Talk Art

Russell and Robert meet art critic Louisa Buck to discuss the history and scandals of Cork Street Galleries in London. For this special Frieze London episode, we also celebrate two outdoor site-specific installations as part of its contemporary programme. We explore the evolution of exhibitions on Cork Street between 1925-2021, starting with the Mayor Gallery. We discuss the Surrealists, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Claude Cahun, Sheila Legge, Dali's Lobster telephone, Méret Oppenheim's fur tea cup and much, much more!We recommend visiting Gina Fischli's Ravenous and Predatory (2021), the first artist commissioned for the Cork Street Banners public art commission. Cork Street also has its first AR exhibition Electronic Hydra Prelude, curated by Daniel Birnbaum which features AR works by Julie Curtiss, Koo Jeong A and Precious Okoyomon. Plus a new work by Tomás Saraceno is also on view.Visit http://CorkStGalleries.com to discover more about this history of Cork Street as well as current exhibitions! Follow Louisa Buck on her new Instagram @Louisa.Buck.1For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

New Talk Art!!! It's Frieze week in London and we are proud to collaborate again with BMW to bring you a special episode with leading choreographer Wayne McGregor and art group Random International to celebrate the world premiere of “No One is an Island”. We also meet with Superblue's Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst and BMW's Hedwig Solis Weinstein to explore this extraordinary art commission!!! Random International, Studio Wayne McGregor, Superblue and BMW i share a passion for pushing boundaries and exploring new territories. All are moved by similar questions about how future generations will interact with automated and digitised processes and environments whilst embracing reduction and sustainability.No One is an Island is fuelled by science and explores electrified movement steered by advanced algorithms. It is a future-oriented reflection on how the human mind empathises with artificial intelligence and automated processes. The performance comprises sculptural, performative and musical elements. The centrepiece is a sculpture that experiments with the minimal amount of information that is actually necessary for an animated form to be recognised as human; and the fundamental impact created by subtle changes within that information. In its transition from robot to human likeness, the sculpture is accompanied by a live performance with dancers of Company Wayne McGregor who interact with the kinetics, further exploring the relationship between humans and technology and our capacity to empathise with a machine. The interventions of the dancers scored by Chihei Hatakeyama add a performative dimension to the sculpture, re-translating and celebrating the connection between human and mechanical movement.“What I find inspiring about the partnership with Random International, Superblue, BMW i and myself is that we all come together from different knowledge sets, but convene in areas of shared interest. We are all fascinated by the potential of the human body, its relationship with and to technology but most importantly our desire to generate empathetic connections between people. This is a dialogue of inter-connectedness, exploration and surprise. We have no pre-determined road map – instead, we feed from one another’s expertise and ideas to push ourselves towards new horizons” – Wayne McGregor"No One Is An Island" will be available to the public for viewing at Frieze London until 16th October, with daily performances at 3.00pm, 3:30pm, 4.00pm, 4.30pm, 5.30pm, 6.00pm and 6.30pm. The location is Park Village Studios, 1 Park Village E, London NW1 7PX. Register for your timed ticket slot at this link: https://emt.bmw-arts-design.com/exhibition-random-international?partner=mSSgv4ANIzFollow @StudioWayneMcGregor and @RandomInternational on Instagram.Special thanks to @BMWUK and @BMWGroupCulture for this extraordinary trip to see such inspiring art! And happy birthday to @BMWGroupCulture for 50 years of cultural engagement. We can’t wait to see more exciting projects…For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell and Robert meet artist Ro Robertson on the eve of their new exhibition 'Subterrane' at Maximilian William gallery in London. The Cornwall based artist works in sculpture, photography, drawing and performance to explore the boundaries of the human body and its environment. Capturing moments, schisms and shifts, their work often explores negative natural spaces to create expanded representations of the figure. Their first solo exhibition has just opened coinciding with Frieze London art fair.We discuss Robertson’s ongoing body of work titled Stone (Butch) which explores the terrain of the Queer body in the landscape. The term ‘stone butch’ is taken from the lesbian and trans activist Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues in which the oppression of lesbian, trans, butch and femme identities is laid bare. Through an interest in terrain, Robertson elucidates upon Feinberg’s metaphoric ‘raincoat layer,’ the layer which protects the body from hostile external forces.The sculptural articulations of Stone (Butch) are created by plaster casting directly in crevices in natural rock formations at Godrevy Point, St Ives Bay, Cornwall and The Bridestones, West Yorkshire. The ‘sculptural void’ makes physical a negative space created by the power of the sea and air. The sculptures embody a space that is shifting and fluid, reclaiming a natural space for Queer and Butch identity from a history of being deemed ‘against nature’. Robertson sees the natural stone formations as queer forms and changing bodies that are not set in stone, but revealed to us over a long period of time, as fluid structures shaped by water and erosion. Queer bodies which are as fluid as the water that shapes them and as plural as the grains of sand that erode them.Ro Robertson (they/them) (b. Sunderland 1984) is a contemporary artist based in West Cornwall. They obtained their BA in Fine Art from the Manchester School of Art in 2010. In June 2021, Robertson unveiled their first public sculpture, commissioned for the 10th edition of Sculpture in the City and installed at London’s iconic Gherkin skyscraper until Spring 2022. To coincide with this unveiling, Robertson will perform Stone (Butch): Undercurrents in Nocturnal Creatures, a contemporary art festival programmed by the Whitechapel Gallery and Sculpture in the City. Their second public sculpture – commissioned by Sunderland Council as a legacy to the 700 women who worked in Sunderland’s shipyards – will be unveiled later this year. Their work and writing are featured in Breaking the Mould: Sculpture by Women Since 1945, (London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2020) which was published on the occasion of the eponymous Arts Council Collection exhibition. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell and Robert meet legendary American gallerist John Ollman on the 50th anniversary of his career in the art world. As Co-Founder and Director of Fleisher/Ollman gallery, John has paved the way for collectors and museums to support Self-Taught artists. For more than 5 decades, his Philadelphia gallery features work by contemporary artists working both inside and outside of the mainstream.We discuss the lasting influence of Joseph Duveen and Leo Castelli on many gallerists, the psychology of Collecting, the art of Topiary, beginning to work with Janet Fleisher gallery in the early 1970s on a memorable Oceanic Art exhibition. We discuss his championing Self-Taught artists works. We discuss the terminologies created for self-taught artists such as Outsider, Outlier, Visionary and Folk Art. We discuss numerous artists including Sister Gertrude Morgan’s paintings, meeting Lee Godie whilst she was painting outside a Neimann Marcus store, working with Bill Traylor’s work since 1981, James Castle, William Edmondson, the Chicago Imagists, Pauline Simon, the curator Lynne Cook's exhibitions, Martn Ramírez (considered as a 'self-taught master'), Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden, the game-changing exhibition ‘Magicians de la Terre’ which ran across the entire city of Paris in 1989, including Hilma af Klint introducing mainstream audiences to spiritualism within painting. Finally, we explore contemporary artists such as Marlon Mullen and how he discovered the work of the Philadelphia Wire Man in 1985 and the adventures introducing the world to this undiscovered artist's extraordinary sculptures. We also explore the importance of books as a way to discovering artists and artworks plus how collecting art and museum collections have evolved over the past 50 years.Visit @FleisherOllman on Instagram as well as the exhibitions from earlier this year @JTT_NYC and @AdamsAndOllmanView the 'Dear John' show archive page at Adams and Ollman in Portland: https://adamsandollman.com/Dear-JohnView the 'Dear John' show archive page at JTT gallery in New York: https://www.jttnyc.com/exhibitions/2021/dear-johnView the 'Back Stories' show archive page at Fleisher Ollman gallery in Philadelphia: https://fleisher-ollmangallery.com/exhibitions/back_storiesFor images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell & Robert meet artist Susan Chen (b. Hong Kong, SAR, 1992) from Los Angeles where she's been installing her brand new solo exhibition at Night Gallery. We discuss making paintings during the pandemic, Alice in Wonderland, silver glitter Crocs, her admiration for English painter John Bratby (known for his 1950s kitchen sink realist paintings), learning how to find her own artistic voice and numerous positive experiences and lessons from working as studio assistant for fellow painter Shara Hughes.Text by Dani Yan for Night Gallery: "I Am Not a Virus is an exhibition of new paintings by the New York and Connecticut-based painter Susan Chen. This is Chen’s first exhibition at the gallery. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the artist collaborated with twenty-six different sitters of Asian and Asian American descent living throughout the United States. After locating her subjects through various social media platforms, Chen painted her subjects via Zoom in real time. Despite her unfamiliarity with her sitters, Chen’s portraits distill much more than just their subjects’ likenesses. Informed by just a few hours of Zoom conversation with each person, Chen creates compositions that illuminate the experiences, desires, and emotions of her sitters. This closeness comes from Chen’s attention to detail: from nail polish bottles to birth control pills, the objects in Chen’s compositions are rendered in the same heavy brushstrokes as the people they are connected to. Viewers are thus prompted to consider the many elements of Chen’s paintings evenly—the subjects themselves are important, but so are their stories.This focus on Asian American humanity and history has been central to Chen’s work. But after the rise in hate crimes against Asians in the wake of COVID-19, Chen’s practice took on a new impetus. While her past work alluded to Asian American cultural alienation, her recent paintings address anti-Asian hate with a sharpened sense of directness and urgency. In a self-portrait, I Am Not the Kung Flu, the artist captures herself wielding a taser with an array of self-defense weapons scattered across the table in front of her. A pepper gel canister, a whistle, tear gas, a personal alarm, a pocket knife: these are just some of the items Chen found while surveying online what Asian Americans were buying during the pandemic to protect themselves from assault. Indeed, over the course of the past year, the means of survival have changed drastically for Asian Americans like Chen.Chen’s involvement in the fight against anti-Asian racism extends beyond her artistic practice. In the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021, she attended several Stop Asian Hate movement rallies. Inspired by the gravity and hope of these gatherings, Chen distilled her experiences into the largest painting in the show, #StopAsianHate, which depicts a group of life-sized protagonists wielding signs with anti-Asian-violence slogans.Amid endless reports of anti-Asian hate crimes, the sense of urgency that Chen has felt in her day-to-day life has translated into her work. In the artist’s own words, her paintings became more “intentional,” both conceptually and formally. Each portrait was executed as a piece of an overarching narrative. Each color was premixed with delicate care before touching the canvas. In order to achieve the more closely-defined goals behind this show, Chen needed to paint with conviction—the thick layers and bold pigments of paint that punctuate her new canvases are evidence of her increased confidence.These days, reported cases of anti-Asian violence continue to rise, but media coverage has dwindled. Chen, it seems, has found her voice at the right time."Chen received her MFA from Columbia University in 2021 and her BA from Brown University in 2015. In August 2020, Chen presented her debut solo exhibition, On Longing, at Meredith Rosen... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Robert & Russell meet leading curator Ralph Rugoff OBE, the director of London's Hayward Gallery since 2006, and the curator of the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, titled May You Live in Interesting Times.We explore the Hayward's stunning new exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today that brings together 31 contemporary painters who exploit the unique characteristics of their medium to create fresh, compelling works of art that speak to this moment. Approaching painting as a platform for speculative thinking and unexpected conversations, the artists in this exhibition make works that oscillate between observation and invention, depiction and allegory, illusion and materiality.Instead of trying to craft iconic images, they treat the canvas as a site of assemblage where references converge from diverse territories including music, design, advertising, vernacular and documentary photography, viral memes, fashion and cinema, as well as art history. Resonantly ambiguous, their paintings invite viewers to recruit their own imaginations in working out different ways to interpret them, while often questioning how their social reception might shift among different audiences.This extraordinary exhibition includes new and recent works by 31 artists including previous Talk Art guests Alvaro Barrington, Caroline Coon, Somaya Critchlow, Jadé Fadojutimi, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Sophie von Hellermann and Rose Wylie.Rugoff was born in New York City and studied semiotics at Brown University. Prior to the Hayward, he was director of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco for nearly six years. Follow @RalphRugoff and @Hayward.Gallery on Instagram. Mixing It Up is now open and runs until 12th December 2021. To buy tickets or Hayward Gallery membership, visit their official website: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/mixing-it-painting-todayFor images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We discover the world of an incredible artist JESSE MURRY who passed away in 1993 leaving an extraordinary legacy of artwork, poetry and writing. Fusing the Romantic painting tradition of John Constable and J. M. W. Turner with the quality of mind and imagination of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, Murry uniquely sought to create a “landscape” within the fiction of painting that could be “more than a place to dwell but a suitable space for dreams.”We meet two special guests this week to remember Murry’s artwork and to explore his extraordinary thinking - the artists #LisaYuskavage @LisaYuskavageStudio and @JarrettEarnest - who together have united to curate an extraordinary new exhibition titled ‘Jesse Murry: Rising’, curated by Lisa Yuskavage and Jarrett Earnest, at #DavidZwirner’s 533 West 19th Street location in New York.Painter and poet #JesseMurry (1948–1993) identified three significant approaches to landscape—'poetic,' 'dramatic,' and 'visionary,' which he aimed to synthesize into abstract paintings. Born in North Carolina, Jesse Murry studied art and philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College before moving to New York City in 1979. His essays on artists including Hans Hofmann and Howard Hodgkin appeared in a range of publications, including Arts Magazine. After two years of teaching art history and exhibiting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Murry enrolled in the Yale School of Art at the age of thirty-six. ‘Jesse Murry: Rising’ brings together paintings from the last five years of the artist's life. This work—made while confronting his impending mortality from AIDS-related illness—testifies to Murry's lifelong belief in the capacity of painting to hold the complexity of human meaning, at the meeting of a material fact and a location within the mind. Exhibition runs from 17 SEPTEMBER – 23 OCTOBER 2021. Learn more: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2021/more-life/jesse-murryForthcoming on September 28, 2021, and titled after a paper the artist wrote while at Yale, Painting Is a Supreme Fiction is an unprecedented collection of Murry’s writings. Edited and with an introduction by Jarrett Earnest and a foreword by Hilton Als, the book also includes transcriptions of two of the artist’s notebooks, in which the spatialization of the words across the page approaches the condition of thought. We strongly recommend buying this special book!!!Thank you Lisa, Jarrett and the team at @DavidZwirner. #JesseMurry  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell & Robert meet artist Ann Craven. We discuss painting the Moon in TriBeCa and Harlem, Her fascination with Birds as a subject in her work, Agnes Martin, grief and the loss of her father, the influence of Alex Katz’s paintings (who she worked for having first met in Maine), snowy owls and a devestating studio fire twenty years ago in which she lost many artworks and belongings. We discuss an unexpected family connection to art legend Frank Stella, her close friendships with Karma Books Matt Shuster and artist Sophie von Hellerman, plus what it’s like to be part of an artist couple with her husband the painter Peter Halley.Follow @Ann_Craven on Instagram. Visit Ann's official website: http://www.anncraven.com/ To learn more visit Karma Gallery: https://karmakarma.org/artists/ann-craven/bio/Ann Craven (b. 1967, Boston, MA) is known for her lush, serial portraits of the moon, birds, and flowers, as well as her painted bands of color. After completing each work, she dates and titles each palette, rendering it a unique and isolated index of her process. Craven’s predilection for the copy—both from referent photographs and from her own plein air paintings—is both an homage to Pop Art and an exploration of remembrance. As she explains, “My paintings are a result of mere observation, experiment, and chance, and contain a variable that is constant and ever-changing—the moment just past.” Craven presented her first retrospective, titled TIME and curated by Yann Chevalier, at Le Confort Moderne in Poitiers, France in 2014. Recent solo exhibitions include Karma, New York (2021); the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (2019); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2019); Karma, New York (2018); Southard Reid, London (2017); Maccarone, New York (2016); among others. Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum, New York; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, among others. For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell & Robert meet the LEGENDARY Dame Zandra Rhodes DBE!!! We celebrate more than 50 years of creativity and FABULOUS!!!We discuss childhood memories of her mother and growing up in Kent, her early experiments with textile design and printmaking inspired by Andy Warhol and travelling to America in 1969 which led to her huge success during the 1970s. We discover her memories of designing clothes for icons as varied as Princess Diana and Freddy Mercury, her friendship with Andrew Logan and Divine plus making numerous costumes for The Alternative Miss World!!! In this special episode, Zandra remembers her dear friend the artist Duggie Fields who passed away in March 2021. We explore Duggie's artworks, including the first painting Zandra bought from him in 1967, and we celebrate his influence on her work, their lasting friendship and ongoing legacy.Dame Zandra Rhodes has been a notorious figurehead of the UK fashion industry for five decades, celebrating her 50th year in fashion in September 2019 with a retrospective exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum – founded by Zandra – entitled Zandra Rhodes: 50 Years of Fabulous and a retrospective book published by Yale. Her notoriety as a print designer combined with an affinity for fine fabrics and colour has resulted in a signature aesthetic that is undeniably unique and continues to stand the test of time.An eponymous pioneer of the British and international fashion scene since the late 60’s, Zandra’s career has seen her collaborate with brands such as Valentino, Topshop and Mac Cosmetics. Continuing to collaborate with brands that inspire her, 2021 will see the launch of Zandra Rhodes x IKEA amongst many other exciting partnerships and projects.Follow @Zandra_Rhodes_ on Instagram. Visit Zandra's official website: https://ZandraRhodes.com/ To learn more about the work of Duggie Fields visit http://www.DuggieFields.com/ or @DuggieFields on Instagram. Visit the Fashon Textile Museum in London's Bermondsey: https://www.FTMLondon.org/ and their instagram @FashionTextileMuseumFor images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Russell & Robert meet artist Oscar yi Hou from his studio in New York. We discuss growing up in Liverpool, poetry, calligraphy and new paintings on the eve of the opening of his solo exhibition 'A sky-licker relation’ at James Fuentes Gallery:“Oscar yi Hou’s work is anchored in personhood. While this exhibition presents a series of new portraits, what yi Hou’s paintings really record is the relationship shared between the sitter and the artist. Foregoing fixed representation, the works in A sky-licker relation offer a testament to living alongside others. Made over the past year and a half, these works mark the importance and influence of nearness; the being-with of a queer lifeworld.The exhibition title is itself is the result of a series of relations: skylicker is lifted from Aimé Césaire's poem ‘Cahier d'un retour au pays natal’, which yi Hou first came across in Frantz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’. Like the evocation of a sky licker, yi Hou’s given name in Chinese refers to a bird cry (⼀鸣) and he often uses birds as a self-signifier in his paintings and poetry, boundless and in flight. A distinct sense of symmetry can be found in yi Hou’s densely-detailed images, contributing to a compositional logic that is able to hold together a great deal of texture around each of the relationships being represented.Negotiating questions of opacity and (il)legibility, yi Hou employs polysemic symbols such as the five-pointed star, an icon laden with signification between East and West, to emphasize the buried yet multifarious meanings that surround his subjects. In this vein, at times the artist fuses the Chinese calligraphic tradition with graffiti seen on the streets of New York. Yi Hou also makes poetic use of the borders of his works, treating this marginal space as an expression of the interrelation between him and the sitter—while at the same time reflecting upon the limits of grasping this relation. In doing so, the artist’s paintings of others become a form of address, conjuring new signs and meanings to be shared in space. Here, yi Hou intricately demonstrates, in his words, “painting as a practice of dignity.”Oscar yi Hou (b. 1998 in Liverpool, England; lives and works in New York) received his BA at Columbia University, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at T293 Gallery, Rome, Italy; Asia Society, New York; Tong Art Advisory, New York; Half Gallery, New York; Rachel Uffner, New York; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Royal Academy, UK. A sky-licker relation follows yi Hou’s exhibition of works on paper at JamesFuentes.Online earlier this year.Follow @OscyHou on Instagram and also @James_Fuentes_LLC Visit Oscar's official website: https://oscaryihou.com/ and his solo exhibition page at: https://jamesfuentes.com/ Oscar's solo show runs in New York from August 26–September 26, 2021.A recent painting by Oscar is also included in 'Breakfast Under The Tree' group exhibition curated by Russell Tovey at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK until 5th September 2021. Follow @CarlFreedmanGalleryFor images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.