Talk Art

We meet Sean Ono Lennon to explore his music and life with art, plus we discuss the forthcoming box set Power to the People, that Sean has produced, of his parents’ Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1972 fundraising live New York concert. We consider activism in art, especially the legacy of John and Yoko’s timeless work together (as also documented in the recent One to One documentary).Recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York City on 30 August 1972, the Power to The People box set includes 31 Live Tracks from John & Yoko's two historic sets at the One To One Concert backed by Plastic Ono Band, Elephant’s Memory and Special Guests. They were John Lennon’s only full-length concerts after leaving The Beatles and the last two full-length concerts that John & Yoko performed together. Released from 10th October 2025. Learn more: https://www.johnlennon.com/news/power-to-the-people-deluxe-box-4lp-2lp-2cd-1cd-preorder-now/Sean Ono Lennon is a world renowned musician, songwriter, and producer. “He has always chosen his own musical path, following it deftly as he splits the difference between pop and experimental pursuits. He came of age in the kaleidoscopic '90s, working with Cibo Matto and issuing his first solo album, 1998's Into the Sun, on the Beastie Boys' Grand Royal label, while beginning a long stint playing in his mother Yoko Ono's band. In the following decade he formed the psychedelic duo the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger and the improvisational prog group Mystical Weapons. As his musical interests expanded further, he teamed with Les Claypool to form the hard-to-categorize project the Claypool Lennon Delirium, branched out into film scoring, explored more mainstream territory as he worked with artists like Lana Del Ray, Lady Gaga and Lily Allen, and delved into jazz as well. His first foray into that style was 2024's Asterisms, a fully instrumental album of electronics-fused jazz and psychedelic soundscape music. The son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Lennon was born in New York City in 1975. During his childhood, he was educated in Swiss boarding schools, but occasionally appeared on his mother's albums and sang on the 1984 Ono tribute Every Man Has a Woman. In his early teens, he was occasionally seen decked out in a plastic Thriller jacket and hanging out with Michael Jackson, but his first official step into the spotlight was in the form of filmed interviews for the 1988 documentary Imagine: John Lennon. Three years later, he organized -- with Ono and Lenny Kravitz -- a star-studded re-recording of his father's "Give Peace a Chance" as a protest to the Gulf War. That year, he also appeared on Kravitz's album Mama Said.” Biography by Stephen Thomas Erlewine, Rovi.In 2025, Sean is working on a new Claypool Lennon Delirium album (their 3rd) and is directing a documentary film on the crazy genius fashion designers 3as4, who have designed outfits for Bjork and Yoko among many others. Follow: @Sean_Ono_Lennon, @YokoOno and @JohnLennonVisit:johnlennon.comimaginepeace.comcitizenofnutopia.comescapetonutopia.comhttp://theclaypoollennondelirium.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is a special partnership with BOSS. Special episode recorded in Milan, September 2025. #ADRussell meets Marco Falcioni, Creative Director of HUGO BOSS. We discuss the Art Basel Awards which BOSS have been partnering with, Marcos' beginnings discovering fashion in the clubs of Rome, how art is intrinsic to his designing, and the importance of his weekly practice of visiting art exhibitions including Venice Biennale. Collaborations and partnerships are very important to him and the integrity and respect he has for his close team at BOSS. We discuss Cretto di Burri and Land Art, the paintings of Katharina Grosse, Nicola Samorì, Lucio Fontana, Spatialism, Jannis Kounellis, Arte Povera, and how their art, and the art movements they were part of, opened up his mind to the power of art.BOSS is known for timeless and sophisticated style, and commitment to culture, sport and sustainability, underpinned by technical innovations developed over its century-long history. Russell explores his inspirations and design approach, including runway collections, collaborations with David Beckham, Aston Martin, and reimagining classics with a modern twist.Follow @FalcioniMarco and @BOSS Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For six decades American artist Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction through her paintings, drawings and prints. She first garnered widespread recognition in the early 1970s with her Stroke paintings that dissect the most fundamental of painterly gestures: the brushstroke. Fuelling abstraction with autobiography, she consciously worked against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. ‘I wanted more in painting, not less,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell a story, have a beginning, a middle, an end... to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex.’ Building a vocabulary of recurring personal motifs – from roses and breasts, to ponds and mud, totems, screaming faces, grapes, scrawled words, cherry trees and moons, pumpkins and sunflowers – she pushes the formal possibilities of paint while developing a complex materiality through an additive process of collaged materials. Snyder’s rigorous interrogation of abstraction is underpinned by her feminist outlook, as she centres ‘the essence of feelings of a female body’ to carve out new terrain in contemporary American painting.Love from an Abstract Artist is an exhibition spanning over six decades of American artist Joan Snyder’s work on paper. Featuring nearly 50 new and historical works, dating from the mid-1960s to the present day, it bears witness to the important position drawing has always held in Snyder’s practice. Often diaristic and autobiographical, these varied works encompass Snyder’s grids, symbols, landscapes and strokes, and incorporate collaged materials including fabric, rope, berries, herbs and hand-pressed paper pulp, among others. Snyder has continually expanded the possibilities of drawing. Her works on paper are, as the American critic and art historian Faye Hirsch writes, ‘independent and self-sufficient objects’.Snyder is recognised for developing a new, distinctly embodied language of abstract painting at a time when legacies of Abstract Expressionism loomed large and Minimalism espoused new conditions of sterility and mechanical facture in American art. In this male-dominated climate, she dissected the ‘anatomy’ of painting to its constituent parts and, in the mid-1970s, began adding personal motifs to her work such as bodies and breasts, vulvas and hearts, totems and fields of flowers. ‘It seemed to me that in order to go forward, I had to push back hard,’ she reflects. ‘To again embrace ideas that were at the very foundation of all my thinking about painting – about structure, about application, about meaning, about materials.’ The earliest works in the exhibition including Stripes/Mounds and Green Strokes (both 1968) reveal how drawing offered the artist a framework, outside of painting, through which to deconstruct its most fundamental elements. ‘My drawings are the skeletons upon which I plan to add muscle and bones and flesh,’ she has said. Presenting a series of reduced marks – blobs, lines, stripes and strokes – these works contain the pictorial discoveries that would catalyse one of the artist’s major bodies of work, the Stroke paintings.Joan Snyder: Love from an Abstract Artist at Thaddaeus Ropac, runs til 4 October 2025: https://ropac.net/online-exhibitions/210-joan-snyder-love-from-an-abstract-artist/Follow @Joan_Snyder_Art and @ThaddeusRopac on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This lively discussion features Peaches, a boundary-pushing musician and performance artist known for her provocative style, and Klaus Biesenbach, a curator and director at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. They delve into the evolution of Berlin's art scene from the 90s to today, sharing insights on the shift from DIY creativity to institutional curation. Peaches reveals her experiences with ASMR as art and body politics, while both guests explore the importance of audience engagement and political messaging in their work. They wrap up with humorous takes on art and practical advice for aspiring artists.

WePresent x TalkArt special episode recorded live at Whitechapel Gallery. Recorded in front of a sold out live audience at @WhitechapelGallery we speak with @DominicJohnson and Jamal Butt to explore the current HAMAD BUTT exhibition: his life, art and legacy. ❤️ And published on @WePresent today to accompany our podcast is previously unseen artworks by Hamad Butt to feast your eyes on.Apprehensions is the first major survey of #HamadButt (b. 1962, Lahore, Pakistan; d. 1994, London, UK). One of the most innovative artists of his generation, Hamad Butt was a pioneer of intermedia art, bringing art into conversation with science, whilst also referencing his Queer and diasporic experiences. He offered a nuanced artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the UK, taking a conceptual rather than activist approach.Butt’s conceptually and technically ambitious works seamlessly interweave popular culture, science, alchemy, science fiction, and social and cultural concerns, as forms that are simultaneously poetic and provocative. They imagine sex and desire in a time of ‘plague’ as seductive yet frightening, intimate yet isolating, compelling yet dangerous – literally, in some cases, threatening to kill or injure.Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in East London, Butt was British South Asian, Muslim by upbringing, and Queer. A contemporary of the Young British Artists, and their peer at Goldsmiths’ College, London, Butt was described by art critics as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s, as his works often imply physical risk or endangerment.Follow: @WhitechapelGallery and @WePresent and check out WePresent today to see the series of never-before-seen artworks by Hamad, generously shared by Jamal. Visit: https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/hamad-butt-talkart-whitechapel-galleryThis episode is brought to you by our friends at WePresent, the Academy Award winning arts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artists such as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresent showcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championing diversity in everything it does. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art live! As part of the Nevill Holt Festival 2025, Talk Art hosted a live podcast recording with special guest Harland Miller. From the Nevill Holt Theatre, the world-renowned artist Miller joined Russell Tovey and Robert Diament in conversation to discuss his paintings and lifetime of art making.The Nevill Holt Festival is an annual celebration of arts and culture held in the Leicestershire countryside. Recorded on 12th June 2025, in front of a sold out audience.Artist and writer Harland Miller’s (born 1964) polychromatic and graphically vernacular paintings have garnered a devoted following. Infused with irreverent northern English humour and refined by his lifelong love of language, Miller’s work synthesises references from both high and low culture, spanning literature, music, self-help manuals and medieval iconography.Attesting to his deep-rooted engagement with the narrative, aural and typographical possibilities of language, Miller expressed, ‘People read before they can stop themselves, it’s automatic. Words offer a way into what you’re looking at, but no matter how integrated the text is, no matter how much you might think it’s synthesised into the painting, there is this imbalance in terms of how much the words are doing as words.’Follow: @NevillHoltFestivalVisit: https://nevillholtfestival.com/Learn more about Harland’s paintings: https://www.whitecube.com/artists/harland-millerFollow us on Instagram: @TalkArt📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet painter Charlotte Keates within her new installation ‘Inner Landscapes’. We discover the inspiration behind her epic new commission and explore her lifelong passion for drawing and painting.Keates’ work is inspired by interiors, travels, and architectural composition, in seamless communion with elements from the natural world. Trees push through flat concrete, while perspectives unfold in sheets of glass. These images of modernist leisure leave one with the feeling of having entered a space only recently vacated, dramatizing stillness without surrendering movement. These are environments that suggest, technically as well as artistically, indistinct human activity and motion.Her paintings gently weave together impressions of space and structure with subtle narratives, often emerging through the interplay of distinctive colours and carefully placed objects. These scenes do not depict real places but rather reflect traces of memory and quiet moments of perception. The spaces she constructs are imagined, yet the emotions they carry feel genuine and immediate. Without relying on overt storytelling, her works convey a calm presence and a quiet tension. As art historian Marco Livingstone observed, “the highlighted area acquires a hypnotic presence, as if spotlit into existence from within an atmosphere of ambiguous limitless space.”Keates was born in 1990 in Somerset, United Kingdom, and currently lives and works in Guernsey and London. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Falmouth University. She will show new work in a forthcoming group exhibition at the Ju Ming Museum in October 2025, Taipei, Taiwan.Follow @CharlotteKeates on Instagram.📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Iconic painter Sean Scully joins to celebrate his 80th birthday, sharing profound insights from his 50-year career. He discusses the protective yet divisive nature of walls in art, and how his immigrant background fuels themes of nostalgia and empathy in his work. Scully reflects on the transformative power of art, touching on loss and fatherhood, while critiquing minimalism and exploring emotional depth. The significance of color and connection in his creative process is highlighted along with the importance of storytelling in art.

We meet John Cameron Mitchell, groundbreaking American actor, writer and director best known for creating, directing and starring in the Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), a film adaptation of the off-Broadway stage production he co-wrote with composer Stephen Trask. We discuss Claude Cahun, David Bowie and the power of art, ahead of his major live show this Tuesday 8th July at the Adelphi Theatre in London.In 1998, he co-created Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a genre-defying rock musical about a genderqueer East German singer navigating identity, love, and fame. The show became an off-Broadway sensation, earning a cult following. In 2001, Mitchell directed and reprised his role as Hedwig in the film adaptation, which won the Best Director Award and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. The film’s success cemented his status as a visionary filmmaker.Following Hedwig, Mitchell directed Shortbus (2006), a provocative indie film exploring sexuality and relationships through an ensemble cast. In 2010, he directed Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, a deeply emotional drama about grief, which earned Kidman an Academy Award nomination.Marking 25 years since the London premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, theatrical icon John Cameron Mitchell presents a spectacular one-night-only celebration of his career and of the cult classic that rocked the foundations of music theatre forever. On Tuesday 8th July, the two time Tony Award-winning star of stage and screen will take to the West End stage for the very first time, joined by a host of incredible special guests including Boy George, Divina de Campo, Michael Cerveris, Nakhane, Martin Tomlinson and Mason Alexander Park.Expect the unexpected – from the glittering glam that rocked him as a boy living in early 70’s Scotland, to gut-punching ballads spanning Off-Broadway, Broadway, Hollywood and beyond — as Mitchell opens his heart and history to the city that first embraced Hedwig a quarter-century ago.Dress to Express as we celebrate the transformative power of music, love and radical self-expression. London, it’s been a long time coming, are we ready to ‘Pull that wig down off the shelf’?!Visit: https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/john-cameron-mitchell/Follow: @JohnCameronMitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New @TalkArt podcast episode. We meet Ann Carrington @anncarringtonart at her studio in Margate! Ann Carrington sculpts fantastical metal sculptures that evoke the age of aristocracy. She gathers found and discarded objects to shape her artworks, which often take the form of bouquets, vases, and oversized busts. The use of discarded, found and multiples of objects is a fundamental element of Ann’s sculptures and wider practice. All objects are saturated with cultural meaning which, as an artist, she seeks to explore, unravel and investigate. Mundane objects such as knives and forks, barbed wire, pins and paintbrushes come with their own readymade histories and associations which can be unravelled and analysed if rearranged, distorted or realigned to give them new meaning as sculpture.Carrington’s chosen medium of manipulating, forging, and sculpting metal is laborious and intricate. She works with heating techniques like soldering and welding, the latter of which she learned about a decade ago specifically so she could fuse her metal flowers into elaborate, formidable bouquets. There’s an added complexity as well: Because she uses found objects and scrap metal, initially she doesn’t always know what is under the surface of the material she’s working with.The internationally known Carrington, who lives and works in Margate, England, has created artwork for the United Nations and the Royal Family as well as having works in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal College of Art, and numerous private collections including Elton John, Paul Smith, and Lulu Guinness. Among her best known commissions is a 2012 banner for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee, which she painstakingly constructed out of half a million gold buttons. Carrington also has an official license to produce replicas of royal stamps of the Queen that she similarly constructs with buttons.Follow: @anncarringtonart #AnnCarringtonVisit: https://anncarrington.co.uk/Listen to Talk Art podcast free: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.