everything it does.

In this episode we'll be speaking to acclaimed photographer Robin de Puy about her new

project AMERICAN, a collaboration with WePresent, which is an unflinching portrait of a

divided nation. AMERICAN shares Robin's unique perspective on the often-overlooked

faces that represent the country's incredible diversity and complexity, and poses the

question: 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/

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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/

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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 @Gagosian

Visit: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/michael-craig-martin

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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 Lineruns until 11th January 2025 and is now open at Pilar Corrias, on Savile Row, London. Free entry.

Follow @MaryJRamsden

Visit: https://www.pilarcorrias.com/exhibitions/466-mary-ramsden-desire-line/

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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.

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.

In the final room of the exhibition, the artist has installed a live 3D printer to extrude a mixture of chalk and porcelain over a series of weeks, gradually building the sculpture. The form it draws, in hexagonal lines, is a scaled-down version of a dene hole – a type of deep underground chamber. Prevalent in Kent, dene holes were hand-excavated and accessed by a narrow, vertical shaft. This printer operates once a day, during which it prints a single layer of the sculpture. Each layer must dry before the next is added the following day, continuing until the sculpture is complete.

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 @TurnerContemporary

Thanks to @ThomasDaneGallery

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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

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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

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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

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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/

@HauserWirthand @SikkemaJenkins

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 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-2020

Learn more at Cooke Latham Gallery: https://www.cookelathamgallery.com/artists/65-fani-parali/biography/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @JonasBRWood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @KettlesYard and @ThaddeusRopac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @RobRinder and @Rylan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @StudioLenca

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @DevilInTraining

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

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

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

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

Follow @PuppiesPuppiesJade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @JeanClaracq

Visit @GalerieSultana

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

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

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

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

Follow @DominiqueFung

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

Special thanks to Massimo De Carlo.

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @GemmaRollsBentley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @MaryMcCartney

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

Thanks to Katy Wick and The Wick.

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

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

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

Follow @CorbinShaww

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

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

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

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

Follow @SelfEsteemSelfEsteem on Instagram and @SelfEsteem___ on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

Follow @JackPierson9 and @Lisson_Gallery

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @NathanaelleHerbelin and @MuseeOrsay

Thanks to @XavierHufkens and @GalerieJousseEnterprise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @KAWS on Instagram.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @Shaq.Whyte and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

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

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

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

Cork Street Banner Commission

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

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

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

Follow Louisa Buck on her new Instagram @LouBuck01

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

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