Episodes
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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 Line runs 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/
@HauserWirth and @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.
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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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