Talk Art

We meet artist Aubrey Levinthal from her studio in Philadelphia!!!Softly-rendered portraits by Aubrey Levinthal explore contemporary psychology. In the works, figures go about familiar daily routines - eating, sleeping and daydreaming. The artist is inspired by a range of modernist painters, from portraitist Alice Neel to collagist Romare Bearden and modernist David Hockney. Her intentionally muted palette of predominantly grey tones is created by layering light washes of oil paint onto panels, and then scraping them down with a blade. This technique renders the skin of her characters as almost translucent - either emerging from, or dissolving into, their surfaces.Much of Levinthal’s recent work relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. The loneliness and claustrophobia of social isolation is told through melancholic facial expressions and slumped postures. Recurring motifs, such as browning bananas and unfinished meals, allude to the passing of time, while irregularities in proportion and perspective engage the ways in which a home becomes strange when you spend all your time within it. These details embody the crux of Levinthal’s practice - how we inhabit spaces, and how they inhabit us.Levinthal’s paintings focus on her own daily interiority and the quotidian, mostly situated in the home. More recently, Levinthal reflects on ones’ relationship to the outside world and moves the psychology away from the isolated self to a more unknown drifting space. The paintings are infused with more daylight, colour has become brighter, and the figures are larger. Shared environments, such as neighborhood coffee shops, yoga studios, hospitals, hotels and pools are fraught with nuanced tension and personal connection. Levinthal heightens the psychological space between observing and knowing. The paintings explore a sense of insecurity, self-reflection and curiosity in collective spaces. In Bagel Line (2022), a group of friends situated outside a bagel shop huddle closely together in winter coats. Their expressions range from anxious to annoyed to eager highlighting ones’ own duality. The artist projects an interior life onto these strangers: a barista, a person standing in line, a blue-haired teenager at a take-out counter, or a shopper in a clothing store. Within the paintings, objects take on abstract shapes and act as barriers. In Crab Shack (2022), two brown paper bags give the impression of a wall in front of a pensive young woman. Levinthal draws inspiration from the Renassiance period to Modernists such as, Mary Fedden (1915-2012), Milton Avery (1885-1965) and Fairfield Porter (1907-1975). Levinthal’s tenderly observed paintings illuminate the strangeness of daily interiority and introspection. In Yoga Mat (2022), the viewer is confronted with a lone woman in a yoga pose. The figure also doubles as an ancient sculpture, most evident in the shapes used and the manner in which the feet are depicted, as if resembling stone. This painting was directly inspired by the Egyptian sculpture titled Statue of Sitepehu (1479-1458 BCE), which is part of the permanent collection at the Penn Museum, Philadelphia. The artist lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.Follow @AubreyLevinthal on Instagram and their official website https://aubreylevinthal.com/ Follow their gallery: @Monya_Rowe_GalleryAubrey's new work is included in group show 'Close' at GRIMM Gallery curated by Talk Art co-host Russell Tovey from 4th March - 6th April, 2023 2 Bourdon Street, London (UK). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet leading artist TOM BURR from his studio in Connecticut, USA!In his spare, enigmatic, mixed-media sculptures and installations, Tom Burr explores the ways in which we imbue the spaces and things by which we are surrounded—like clothing, furniture, or the patterns in wood—with our memories and emotions. As he explains: “I know that objects retain the stain of people and that our memory can be physically located out of longing or grief.” Though his work is grounded in his own memories, it is deliberately ambiguous, allowing viewers to invest it with their own life experiences. He uses what he calls a “focused spectrum” of humble materials and found objects, including plywood, old blankets and t-shirts, radiators, doors, books, and bits of hardware. By draping a pair of nylons over a radiator, encasing sneakers in yellow Plexiglas, or constructing stripped-down rooms, Burr makes his (and our) memories material.Tom Burr (b. 1963 in New Haven, Connecticut) lives and works in New York. He has shown extensively throughout Europe and the United States. He most recently was the subject of a solo exhibition entitled Hinged Figures at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. His work was recently featured in Queer Abstraction at the Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA.Burr’s work has been collected by major museums internationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Migros Museum, Zurich, Switzerland; MOCA, Los Angeles, CA; MuMOK, Vienna, Austria; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Sammlung Grasslin, Germany; Sammlung Verbund, Vienna, Austria; Ludwig Museum, Koln, Germany; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; FRAC, Champagne Ardenne, France; FRAC, Nord-Pas de Calais, France; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel. Burr attended the School of Visual Arts and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.Tom Burr’s forthcoming solo exhibition runs from 10th March 2023 at Bortolami in New York.Follow @BurrTomBurrVisit: Maureen Paley, London, Bortolami, NYC and Galerie Neu, Berlin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Talk Art!!! For this VERY special episode we meet artist couple - photographer Ian Lewandowski and painter Anthony Cudahy to discuss how their individual art practices overlap through their life together and the idea of the 'muse'.Ian Lewandowski (born 1990) is a photographer from Northwest Indiana. He’s exhibited photographs at School 33 Art Center (Baltimore), 1969 Gallery (New York), Skylab Gallery (Columbus), and Lamar Dodd School of Art (Athens). Ian has been published in Unseen, The Fader, American Chordata, and Capricious. In 2017 Dashwood Books published Vigil (RHYTHM) Vigil, a volume of his photographs alongside paintings and drawings by his partner Anthony Cudahy, which was in 2018 featured in theQueering Space group exhibition at Alfred University (Alfred). He holds an MFA from the State University of New York at Purchase. Ian’s work negotiates picture and body histories. He also archives the photo work of Kenny Gardner (1913-2002). He lives in Brooklyn. Ian Lewandowski’s first monograph, The Ice Palace is Gone, published by Magic Hour Press, is a collection of large format color photographs depicting queer identities and interiors within the context of community and care. Alluding to the nightclub on Fire Island, the Ice Palace is a space that represents the temporal and precarious nature of queer spaces, and the necessity for them to be constantly rebuilt and reimagined. In The Ice Palace is Gone, Lewandowski creates honest depictions of those he photographs, while presenting a potentiality for who they could be. Lewandowski’s portraits crystalize his subjects as characters within this seductive and surreal world, blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Anthony Cudahy (born 1989) is a painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY Anthony Cudahy (b.1989 Florida, USA) received a BFA from Pratt Institute, NY in 2011 and completed an MFA at Hunter College, NY in 2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Cudahy’s tender paintings reveal the nuanced complexities of life. In masterful compositions he creates a world for unspoken stories, intimate moments and romantic gesture. Personal and poetic, Cudahy’s figures coalesce with the atmosphere of their environments in fluid brushstrokes. At once dark and luminous, Cudahy’s paintings often have a phosphorescent quality to them, as though they are lit from within. For the artist, how the paint is handled has its own narrative potential – the thick textures, light airy space, patterning and delicate marks are all active in the story he is creating. Alongside painting, Cudahy makes incredibly detailed colored pencil drawings, in an all-consuming process of mark making. Unlike his paintings which transform throughout the making, the challenging medium calls for the compositions to be decided beforehand.Follow @AnthonyCudahy and @ILewando on InstagramVisit: https://anthonycudahy.com/ and https://ianlewandowski.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet SANDRA BERNHARD, performer, actress, singer, comedian, author and ICON!!!! We discover the influence of her artist mother, growing up in Flint Michigan and meeting/collaborating with artists as wide-ranging as Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, John Boskovich, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, and Keith Haring and her deep admiration for the work of Cindy Sherman. We also learn about her passion for expressing herself via fashion, walking the runway for Chanel and Comme des Garçons, and her iconic performances on Late Night with David Letterman in the 80s and 90s.Bernhard is currently starring (alongside our very own Russell Tovey) in the new season of American Horror Story: NYC, having previously made a special guest appearance on AHS: Apocalypse. Her successful, decades long television career also saw her as a series regular in the immensely popular FX Television/Ryan Murphy show POSE as brassy but caring Nurse Judy Kubrack, who works with H.I.V. / AIDS patients. She is also currently in her fifth year hosting her weekly radio show Sandyland on Sirius XM's Radio Andy channel 102, for which she won a broadcasting Gracie Award.She first gained attention in the late 1970s with her stand-up comedy, where she often critiqued celebrity culture and political figures. A pioneer of the one-woman show, Bernhard brings a completely unique and raucous mix of cabaret, stand-up, rock-n-roll, and social commentary to her live stage performances. Just last year she celebrated the 10 year anniversary of her iconic annual holiday shows at Joe's Pub in New York City, while she also continues to tour throughout the country and overseas. Extremely notable past live stage shows, which she has performed both on and off-Broadway, include Without You I'm Nothing, I'm Still Here, Dammit, Everything Bad and Beautiful, and #blessed.Bernhard's film credits include The King of Comedy, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics, Track 29, Hudson Hawk, Dinner Rush, and the live performance film Without You I'm Nothing. Past television credits include Two Broke Girls, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, Difficult People, You're the Worst, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Will &Grace, The Sopranos, The Larry Sanders Show and Roseanne. Music albums include I'm Your Woman (Polygram, 1986), Excuses for Bad Behavior (Epic, 1994) and the world music album Whatever It Takes (Mi5, 2009). She has written three books: May I Kiss You on the Lips, Miss Sandra?, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, Love, Love and Love.Follow: @SandraGBernhard on Instagram. Visit her official website: https://www.sandrabernhard.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Talk Art! We head to London's Pippy Houldsworth Gallery to meet leading artist Nengi Omuku (b.1987, Nigeria)!!!Grappling with ideas around gender, cultural heritage and race, Nengi Omuku’s practice explores the complexities of identity, focusing on interior psychological spaces and how they manifest within the physical world. Rendered in oil paint on strips of sanyan – a traditional Nigerian fabric used for draped clothing – Omuku creates ethereal scenes of figures in constant flux, interacting with one another and the landscape around them. Inspired by both archival and current images taken from the Nigerian press and media, she creates worlds in which the distinction between bodies and nature is often blurred, reflecting on the intricacies around navigating place and belonging.  The spectral figures in her works have their faces deliberately obscured; silent observers whose gaze penetrates out towards the viewer. Reflecting the fluctuation in her paintings between the figurative and abstract, they too resist singularity and instead look to embrace the collective experience, echoing the choruses in Greek theatre. Omuku’s interrogations of the ambiguous spaces in between is equally explored in her use of materials. Weaving together strips of sanyan, she often combines vintage textiles from different fabrics, creating an amalgamation of materials to which she then reverses and applies oil paint to the back. The dichotomy between the intricately woven and carefully designed materials combined with the fluidity of the oil paint, speaks to living between cultures whilst at the same time feeling deeply connected to her country of birth.Nengi Omuku (b.1987, Nigeria) has completed both her BA and MA at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Omuku’s work is inspired by the politics of the body and the complexities that surround identity and difference. With every journey, she considers how human beings position themselves in space in relation to other beings. Foremost on her mind are the ways in which the body needs to adapt in order to belong. It is constantly selecting and gathering its identity, mentally, physically, and emotionally. Follow @NengiOmuku and @PippyHouldsworthGalleryLearn more at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/artists/168-nengi-omuku/works/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art is back!!! To kick off the new year 2023, we bring you an exclusive interview with artist JAKE GREWAL on the occasion of his major solo show of new paintings at Thomas Dane.In Jake Grewal’s paintings and drawings nude figures, nearly always male and often based on the artist’s own image, inhabit verdant forests and woodland landscapes. Unmoored from any specific time or place, Grewal’s dream-like scenes are spaces of desire and projection, where the artist’s exploration of self opens out into narratives surrounding the fractious relationship between human and nature, and the search for an idealised place of queer communion. Grewal’s figures appear at once in harmonious cohabitation with their natural surroundings and seemingly on the verge of being consumed by them, an ambiguity that suffuses his works with an atmosphere of quiet uncertainty and longing.Drawing is central to Grewal’s practice. In his charcoal and pencil sketches, images and narratives are slowly brought into focus, often through the insistent repetition of an idea made in different mediums, on varying grounds and scales. There is an intimacy and expediency offered by charcoal and graphite that Grewal harnesses and embeds in his work in order to lend his figures the quality of being just out of reach. The exhibition includes a number of small charcoal studies made in the studio and out of doors the close-cropped framing of bodies and natural forms makes them feel like fragments of much larger scenes.Sketching from Old Master paintings informs the way in which Grewal constructs many of his images, drawing from painters such as Constable, Corot, Degas, and Gauguin; artists for whom a deeply evocative relationship to the natural world was central. Close scrutiny of these works allows Grewal to extract formal passages and devices from a quintessentially European landscape idiom and transpose these onto the landscapes of his imagination. As stage sets for subjects cast in the image of his own body, Grewal’s works challenge the entrenched white, heteronormativity of the Western canon of painting.Once Grewal finds an image that holds enough complexity or embodies a satisfying sense of evasiveness, he will explore the image in paint. Now I Know You I Am Older brings together a number of new works depicting single or double figures, though the multiplying of figures in Grewal’s work can often be read as the observation of a single figure across time, a cubist interrogation of physical and psychological space, or like the unfolding of a filmic sequence. Grewal puts pathetic fallacy to dramatic effect, using twilight or dramatic sunsets to add a sense of drama or foreboding to an image. In If I Stay You’ll Break Me (2021­–2022) a piercing orange light cleaves the canvas in two, turning a large tree into a dramatic tracery of shadowed forms across a brooding sky; two ghostly figures appear in the centre of the work but appear to have been erased. In another large-scale image two figures walk across a watery landscape that recedes into an infinite sublime. The open expanse and quiet movement of its protagonists present an open-ended scenario onto which the viewer is invited to project any number of narratives, their purposeful stride towards a place not yet discovered.Jake Grewal (b.1994). View Jake's show at Thomas Dane until 28th January 2023, free entry. View at https://www.thomasdanegallery.com/ Follow @JakeGrewal on Instagram and their website: http://www.jakegrewal.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! We have a very funny gift of an episode for you before we take a few weeks off!!! We will return in mid January 2023!We meet the one and only BILLY EICHNER!!! Leading American comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter, Eichner is the star of new gay romcom Bros and also the creator of Billy on the Street, the iconic comedy game show. The show earned Eichner a nomination for the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Game Show Host.We discuss how Billy grew up with access to the arts in New York City but how he went on to discover most of his favourite artists via musicals, movies and TV shows! Most notably Six Degrees of Separation, the 1993 American comedy-drama starring Will Smith. We learn how Joan Rivers became a mentor and friend and how Madonna's SEX book by Steven Meisel was the first art book he ever owned!Follow Billy on Instagram: @billyeichner and check out Bros The Movie: @BrosTheMovie Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Talk Art Christmas Special!!!! We meet the one and only Julian Clary, comedy pioneer, camp icon and bonafide Talk Art hero!!!! BORN TO MINCE!!!!We discuss living with art, the lasting influence of his art teacher and the fine art of Christmas pantomimes! We learn about his interest in the work of Keith Haring, Peter Blake, Jean Cocteau, queer life in the 1980s and his admiration for Noël Coward, Lindsay Kemp and Renaissance Art! We also have an art quiz in the style of Mastermind, to encourage maximum festive drama!!!After studying Drama and English at Goldsmiths College, University of London, Julian Clary began working on the cabaret and alternative comedy scene in the 1980s, first under the alias Gillian Pieface and later as The Joan Collins Fan-club. We reminisce about Fanny the Wonder Dog and Julian's hosting of groundbreaking TV show Sticky Moments with stage sets inspired by painter Marc Chagall, plus his radical stand-up comedy performances on Friday Night Live, which returned in October 2022 for a special, critically acclaimed & award-nominated brand new episode, as part of the 40th anniversary of Channel 4!Julian made his London Palladium debut in 2016 and returns to the stage in 2022! This Christmas join comedy superstars Dawn French and Julian Clary, with Alexandra Burke making her Palladium pantomime debut, as they lead the cast of a brand-new production of Jack and the Beanstalk at London’s iconic home of pantomime! Book tickets now: https://palladiumpantomime.com/ or @PalladiumPantoVisit Julian's Instagram: @JulianClaryRenownedHomosexual and his official website: https://JulianClary.co.uk/HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!! Thank you for another amazing year!!! With love, Russell and Robert X Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Talk Art! We meet Jammie Holmes from his studio in Dallas, Texas. Holmes is a self-taught painter from Thibodaux, Louisiana, whose work tells the story of contemporary life for many black families in the Deep South. Through portraiture and tableaux, Holmes depicts stories of the celebrations and struggles of everyday life, with particular attention paid to a profound sense of place. Growing up 20 minutes from the Mississippi River, Holmes was surrounded by the social and economic consequences of America’s dark past, situated within a deep pocket of the Sun Belt, where reminders of slavery exist alongside labor union conflicts that have fluctuated in intensity since the Thibodaux Massacre of 1887. His work is a counterpoint to the romantic mythology of Louisiana as a hub of charming hospitality, an idea that has perpetuated in order to hide the deep scars of poverty and racism that have structured life in the state for centuries.Despite the circumstances of its setting, Holmes’ work is characterized by the moments he captures where family, ritual, and tradition are celebrated. His presentation of simple moments of togetherness and joy within the black population that nurtures the culture of Louisiana has made him an advocate for this community. Holmes’ paintings fall somewhere between realistic depiction and raw abstraction, incorporating text, symbols, and objects rendered in an uncut style that mirrors a short transition from memory to canvas. He often references photographs from home, but also draws heavily on his own recollection of moments and scenes and works quickly to translate his emotions to paint.Follow @JHolmes214 and visit https://www.jammieholmes.com/Learn more at Marianne Boesky Gallery: https://marianneboeskygallery.com/artists/440-jammie-holmes/biography/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We meet leading artist Peter Halley from his studio in NYC!Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Peter Halley’s paintings and extensive writings about the ever-growing digitisation of cultural, artistic, and social life established him as a leading figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement in New York City. In his paintings and writings, Halley described the increasingly isolated built environment through his uniquely invented language of ​‘cells’, ​‘prisons’ and ​‘conduits’. These central motifs were a means of thinking through the French Post-Structuralist ideas of Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard – among others – in relation to digital technology and capitalism. The gridded forms of Halley’s paintings reference not only the societal structures of the urban grid and the expansion of its underlying network of information technologies, but also the legacies of minimalist painting with which Halley grew up. It was during this period of the 1980s, while re-evaluating some of the inherited traditions of modernism, that Halley began to use synthetic colours and materials such as Day-Glo paint and Roll-a-Tex, which continue to characterise his work to this day. Alongside his teaching, painting and writing, in 1996, Halley founded index magazine, which was a further locus of his contribution to critical discourse around contemporary culture.Halley’s exhibition at Modern Art comprises a group of new shaped-canvas paintings that Halley has been evolving over the past several years. Building on his well-developed language of cells, prisons and conduits, these new shaped-canvas paintings further elaborate a relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional space in relation to the built environment. While remaining faithful to his painterly vocabulary and chosen materials: acrylic, Roll-a-Tex, and fluorescent Roll-a-Tex on canvas, Halley’s new works mark a departure from his paintings from the 1980s which assumed rectangular forms. The shapes of Halley’s new canvas surfaces are defined through the painted geometric compositions, associative of another dimension – perhaps an architectural plan, or a circuitry board – while the works continue to inhabit a point of contradiction between pure, rationalist geometry and playful, irreverent colour and texture. Peter Halley was born in 1953 in New York City, where he continues to live and work. He received his ba from Yale University in 1975 and his mfa from the University of New Orleans in 1978, remaining in New Orleans until 1980.Follow @PeterHalleyStudio on Instagram and https://www.peterhalley.com/View his works at his gallery Stuart Shave/Modern Art: https://modernart.net/artists/peter-halley Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.