Talk Art

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Sophie von Hellermann Oct 12, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Follow @SophieVonHellermann and @PilarCorrias

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

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

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Eva Jospin, presented by Ruinart Oct 10, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

More can be found out at Ruinart.com

Follow @Ruinart

Please drink responsibly

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

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Rafał Zajko Oct 05, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

Nearest tube: North Greenwich. Free entry.

Follow @Rafal_Zajko and @QueerCircle

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

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Bengi Ünsal - ICA London Sep 28, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

Follow @ICAlondon and @BengiUnsal

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

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

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

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Tom of Finland + Durk Dehner Sep 25, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sylvia Snowden Sep 21, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fiza Khatri Sep 18, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Julian Schnabel Sep 14, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special thanks to @PaceGallery.

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Ted Rogers Sep 12, 2023

Show notes

Talk Art special episode with WePresent!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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Gus Van Sant Sep 08, 2023

Show notes

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

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

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

Van Sant lives and works in Los Angeles.

Follow @Gus_Van_Sant

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

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

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