Spelade

  • WARNING: this episode of Talk Art contains strong language! Russell & Robert meet legendary English artist Caroline Coon. We discuss 50 years of painting in Ladbroke Grove, feminism, her longterm political activism, the importance of being socially conscious, decriminalising sex work, growing up in Kent, punk rock, managing The Clash & writing for Melody Maker in the 1970s. We explore the influence of artist Pauline Boty who helped found British Pop art, and was the only female painter in the movement, inheriting Boty's paints after her early death at the age of 28, and we consider the lasting power of painting but also ceramics and artworks made by hand. Her first solo exhibition ‘Caroline Coon: The Great Offender' was held in 2018 at The Gallery Liverpool, followed by her current first solo London exhibition at TRAMPS (running until 22nd December 2019) curated by artist Peter Doig & curator Parinaz Magadassi. The works span the 1980’s to 2019, demonstrating how Coon, in her explicit social and political commentary, has made art that rebels against binary conceptions of gender and challenges orthodoxy in ways that are particularly relevant today. The exhibition travels to TRAMPS New York, in Spring 2020. Art historian Maria Elena Buszek, in her catalogue essay for the exhibition, writes: “Artist, writer and activist Caroline Coon is one of the towering ‘disappeared’ women of her generation; she was a catalyst and witness to some of the most critical moments of art, music, and politics, only to see her participation muted and marginalised, and her male contemporaries canonised.” Learn more at www.TrampsLtd.com and www.CarolineCoon.com Special thanks to Martin Green.

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  • Robert & Russell meet legendary British artist Denzil Forrester. We discuss 40 years of painting, his childhood in Grenada, the impact of moving to London in 1967 aged 11, his memories of making drawings in London's dub & reggae nightclubs of the late 1970s-80s, his admiration for Jah Shaka's sound system and the drive to create paintings that documented the club scene he cherished. We learn about racially-motivated arrests of the time including Forrester's own unjust arrest as a student followed by the death of Winston Rose a few years later, a friend of Forrester’s who died while under police restraint. Forrester went on to pay tribute to Rose in a number of iconic paintings including 'Three Wicked Men' (1981), now part of Tate museum's collection, and in a recent large-scale public mural for Art on the Underground titled 'Brixton Blue' (2019). Reflective of the contemporary black experience and the racial tensions of the 1980s, the mural straddles Brixton station's entrance and depicts a Brixton street scene with the figures of a truncheon-wielding policeman, a Rastafarian ‘businessman’ holding a portable sound system and a besuited politician. We also hear how curator Matthew Higgs of White Columns, New York and fellow painter Peter Doig & TRAMPS gallery helped shine a spotlight on Forrester's paintings for a new generation.


    Denzil Forrester's major solo exhibition 'Itchin & Scratchin' runs at Nottingham Contemporary until 3rd May 2020. This remarkable exhibition's wide ranging artworks roam from London to Rome and New York, from Jamaica to Cornwall. Pulsing with music and movement, these nocturnal scenes are by turns intimate and ecstatic, singular records of the Afro-Caribbean experience in Britain. Presented in partnership with Spike Island, Bristol, where it will travel to from 4 July to 6 September 2020. Follow @Nottm_Contemp and @SpikeIsland. Special thanks to @StephenFriedmanGallery's Karon Hepburn, Jonathan Horrocks and Tamsin Huxford. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or email [email protected] as we love hearing your feedback! @talkart


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  • Russell & Robert meet Tai Shani, multidisciplinary British artist and joint-winner of the Turner Prize 2019. Shani’s practice encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations, frequently structured around experimental texts. She is currently a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art.


    Taking inspiration from disparate histories, narratives and characters mined from forgotten sources, Shani creates dark, fantastical worlds, brimming with utopian potential. These deeply affective works often combine rich and complex monologues with arresting, saturated installations, manifesting equally disturbing and divine images in the mind of the viewer. 


    We discuss her on-going "DC: projects", developed by the artist over a four-year period and culminating in her Turner Prize nomination. The work is made up of multiple characters which explore mythical and real women in an expanded adaptation of Christine de Pizan's 1405 pioneering proto-feminist book, The Book of the City of Ladies. Shani uses the structure of an allegorical city of women to explore ‘feminine’ subjectivity and experience, through a gothic/science-fiction lens. Adopting Pizans’ medieval conception of history, where historical events, fictions and myths are entwined, "DC: projects" draws upon a host of references, tropes and characters from disparate sources, creating an elaborate world, outside of time and beyond patriarchal limits. 


    Follow @TaiShani on Instagram or visit www.TaiShani.com and for details of Tai's installation at Turner Prize 2019 visit @TurnerContemporary or @The_Tetley for Tai's earlier exhibition mentioned in this episode. If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or email [email protected] as we love hearing your feedback! @talkart


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  • Talk Art NYC!!! Russell & Robert meet artist Brian Donnelly aka KAWS at his Brooklyn studio for a rare glimpse into the private world of one the world's most iconic creative figures. KAWS engages audiences far beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of influential work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, large-scale sculptures, street art, graphic and production design. Over the last two decades KAWS has built a successful career with work that consistently shows his formal agility as an artist, as well as his underlying wit, irreverence, and affection for our times. The nature of his work possesses a sophiticated humour and thoughtful interplay with consumer products and collaborations with global brands from DIOR (with Kim Jones), to his own, now dormant, streetwear label OriginalFake.


    He often draws inspiration and appropriates from pop-culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary for his works across various mediums. Now admired for his larger-than-life sculptures and hardedge paintings that emphasize line and color, KAWS' cast of hybrid cartoon and human characters are perhaps the strongest examples of his exploration of humanity. KAWS has been exhibited at the Doha Fire Station Museum, National Gallery of Victoria Melbourne, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, High Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and the Yuz Museum in Shanghai.


    Follow @KAWS on Instagram or visit www.KawsOne.com If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or email [email protected] as we love hearing your feedback! @talkart


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  • Russell and Robert meet American artist Louis Fratino in London! Drawing inspiration from personal experience and, more recently, photographic source material, Fratino makes paintings and drawings of the male body. His work includes portraits, nudes, and intimate scenes of male couples engaged in activities ranging from the mundane to the graphically sexual. The result is a body of work that is a loving and honest expression of the contemporary gay experience. With great attention to surface and color, features such as an earlobe, belly button, body hair, or the curves and planes of the body are accentuated and stylized in Fratino's work, complimenting the sensual appeal of his subject.


    Born in 1993, in Annapolis, MD, Fratino received his BFA in Painting with concentration in Illustration from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD in 2015. Recent exhibitions include Night and Day, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY (solo); Heirloom, Antoine Levi Gallery, Paris (solo); Youth and Beauty!, MAN Museo d’Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Nuoro, 2018 (group); and Matisse + Fratino, Cabinet Printemps, Düsseldorf, 2018 (group). He is a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Painting, Berlin (2015-16) and a Yale Norfolk Painting Fellowship, Norfolk, CT in 2014. Fratino lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.


    For more details on Louis' works, check out #LouisFratino hashtag on Instagram or visit his galleries @SikkemaJenkins (New York) or @AntoineLevi (Paris). If you've enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or email [email protected] as we love hearing your feedback! @TalkArt


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  • Russell & Robert meet British artist Ima-Abasi Okon. Ima's current solo exhibition is at VOID, Derry~Londonderry and runs until 25th April 2020. This episode was recorded in July 2019 during an earlier iteration of Ima's solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Ima works with sculpture, sound and video to produce installations that explore exhibition-making as an exercise in syntax, adopting linguistic and grammatical structures within her installations as a way of complicating the construction of knowledge.

     

    For the VOID iteration of the commission, a series of industrial air conditioners are adapted to become hosts for a new multi-channel sound piece comprising an existing audio track that has been slowed down. Acting as both a cooling system for the gallery and as a vehicle for the sound work, the fans perform at various speeds and durations.

     

    In another gallery the ceiling has been partially lowered using a standardised modular system, often found within offices, retail spaces, waiting rooms and other administrative environments. The mass-produced ceiling tiles have been smeared with an invisible mixture of morphine, insulin, ultrasound gel and gold, imbuing the otherwise everyday objects with a personal, totemic charge.

     

    Hand-crafted glass light shades, each adorned with an opulent design and filled with palm oil and Courvoisier VS Cognac, hang from the ceiling. With the introduction of these liquids, the lights emit a golden glow, further highlighting an atmospheric friction between Okon's production processes, pointing to the possibilities of magic as a sculptural act. Okon's ongoing use of oriented strand board, painted with varnish and framed with 'exotic woods' further explore how value is assigned to a given object or material through its categorisation, modes of display and origin.

     

    Ima-Abasi Okon is currently participating in the residency programme at Rijksakademie Academy for fine arts, Amsterdam. For more about Ima’s work please visit http://www.imaokon.co.uk or follow @i_a_okon. For exhibition images: @DerryVoid and @ChisenhaleGallery. Special thanks to Polly Staple & Ellen Greig at Chisenhale and Mary Cremin & Tansy Cowley at VOID. Finally, THANK YOU for listening! We love to hear your feedback. @talkart


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  • Robert & Russell meet the one-and-only legend that is Princess Julia!!!! We discuss her endless creativity across different worlds of music, fashion and art, life-drawing and her weekly trip to ‘Sketch Sesh’, her friendship with DJ Jeffry Hinton, and how she started DJing herself at queer spaces in London. We find out what it’s like to be photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, her memories of being the coat check girl at Blitz & Taboo nightclubs, Leigh Bowery, Boy George, Jordan (a Malcolm McLaren protégé who featured in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee) and the long lasting influence & legacy of that era. We discuss being shy, her love for Old Master paintings, emerging artists like Richard Porter and Lydia Blakley, her passion for Fashion East, modelling for Kylie Minogue, our mutual admiration for Pet Shop Boys plus her favourite performance artists including David Hoyle, Justin Vivian Bond and Christeene!! Finally discover how Robert first met Julia almost 20 years ago at the early 2000s clubs Kashpoint, Nag Nag Nag and Electrogogo resulting in a duet for Rob’s then electropop-band Temposhark. Follow @HRHPrincessJulia on Instagram and @TalkArt for photos of artworks discussed in this episode!

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  • Robert & Russell meet David Shrigley OBE, one of the UK’s most loved and respected artists whose hilarious and disturbing doodles, sculptures and anecdotes depict the world as an absurd place. We discuss wide-ranging topics such as worms, tattoos, Dada, taxidermy, making art books and being nominated for the Turner Prize. Whilst further exploring art as therapy, living in Brighton, songwriting, drawing dogs and what it’s like to have internationally recognised handwriting. Plus discover what David's wrestling name would be, if he were a champion wrestler!! Please leave us a review and rating if you’ve enjoyed this episode! For images of all works discussed in this episode, visit our Instagram @TalkArt 

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  • Russell & Robert meet leading documentary and fashion photographer Jamie Hawkesworth. We discuss Milton Avery, forensic photography, the power of natural light, a dedication to analogue cameras, taking Kate Moss’ portrait in India and documenting landscapes of Antarctica. We learn about Jamie’s early project 'Preston Bus Station' and explore his later collaborations with JW Anderson for Loewe and exhibitions at The Hepworth Wakefield and Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; the latter showing a mix of his personal as well as his commercial photography. Jamie reveals his admiration for photographers William Christenberry, Jem Southam & William Eggleston and for land artist Michael Heizer - who invited Jamie to take his portrait in the Nevada desert at Heizer’s mythical, monumental, as-yet-unseen 'City' (an ongoing land artwork that began in 1972 and will finally be publicly opened in 2020).

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  • Welcome to Talk Art! Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament discuss how they first became friends a decade ago, plus more recent adventures at Frieze Art Fair, the Turner Prize, South London Gallery and other exhibition highlights in London, as well as Robert's gallery relocating to the seaside town of Margate, Kent.

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  • Robert & Russell meet Tracey Emin CBE, one of the world’s most respected, successful and controversial artists. During an hour-long private tour of her current solo exhibition ‘A Fortnight of Tears’, we explore her mother’s recent death, grief, everlasting love, the supernatural, insomnia and abortion. Tracey reveals that nature is one of her biggest influences and how working in a small South of France studio enabled the artist to wholeheartedly and triumphantly return to painting. Learn more about her longterm connection to the work of Edvard Munch, her return to her childhood hometown of Margate and why, surprisingly, she doesn’t keep a diary. For images of all works discussed in this episode, visit our Instagram @TalkArt Please leave us a review and rating if you’ve enjoyed this episode!

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  • Talk Art returns! To kick off Season 2, Russell & Robert meet Zoe Bedeaux, the multi-disciplinary artist, poet, super-stylist and creative shapeshifter. We discuss harlequins, Picasso, Irving Penn and Louise Nevelson. Whilst learning about Zoe's collaborations with iconic image makers Judy Blame, Ray Petri and more recently leading photographers Juergen Teller and Tim Walker. You can view Zoe's film work 'From The Mouth of Babes Speak I' at Somerset House in London as part of a major new exhibition 'Get Up, Stand Up Now' until 15th September 2019. The show celebrates the past 50 years of Black creativity in Britain and beyond. @zoebedeaux @talkart

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  • Robert & Russell meet broadcasting legend Janet Street-Porter CBE at her home in East London. We discuss reading & self improvement, comic strip art, her godmother who was a big influence in her teenage years, French cinema & the films of Jean Cocteau, her favourite composers including JS Bach and Philip Glass as well as a memorable Gustav Metzger performance that she saw whilst studying at the Architectural Association. We learn about Janet’s favourite art including Jake & Dinos Chapman’s Goya-inspired etchings, Pop Art, Joe Tilson, Allen Jones, Richard Hamilton, Michael Craig-Martin, Grayson Perry, Patrick Caulfield, Jim Dine, Ed Rusha, Hamish Fulton, Gary Hume and H.C. Westermann. We also view a previously-unseen series of 6 portraits of Janet painted by Damien Hirst.

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  • Russell & Robert meet painter Rose Wylie, one of their all-time art heroes, at her Kent home-studio where she’s painting for a New York solo show opening later this year at David Zwirner. We discuss the impact of film on her painting including Gus Van Sant, why the early paintings of Cezanne are the greatest, painting people she respects such as Serena & Venus Williams, alchmey bottles, helping frogs cross the road, wild roses and letting your garden grow free. We learn about her longterm working relationship with Jari Lager & Union Gallery (now Choi & Lager) and her respect for artists such as Tal R, Alida Cervantes, Sam Doyle, Faith Ringgold, Kerry James Marhsall, Neo Rauch, David Hockney and Katherine Bernhardt.

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  • Robert & Russell meet Mark Gatiss, the influential British actor, screenwriter, director and novelist. We discuss Mark's recent BBC4 art documentary 'John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art', celebrating the life and work of the highly prolific and successful 20th century English artist whose work is now all but forgotten. A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Minton suffered psychological problems, self-medicated with alcohol, and in 1957 died by suicide. We chat in depth about Mark's forthcoming documentary on the life of illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, a peer of Oscar Wilde, whose black ink drawings revealed the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. We explore Mark's own passion for drawing and painting portraits, the psychology behind The League of Gentlemen, his admiration for Alan Bennett, and how he came to write the series of 8 monologues ‘Queers’ in response to the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offences Act. This episode was recorded in early January 2020.


    Follow @TalkArt on Instagram for images of all artworks discussed in this episode! Follow @MarkGatiss on Twitter, and check out @TalkArtPodcast, our new Twitter.


    Thanks for listening to Season 4! We will be back NEXT WEEK with the all new Season 5 'Talk Art: QuarARTine' series, recorded remotely from the global lockdown.


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  • Russell and Robert return for Season 5! Recorded primarily during quarantine lockdown, we’ve reached out to international creative guests from art, design, music, sport, fashion, TV and film. Every Tuesday & Friday (yes, twice a week!) we will bring you voices that inspire us and that we hope will inspire you too. These are unprecedented, scary, challenging and deeply sad times. We strongly believe in art and in its power to unify, to resonate, to bring hope through adversity, to offer encouragement but most of all to shine light in the darkest of moments.


    For episode 1 of Talk Art's QuarARTine series, Russell and Robert chat with legendary singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright from his home in Los Angeles.


    We discuss his iconic song ‘The Art Teacher’, his love of Whistler and John Singer Sargent’s paintings, his childhood passion for making zines and his baroque alter ego Bella von Herzgold. We hear about the time Rufus met legendary artist Erté in late 1980s New York, the influence of Aubrey Beardsley, Mucha's posters and Art Nouveau. We explore the realist paintings of Andrew Wyeth, his husband Jorn’s love of art and friendships with curator Klaus Biesenbach & artist Marina Abramović, visiting the Venice Biennale, and living with artworks by Timothy Cummings, Jonathan Meese, Clementine Hunter, Robert Wilson and even an iconic Andy Warhol polaroid of Grace Jones! We explore the psychology behind composing & developing characters for his recent opera’s 'Prima Donna' and 'Hadrian' and he reminisces about a travelling exhibition of art from the Russian Hermitage museum that made a big impact in his youth and New York afternoons hanging out with performance icons Penny Arcade, Jack Smith and Quentin Crisp. 


    Follow @RufusWainwright and be sure to watch Rufus' daily 'Quarantunes/Robe Recitals' live performances streaming free via his Instagram. Pre-order Rufus' new album 'Unfollow The Rules' out from 10th July 2020. Lead single 'Damsel in Distress' is available now with a stunning animated video created from Rufus' own drawings!! www.RufusWainwright.com For images of all artworks discussed in this episode, visit us @TalkArt on IG or @TalkArtPodcast on Twitter. Thanks for listening!


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  • Russell and Robert meet artist Doron Langberg, an Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture, addressing issues of gender and sexuality creating a shared experience of love and desire through the surface and subjects of his paintings. Langberg paints large-scale portraits of family, close friends and lovers. These visualizations of queerness—both his own and those of the many queer subjects depicted—move beyond the traditional shorthand of signs and easily recognizable queer iconographies. Instead, Langberg contextualizes queer sexuality and intimacy within larger narratives of everyday life. Follow @DoronLangberg on Instagram and Yossi Milo Gallery @YossiMilo. For all images discussed today visit @TalkArt and check out our new Twitter is @TalkArtPodcast Thanks for listening!!!

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