Interview with Crystal Fischetti

06/02/21
Interview with Crystal Fischetti 

Crystal Fischetti: Hello Again!
Grove Square Galleries, London
11 February – 9 April 2021
 
Besides being an artist, Crystal Fischetti (b1984, London, UK) is also an empath, psychic and shaman. For her forthcoming solo exhibition Hello Again!, she is bringing all aspects of herself together, creating “a beautiful marriage”. The 36 works on display – this number was chosen because it was her age when creating them, and Fischetti believes deeply in the power of numerology – are vibrant and pulsating, each one representing a visual journey, but also a return to self. The use of unprimed canvases goes back to the artists of the New York School, to whom she is often compared in style, and their elements of play, as well as of mysticism, and her use of bedsheets uncovers what it means to be at home, representing physical intimacy, rest and repose, lucid dreaming, and also a connection to the astral realm and the unconscious. 
 

Fischetti, who is of mixed British, Italian and Colombian heritage, trained as a dancer before turning to visual art, and she still uses her whole body to paint – often incorporating hand- and footprints in her works – and she hopes, in the future, to create more performative, live-painting pieces. 
 
I spoke to Fischetti for Studio International via Zoom about her calling by Spirit to be of service, how the pandemic has influenced her work, and the simple process of creating alchemy out of the things you have around you.

 
Watch the full interview here

Interview with Prabhakar Pachpute

02/02/21

Interview with Prabhakar Pachpute

The Indian artist Prabhakar Pachpute (b1986, Sasti, Chandrapur) is known for his large-scale charcoal wall drawings and combined installations, taking his background of coal mining, the associated landscapes and characters as their subject matter. His surrealist motifs and abstracted language are continuing to develop, and, when not grounded because of Covid-19, his participation in various international biennials and summits has led to travel and research opportunities, feeding him with further characters and stories to weave into his ultimately political works. 
 

One of the six shortlisted international artists for the Artes Mundi 9 exhibition and prize, delayed from October 2020 and opening virtually on 15 March 2021, at the National Museum Cardiff, Pachpute talked me for to Studio International via Zoom from India.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Sara Barker

22/01/21

Interview with Sara Barker

Sara Barker: undo the knot
CAMPLE LINE, Scotland
3​1 October 2020 – 30 January 2021

Sara Barker (b1980, Manchester, UK) uses a combination of materials – initially, rougher, cheaper ones, such as cardboard, and, later, more permanent metals such as steel, aluminium and brass, alongside glass and automotive paint – to create works that blur the boundaries between figuration and abstraction; sculpture, painting and drawing; and imagined and physical spaces. The tension in her pieces is felt viscerally by the viewer, who is drawn into a dialogue, already taking place between the works themselves. Heavily influenced by literature, poetry and language, Barker calls for human interaction with her creations.

 
Her exhibition undo the knot, on show at CAMPLE LINE, includes, for the first time, what Barker describes as “exploratory works” – her initial, rougher “sketches” – which are not yet fully resolved, leaving open questions. Part of her motivation to include these works was the change in her approach to her practice, brought about by the first lockdown, when she became incredibly aware of a sense of having too much, endless time, yet simultaneously of none of it being available. Working from home, instead of her studio, she sought to bring her full daily experience into her work – all of the mundane and profound moments of life. 
 
I spoke to Barker via Zoom about how lockdown altered her practice, the role of tension and fragmentation in her work, and how the building at CAMPLE LINE became a work in the exhibition in its own right.

Watch the interview here

 
 

Interview with the Binnie Sisters

13/01/21

Interview with the Binnie Sisters

Christine and Jennifer Binnie first shot to fame in 1981, along with fellow artist Wilma Johnson, as the performance-art collective the Neo Naturists, for which they famously flashed in the British Museum, as well as in many London nightclubs. However, before the decade was out, the sisters had gone from hanging out with the likes of Grayson Perry (whom Jennifer was dating), Boy George and Marilyn, to, in Jennifer’s case, returning to live in the East Sussex countryside and becoming a mother and painter, and, in Christine’s, to working as a potter. Although never officially ceasing their Neo Naturist activities, the sisters have since focused much more on their individual practices. Coming together as the first guest curators of an exhibition drawn from the 5,000 works in the Towner Collection, however, has been an enjoyable experience for them both, bringing them back to their roots, and asking them to reflect on their own work and how to incorporate it into the show. 

Christine spoke to me by phone from her flat in London, while Jennifer preferred to email her answers.  

Read the full interview here

Interview with Jim Dine

07/01/21

Interview with Jim Dine

At the grand age of 85, Jim Dine (b1935, Cincinnati, Ohio) has a six-decade-long career under his belt, including nearly 300 solo shows. With a practice spanning painting, sculpture and poetry, he works uninterruptedly, and with as much dedication now as ever. His exhibition, A Day Longer, at Galerie Templon, Paris, showcases works made over the past three years, many finished during the first lockdown. It includes a new body of self-portraiture, alongside bronze sculptures, and his easily recognisable paintings into which he embeds tools and incorporates symbols from his personal iconography, such as hearts, skulls, veins and the comic character Pinocchio. The title of the exhibition, taken from one of his poems, is also the title of a newly published book of his poetry.

 

Read the full interview here

Interview with Katharina Grosse

21/12/20

Interview with Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse (b1961, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) is known for her large-scale, often site-specific and in-situ paintings, which draw the viewer in, disrupting and redefining hierarchies and boundaries, and shifting perspectives. For Grosse, there is no distinction between painting, sculpture and architecture. As well as her smaller studio canvases, she paints on found materials, cast-metal sculptures and lengths of draped fabric, creating fully immersive installations.

Currently showing as part of the all-women group exhibition Push the Limits, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, Grosse talks to Studio International by email about her views on time, energy and meaning.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Trulee Hall at the Zabludowicz Collection

15/12/20

Interview with Trulee Hall 

Following her sold-out opera commission just before lockdown in March, the Los Angeles-based artist Trulee Hall (b1976, Atlanta) has returned to the Zabludowicz Collection in London to create her first solo institutional European show. Comprising works from the collection (acquired from her major LA show last year), elements from and a video of the opera, and a number of new pieces, the exhibition is fully immersive and promises to transport visitors to an alternate reality – “Trulee’s world” – where dichotomies are set up, only to be broken back down and questioned, and layers of meaning are offered, to be peeled back and explored at the viewer’s whim. 

Hall spoke to Studio International via Zoom, offering insight into her musical background, her use of symbols – and the meanings associated with her golden corn-on-the-cobs – and what she thinks of her work being described as “erotic grotesque”, and following in the psychosexual artistic legacy of such artists as Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Emily Jacir

 01/12/20

Interview with Emily Jacir

Emily Jacir (1972, Bethlehem, Palestine) creates works of art across many mediums, exploring histories of colonisation, exchange, translation, transformation, resistance and movement. Books, libraries, etymology and the act of translation are also fundamental to many of her works, which are frequently diaristic in form, and impacted by direct experience, community interaction, and intense research.

Currently showing a large stone medallion as part of the all-women group exhibition Push the Limits, at the Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, Jacir talks to Studio International by email about the origins and meanings of this work, as well as some of her other key projects.

 

Read the full interview here

Review of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre online at Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

18/11/20

Toulouse-Lautrec and the Masters of Montmartre 

Victoria Art Gallery, Bath

Available online

 

“They don’t pretend to be precious stuff; they’ll be torn down in a little while and others will be put up, and so on: they don’t give a damn! That’s great! – and that’s art, by God, and the best kind, mixed in with life, art without any bluffing or boasting and within the easy reach of ordinary guys,” said the anarchist art critic and aesthete Félix Fénéon.

 

This exhibition, comprising 80 colour “street art” posters by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and his contemporaries, including Pierre Bonnard, Jules Chéret, Alphonse Mucha and Théophile Steinlen, was long in the planning at Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. Sadly, it was open for less than two months before closing because of the Covid pandemic. The gallery, however, which intends to remain closed until next spring, has responded by moving nearly 50 works from the exhibition online: and not just the images, but also audio accompaniments for 16 of them, giving information about the artists, the bohemian celebrities of turn-of-the-century Montmartre, and background music to bring the atmosphere of the café-concert to life. 

Read the full review here

 

Interview with Arik Levy and Zoé Ouvrier

13/11/20

Interview: Arik Levy and Zoé Ouvrier 

Arik Levy (b1963, Tel Aviv) and Zoé Ouvrier (b1975, Montpellier, France) create works inspired by nature, but they do not simply attempt to interpret what they see; rather, they go beyond this, exploring, in Levy’s case, psychological and material polarities, and, in Ouvrier’s, feelings, emotions and narratives. Beyond Nature, then, is an appropriate title for this first exhibition bringing together the married couple’s works, and they are as excited as anyone to see what new conversations will arise as a result. 

 

I spoke to Levy and Ouvrier via Zoom from their new home and studio in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. 

Read the full interview here

Review of Artemisia at the National Gallery, London

02/11/20

Artemisia

National Gallery, London

3 October 2020 – 24 January 2021

 

The Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c1656) is well on her way to becoming as widely recognised an artistic icon as Frida Kahlo. Certainly in the era of #MeToo, her autobiography of being raped by a fellow artist, a friend of her father, at the age of 17, and enduring a seven-month-long trial, which included torture, to test the veracity of her testament, goes before her and makes her name – for better or worse – more well-known than her artwork. Of the latter, those paintings depicting biblical heroines as strong – and often vengefully violent – real women are the most beloved, and, in fact, generally the only ones known. I confess to having been oblivious to many of her more tender subjects until this long-overdue – and latterly delayed due to Covid-19 closures – exhibition at the National Gallery, London, finally opened its doors.

Read the full article here

Interview with Kate Mieczkowska

29/08/20

Interview with Kate Mieczkowska 

Having graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 2018, Kate Mieczkowska was preparing for her curatorial debut, an exhibition of works by eight female-identifying artists at Bermondsey Project Space, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and the exhibition moved online. Mieczkowska was not in the least perturbed and is keen to see the positives of this outcome. In the run up to the week-long online event – which will afterwards continue as a permanent website – she spoke to Studio International about the ideas behind the exhibition, some of the links she has forged with artists here and in Saudi Arabia, and her own practice and career trajectory.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Toby Deveson

23/07/20

Interview with Toby Deveson

Toby Deveson (b1971, Milan) was given a Nikkormat camera by his father when he was 16. For more than 30 years, he has been using the same 24mm lens he “borrowed” from his dad. Largely self-taught in photography, Deveson composes his images much as he once composed music: building a solid foundation and a structure with science, before following his instincts. His enigmatic black-and-white images are never cropped. Having started out working in documentary photography, in particular in the orphanages in Romania, Deveson soon discovered his love of landscapes and the “exhilarating relationship” with Mother Nature. His dream is to provoke reaction and move someone to tears with a landscape rather than with a dying child.

Deveson spoke to Studio International about his journey – both to places in all four corners of the globe and in terms of his career development – and his desire to leave a legacy.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Andrew Litten

15/07/20
Interview with Andrew Litten

The self-taught figurative artist Andrew Litten (b1970, Aylesbury, UK) paints unsettling images, frequently depicting liminal states, or a vortex of raw emotions, set in a nightmarish realm of distorted technicolour. His exhibition Concerning the Fragile, now on show at Anima Mundi, St Ives, seeks to share stories of authenticity and vulnerability, encouraging empathy and connection. Litten does not shy away from difficult subjects, and his works directly address issues of addiction and dependency, as well as the death, by suicide, of his wife just last year. 

At a time when humanity has become painfully aware of its fragility and mortality, this exhibition could not be more relevant and honest.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Clae Eastgate

20/06/20

Interview with Clae Eastgate 

Clae Eastgate (b1968, Nottinghamshire, UK) is a largely self-taught portrait painter. For 16 years, she worked primarily as a commission artist, but her current project, Painting the Poets, sees her building a collection of portraits of female poets – a “legacy project”, she says, at “an unprecedented time in history, in terms of the growing cohort of female poets”. For Eastgate, painting a portrait is not just about achieving a physical likeness. For a portrait to be successful, it requires a balance of several elements – a sometimes elusive proposition – allowing the telling of a story through the visual representation of what is being communicated emotionally, or through the use of allegorical self-symbolism. Accordingly, each painting she makes will have its own style, echoing something of the sitter, as well as Eastgate’s own development as an artist. A perfectionist to the core, Eastgate, through this project, is learning a lot about the challenges and rewards of the art world, and hopes to present the portraits, not just as works in themselves, but accompanied by poetry recitals, and perhaps even live painting events, creating a much wider platform for women to express themselves artistically – and be heard. 

I spoke to Eastgate at her home in Shropshire.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Matthew Burrows

18/06/20
Interview with Matthew Burrows

Matthew Burrows (b1971, the Wirral) is a painter through and through, even though his strategies for approaching his work include numerous analogies to try to free himself from the weight of art history. His canvases are built up with thin layers of paint, creating the effect of a textured piece, woven in and out, much like a basket. He likes to think of the horizontals and verticals as a play between a structure that is given and a process that is open.

Burrows is also the artist behind the enormously successful #ArtistSupportPledge, a simple idea, launched on Instagram just before lockdown in the UK, and now a worldwide phenomenon, earning many artists more than ever before, and proving to be self-sustaining for the community. Using the hashtag #ArtistSupportPledge, artists and makers post works for sale on social media, which must be £200 or under, with the implicit promise that, once they have sold £1,000 worth, they will buy a work by someone else, thus feeding back into the economy, creating a form of subsistence culture.

Burrows studied as an undergraduate at Birmingham School of Art (1990-93) and graduated with a master’s degree in painting from the Royal College of Art in 1995. He lives and works in East Sussex, where the landscape, and his endurance runs through it, form an integral part of his practice. 

Burrows spoke to me for Studio International about how the pledge came about, his hopes and plans for its future, his thinking about his practice, and how he hopes to return to being a full-time artist very soon.

Read the full interview here

Interview with David Downes

15/06/20

Interview: David Downes

When it became apparent that something big was approaching – that is, when deaths from Covid-19 started sweeping not just through China but also Italy – landscape artist David Downes saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to document this global pandemic, producing a work a day (or every other day), in the manner of a war artist. Mixing reality with surreality, familiar places with imagined representations of the virus – “Covids”, as Downes calls them – he has a growing series of pen, ink and acrylic drawings. Once there is more freedom of movement and he can return to his studio, Downes hopes to work some of these up to larger scale on canvas. He also has plans for an exhibition. 

Downes, who was born in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, in 1971, completed an MA in communication design at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1996. His first major contract, in 1999, was a commission from the BBC to record the corporation’s most important architecture at the turn of the century. He has since had numerous other prestigious commissions, including painting the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant from the roof of the Savoy Hotel in 2012, and, last year, creating a giant mural for the launch of a new ITV period drama, depicting the fictional coastal town of Sanditon, based on Jane Austen’s final, unfinished novel. 

Having been diagnosed with high-functioning autism at the age of 32, Downes is an active supporter of the National Autistic Society and has been a vice president since 2012. 

As I call Downes, one morning during lockdown, he is just about to start work on another large drawing, working from a spare room in the house he shares with his girlfriend and their dog, Winston, in Manningtree, Essex.

Read the full interview here

Interview with Studio Morison

12/06/20

Interview: Studio Morison 

Heather Peak Morison (b1973, UK) and Ivan Winston Morison (b1974, Turkey) have been working together for the past 15 years. Their collaborative practice incorporates aspects of art, sculpture, architecture and performance. They are co-directors of Studio Morison, an artist-led creative practice, and their blueprint for happiness. 

Studio Morison was selected last year as one of the artist practices to be commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire as part of the three-year, region-wide arts commissioning programme New Geographies, funded by the national lottery through Arts Council England, which aims to bring contemporary art to unexpected places in the east of England. Their resulting work, MOTHER …, situated on Wicken Fen, is an interpretation of a traditional fenland hayrick, and offers a space for visitors to sit and shelter and be with nature. The work also engages with the connections between the natural world and our mental health. A series of four events, furthering this connection, has, in part, been postponed due to Covid-19.

I spoke to Heather and Ivan from Studio Morison, while under lockdown, about the ideas behind MOTHER … and the artists’ wider practice.  

Read the full interview here

Interview with Oluwole Omofemi

23/03/20
Interview: Oluwole Omofemi


Oluwole Omofemi: The Way We Were
Signature African Art, London

12 March – 16 April 2020

Oluwole Omofemi (b1988, Ibadan, Nigeria) always wanted to be an artist, despite opposition from his family. As a child, he learned about the civil rights movement and the natural hair movement of the late 60s and early 70s from his grandfather, who, at the time, sported an afro. Omofemi now uses hair in his paintings as a metaphor for freedom and power, and as a symbol of identity. Some of his series use the more muted palette of the old masters, showing how entrenched identity and culture are in a person’s belief system; others use a brighter, pop art palette, portraying energy and strength and looking to the future. Whatever the style, he considers his work to be African at heart.

One work in particular stands out from the others on display – In Her (2019), depicting a bald woman set against a bright, almost street art-style background, covered in words such as hope, love, aspiration and queen. This piece is dedicated to Omofemi’s grandmother, who died of cancer, as well as to raising awareness of the disease, and showing that a cancer diagnosis is not necessarily the end of everything: there is always hope. Other works are dedicated to his mother, through the use of floral patterns. In general, Omofemi sees women as close to God, in their ability to love, accept and forgive. This is why the majority of his subjects – and all of those in this exhibition – are female.

I spoke to Omofemi just before the opening of his first exhibition in London, at Signature African Art’s new Mayfair venue.

Watch the interview here

Review of Hedda Sterne at Victoria Miro Mayfair

02/03/20

Hedda Sterne

Victoria Miro Mayfair, London 

29 January – 21 March 2020

Hedda Sterne. “The only female at [the] birth of abstract expressionism.” Friends and neighbours with gallerist Peggy Guggenheim and in the stable of art dealer Betty Parsons. A “great-artist”. 

Born Hedwig Lindenberg on 4 August 1910, in Bucharest, Romania, Sterne lived to the grand age of 100, dying in New York City in 2011. She knew she wanted to be an artist from the age of five or six. “I always loved Leonardo,” she told Sarah Boxer, for the New York Review of Books, shortly before she died. “Artists were always referred to as great artists. I thought that’s what the profession was. One word: great-artist. There wasn’t one moment in my life when I thought I wanted to be anything else.” And so that is what she became. She began to make a name for herself in Romania, but it was after arriving in New York in 1941, fleeing Nazi-occupied Bucharest, that things really began to happen. Having married and separated from a man named Fritz Stern, she adopted his surname, adding an “e”, maintaining this moniker, despite her marriage to fellow Romanian artist Saul Steinberg, three years later. 

Sterne fell in love with America and painted its modernity from every angle: “The American kitchen, the American bathroom, the American street, you know, its horizontals and verticals, its points and lines. New York was a total delight, a paradise.” In 1950, she was photographed by Nina Leen, along with 14 other artist-signatories – including Willem De Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still – of an open letter to the president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, protesting against the museum’s aesthetically conservative group-exhibition juries. The photograph, of which Sterne later said, “I am known more for that darn photo than for 80 years of work,” describing herself as the “feather on top”, was subtitled “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists” and published on the cover of Time-Life magazine on 15 January 1951. Being the only female in the picture garnered Sterne much attention – positive and negative. Lumped together with the abstract expressionists, partly because of her gallerist and dealer, and largely because of this photograph, Sterne always maintained she was not one of the group. “I was not an abstract expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible,” she told Boxer, and, as critic Grace Glueck wrote in 2006: “She has maintained a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including surrealism and abstract expressionism … Although she never developed a signature style, Ms Sterne’s explorations have produced a small universe of evocative images.”

Read my full review here