Talk 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.

We meet Gary Schneider to discuss his photography, and his collaboration printing for Peter Hujar and other aritsts. Born in South Africa, Gary Schneider is a photographer whose early practices in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual. He was raised during apartheid, emigrating to New York in 1977 at the age of 22, and much of his work is informed by the racial issues he grew up with. Genetic Self-Portrait (1997-1998), for example, is a series of images of his own genetic material in which nothing identifies race. Also included in this exhibition are forensic images that use the strategies he developed in Genetic Self-Portrait.These include body imprints of himself and John Erdman, his muse since 1977, and a handprint portrait of the South African artist Senzeni Marasela. It is from a project produced between 2011-2015 funded by a Guggenheim Fellowship which realized Gary’s desire to meet and make portraits of the community of South African artists thriving post-apartheid. He has been making handprint portraits since 1993 and considers them to be as expressive as any portrait of a face, more private, and perhaps more revealing.In other portraits (face and figure), made since 1988, the person lies under an 8x10-inch camera in the dark. The exposure is made by the artist slowly exploring their features with a small flash-light, over a long period of time. This traces both his and their performances and produces distortions in color and form that he further manipulates during the printing process.As mentioned in a recent Frieze article: Artist and master printer Gary Schneider was a close friend and occasional subject of Peter Hujar, the New York-based photographer famed for his empathetic photographs of artist and writer friends, drag performers, nude lovers, farm animals and cityscapes. Since Hujar’s death in 1987, Schneider has been entrusted with making prints of his late friend’s work, a process he describes in engrossing detail in his recent book Peter Hujar Behind the Camera and in the Darkroom (2024). More than three decades spent poring over Hujar’s photographs has given Schneider an unrivalled insight into how their austere elegance was achieved. Here, he remembers what it was like to work with Hujar, the ‘eccentricities’ of his prints and how their years of friendship and collaboration inspired his co-curation, with John Douglas Millar, of ‘Eyes Open in the Dark’ at Raven Row in London – the first comprehensive UK survey of Hujar’s photographs to date.Follow @GarySchneider7Visit www.garyschneider.net/and https://ravenrow.org/exhibitions/peter-hujar-eyes-open-in-the-dark Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet artist Joe Bradley, on the eve of his new solo show of new paintings in London. Animal Family is Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023. His celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, was presented in spring 2024. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria.In these new paintings, figurative elements—which Bradley had begun to develop in previous works—emerge as central compositional structures. ‘I have never really felt comfortable calling myself an abstract painter,’ says Bradley. ‘There have always been flashes of figuration in my work. For whatever reason, at this moment, I feel ready to let it all come to the surface.’ 1A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of colour, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution.In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of colour momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky. While related to those paintings, several vertical canvases represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a broad organising principle. Shades of mid-century deconstructed figuration and other art-historical references and associations come through in these large, frontally oriented figures.Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creation itself. In some of these paintings, the figure is quite discernible. In others, the formal elements share only a general relationship to the human form with eyelike ovals or leglike protrusions suggesting bodily architectures. Like the animal associations in the horizontal canvases, these roughly human-scale paintings reinforce such bodily associations, reflecting Bradley’s sensitivity to the formal, compositional, and material qualities of his medium.Joe Bradley (b. 1975) is widely recognised for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has constantly reinvented his approach to his art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements to refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.”Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He presently lives and works in New York. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet Alev Ebüzziya Siesbye (b. 1938, Istanbul, TR) is a ceramic artist known for her refined, monochrome stoneware bowls, which she has been producing for nearly sixty years. Working with the ancient coiling technique and a traditional wooden kick wheel, Ebüzziya Siesbye creates vessels that bear the intimate marks of her hand, balancing density and spaciousness, firmness and fragility. Fired at high temperatures, her bowls possess a stone-like solidity, while their sharp-edged lips and small, recessed bases lend them an impression of levitation. Though often unadorned, some pieces feature delicate horizontal lines along the rim to, as the artist describes, “prevent them from lifting off the ground.”Ebüzziya Siesbye studied sculpture at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts before working at ceramic studios in Höhr-Grenzhausen, DE, and Istanbul. In 1963, she moved to Denmark to join the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory, later founding her first independent studio in Copenhagen in 1969. She has lived and worked in Paris since 1987. She has been awarded many honors, including the 2022 Danmarks Nationalbank’s Anniversary Foundation Honor Award and the Aydın Doğan Award, and her work has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, Istanbul (TR), and the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK).Ebüzziya Siesbye’s ceramics are held in numerous museum collections, including the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New-York (NY); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (UK); the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (CA); Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris (FR); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (NL); the Museum of Decorative Arts, Copenhagen (DK); the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (SE); the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, (SCT); and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (TX), among others.Follow @Salon94 on Instagram.Alev’s current solo show ‘Vibrations’ which runs in New York at Salon 94 until 8th August 2025, address 3 East 89th Street: https://salon94.com/exhibitions/alev-ebuzziya-siesbye-vibrations Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet Misan Harriman, photographer, social activist and Oscar Nominated filmmaker. He is one of the most widely-shared visual storytellers of this age. He is also the first black person in the 104 year history of British Vogue to shoot the cover of its September issue. In July 2021 he commenced his appointment as Chair of the Southbank Centre, London. His strong reportage style and unique eye for narrative has captured the attention of editors and celebrities around the world. From documenting historic moments in history to photographing high profile celebrities, including Meghan Markle & Prince Harry, Angelia Jolie, Jay-Z, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Giorgio Armani, Rhianna, Cate Blanchett and Olivia Colman, Misan is a photographer of extraordinary range. His striking images have featured in Vanity Fair, Vogue UK, Harpers Bazaar, People Magazine and The Telegraph among others. His first film, the After starring David Oyelowo is the first Netflix UK original Short and has been nominated for an Academy Award.Misan is an outspoken activist supporting Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace, he is also a mental health campaigner with a keen interest in Dyslexia and Neurodiversity. He is currently exploring how web3 can help democratise merit based opportunity for disadvantaged artists on a global scale.He is the founder of Culture3 whose mission is to explain and explore what web 3.0 means for culture, commerce, and society. Nigeria born, Misan was educated in England where he developed a life-long love for the arts. This led him to picking up a camera and honing his craft. He is completely self-taught, his work is inspired by Gordon Parks, Sally Mann, Eve Arnold, Bruce Davidson, Norman Parkinson and Peter Lindbergh. SXSW London presents: Misan Harriman: Shoot the People Part of SXSW London 2025. British-Nigerian photographer Misan Harriman investigates how protest movements shape social change. Following his debut White Nanny, Black Child, director Andy Mundy-Castle turns the camera on Oscar-nominated British-Nigerian photographer and activist Misan Harriman, who became the first Black man to shoot a cover of British Vogue in 2021 and has captured modern icons such as Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, Rihanna, Stormzy, Cate Blanchett, and Tom Cruise. In Shoot the People, Harriman examines how protest and organised movements can lead to social change, all while capturing the resilience of activism through his lens. In July 2025, Harriman will have his debut solo exhibition of his photography in London at Hope93 gallery. https://hope93.com/Follow @MisanHarrimanVisit https://www.misanharriman.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Season 25 begins! We meet Juergen Teller, one of the world’s most sought-after contemporary photographers, successfully straddling the interface of both art and commercial photography.We discuss childhood, touring with Nirvana, Agnès Varda, Tracey Emin, William Eggleston, Kate Moss, Pope Francis, Kristen McMenemy, Zoe Bedeaux, collaborating with @DovileDrizyte and breakthroughs with Marc Jacobs. Juergen Teller’s new exhibition of his photographs taken at Auschwitz Birkenau is now open Kunsthaus Göttingen, Germany until 1 June 2025 @KunsthausGoettingen. An accompanying photobook is published by @SteidlVerlag. 7 ½, Teller’s concurrent exhibition runs at Galleria Degli Antichi, Sabbioneta, Italy until 23 November 2025 @VisitSabbioneta.Juergen Teller (b. 1964, Erlangen, Germany) studied at the Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Photographie in Munich, before moving to London in 1986. Considered one of the most important photographers of his generation, Teller has successfully navigated both the art world and commercial photography since beginning his career in the late 1980s. Working across different genres of photography, Teller has shot fashion campaigns for luxury brands as well as editorials for prominent art and fashion publications.In 2003, Teller was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography, London, and in 2018, he received the Special Presentation Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. His work has been exhibited internationally, including solo shows at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris (2006); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (2013); Bundeskunstalle, Bonn (2016); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2017); Grand Palais Ephémère, Paris (2023); Triennale, Milano (2024).Teller’s photographs have been acquired by numerous international collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Le Louvre, Paris and National Portrait Gallery, London. Teller has published over sixty books and was a Professor of Photography at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Nürnberg 2014–2019.Follow @JuergenTellerStudio and https://www.juergenteller.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet artist Chris Levine, a British contemporary artist renowned for his pioneering work with light and lasers. His innovative approach transcends traditional mediums, integrating technology and spirituality to create immersive art installations that challenge and expand human perception. Levine's multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, photography, performance, fashion, music, and design. He employs lasers and sound frequencies to craft environments that engage viewers on both sensory and contemplative levels. This synthesis of technology and art positions Levine's work within a broader historical context, aligning with movements that seek to transcend the physical and delve into the metaphysical.A seminal piece in Levine's portfolio is "Lightness of Being" (2004), a holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This work has been lauded for its spiritual depth and technical mastery, with the National Portrait Gallery describing it as "the most evocative image of a royal by any artist." The portrait captures the ethereal quality of light and presence, reflecting Levine's ability to merge artistic expression with technological innovation. Beyond portraiture, Levine has engaged in numerous projects that bridge various artistic disciplines. In 2012, the artist partnered with Anohni and the Johnsons for their "Swanlight" performance at Radio City Music Hall, commissioned by the MoMA, New York, integrating laser with musical performance and creating a multisensory experience.  Levine’s site-specific large scale installations have pushed the boundaries of light art, taking diverse settings from the historic Durham Cathedral to the contemporary landscape of Hobart, Tasmania. Aligned with the traditions of public art inspiring communities, Levine’s works make immersive art accessible to broader audiences.  In 2021, Levine's exhibition at Houghton Hall, 528 Hz Love Frequency, featured "Molecule of Light," a monumental 25-meter-high sculpture that transformed the landscape and cemented his innovative approach to light art. This installation not only showcased the artist’s technical prowess but also his ability to harmonize art with architectural space, creating a dialogue between the artwork and its environment. Through his multidisciplinary practice, Levine continues to explore the infinite possibilities of light in art, contributing to the ongoing dialogue on the intersection of technology, spirituality, and visual expression. His work stands as a testament to the transformative power of art, inviting viewers to experience the world through a lens of heightened awareness.Follow @ChrisLevine on InstagramVisit: https://chrislevine.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Best known for his figurative paintings and pastels, which evoke a luminous, dreamlike reality, TM Davy conjures intimate worlds where figures glow with an almost metaphysical presence, transcending the purely visual. Light and form take on an ethereal quality, reflecting emotions, memories, and the quiet subtleties of human experience. Every brushstroke, every shift of light, seems imbued with a deeper resonance — suggesting that the figures portrayed are not mere representations but vessels of something otherworldly, carrying with them the weight of untold stories and silent truths.Blending careful realism with archetypal symbolism, Davy’s work explores love as a sphere of magic and protection — a space where human connection is not just physical, but transcendent; where bonds are forged in realms of the spiritual and the unseen. His figures often seem suspended in a state of grace, bathed in light that is both gentle and intense, creating an atmosphere of reverence and awe. His work suggests that love, in its purest form, is both a force of transformation and a quiet shield — invisible, radiant, and profound.Grounded in the belief that all of art history informs the present, Davy’s technique is marked by a virtuosic layering of colour and a masterful use of light and shadow. His attention to texture and hue draws deeply from classical tradition, while his handling of paint — confident, gestural, at times joyously loose — is unmistakably contemporary. With a lineage that stretches from Reynolds to Turner, Davy takes us to a threshold where intimacy, mystery, and the inner self converge. He stands at the intersection of classical technique and modern sensibility, drawing on the rich tradition of portraiture to create images that feel at once ancient and immediate. Through his luminous compositions, he invites us to pause and reflect — to step into a space where the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve, and where the soul’s journey is lit by love, presence, and the quiet mysteries of being.Over the past few months, Davy has been living and working in Margate, creating an exhibition deeply attuned to its elemental surroundings. Rooted in the present moment, yet echoing timeless myth, the works are shaped by the sea, the chalk cliffs, and the ancient caves that punctuate the coast. These landscapes are not just scenery but portals, inhabited by archetypal beings — Satyrs, Mermaids, White Horses — who rise from seafoam and shadow, conjured from deep cultural memory as much as from the terrain itself. The show is at once an homage to place and a meditation on the mythic — a bridge between the ancient and the now.Davy has the rare ability to render his subjects and scenes with an acute physical presence — they feel almost touchable, real — all the while keeping us fully aware that these are just paintings. He revels in paint’s materiality, with areas of sumptuous brushwork, loose rhythms, and a heightened palette that amplifies the intensity and luminosity of the image. His approach knowingly risks oversentimentality in the pursuit of a higher realm of expression: an emotional frequency that calls us to remain in the present, to feel fully, and to glimpse — even momentarily — the shared magic of human connection.Follow @TMDavy on Instagram.TM Davy's Tine Mara runs from 27th April until 22nd June 2025.Preview is Saturday 26th April 6-8pm, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK.Visit @CarlFreedmanGallery and https://carlfreedman.com/exhibition/tm-davy/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Delaine Le Bas works in a transdisciplinary way: she combines visual, performative and literary practices to create an artistic oeuvre that encompasses all areas of life. In her works she deals with many facets, political as well as private and emotional, which involve belonging to the Rom*nja people, their history and rich cultural heritage.Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal.Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life as she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.'English-Romani artist Delaine Le Bas lives and works across the UK and Europe. Born in 1965 in Worthing, she graduated from Central St Martin’s and her work explores themes of nationhood, land, belonging, and gender through various media such as embroidery, painting, collage, sculpture, installation, and performance. Describing the intertwined nature of her identity and her work, Le Bas has stated “…as a Romani, my viewpoint has always been that of the outsider and this position of the 'other' is reflected in the materials and messages within my work. We live in a culture of mixed values and garbled messages. My works are crafted from the disregarded and disparate objects of the car boot sale and the charity shops."Le Bas has played a significant role in the building of a Roma/Traveller contemporary art movement and aesthetic. Her work has been featured in the 52nd and 58th Venice Biennales and the Gwangju Biennale in 2012. She co-curated the first Roma Biennale, 'Come out Now!', in Berlin in 2018. She was Delaine Le Bas was nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize, with an exhibition at Tate Britain, and is currently artist-in-residence at The White House, Dagenham; a contemporary and community art space operated by Create London. https://www.whitehouseart.org/delaine-le-basStranger in Silver Walking on Air by DELAINE LE BAS, is a new solo exhibition running until 27th September 2025, at The White House, Dagenham: https://createlondon.org/event/atchin-tan-by-delaine-le-bas/Step into an immersive exhibition that transforms The White House on the Becontree Estate into a dreamlike space of shifting, layered imagery with textile, sculptural objects, glasswork and interactive installations.From 31st May - 2nd August 2025, Newcastle Contemporary Art proudly presents  +Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, a solo exhibition by artist Delaine Le Bas, who continues her exploration of linguistics, mythology, and Gypsy Roma Traveller narratives through the tactile power of textiles, language, and storytelling: https://www.visitnca.com/exhibitions/delaine-le-basFollow @DeDeLeBasVisit: https://www.delainelebas.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.