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 Nick Hornby

26/01/21

Interview with Nick Hornby

Nick Hornby (b1980, London) is known for making monochrome sculpture in marble or bronze, often combining art history with digital processes. For his first solo institutional exhibition, he has turned his gaze inward and made a new series of autobiographical sculptures. The gallery is filled with a large array of objects set on plinths, which include portrait busts, modernist abstractions and “mantelpiece dogs”. 
 

In conversation via Zoom, Hornby explains why this combination is not as strange as it might sound, before going on to elucidate his process and talk about what makes his new work so personal. 

Watch and 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 Susie MacMurray at Pangolin London

07/12/20

Interview with Susie MacMurray 

Former classical musician Susie MacMurray (b1959) retrained as an artist during the era of the YBAs, but she is as far removed from their style of “one-liner” work as could be, focusing very much on the materiality and poetry of a piece, combining unconventional materials –  such as red velvet, feathers, wax and barbed wire – to create seductive yet misleading installations, which lure the viewers in, but then cause them to step away in surprise and ask questions. Vulnerability and resilience, danger and attraction, mystery and wonder, life and death – these are all present in MacMurray’s work, which, like a fairytale, centres on alchemy and transformation. 

With an exhibition at Pangolin London, including a site-specific installation – or “drawing in space” – and some new bronze works (MacMurray’s first time working with this material), made in the Pangolin foundry, the artist spoke to Studio International about her collaborative and repetitive way of working, her love of dualities, and her self-discovery as an artist later in life.

Read the full interview here

Q: Tracey Emin

02/12/20

Published in the winter 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

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

Interview with Paloma Varga Weisz

17/11/20

Interview with Paloma Varga Weisz

Born into an artistic family and classically trained in the traditional techniques of woodcarving, Paloma Varga Weisz, who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany, uses the mediums of sculpture, watercolour and drawing to explore a world of masquerades and disguises, revealing histories and creating narratives. Entering the art world in the heyday of the early 2000s, her career took off quickly, and she has exhibited widely internationally and received numerous stipends and awards. 

Her most recent exhibition, “Bumped Body”, was shown at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands, before traveling to the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK, where it was reinstalled in a completely new iteration, opened with a private view, and then closed due to the Covid-19 lockdown. One work, Bumpman, however, stood outside the gallery throughout like an omen or watchman. 

 

Varga Weisz is also preparing to install an eight-metre-tall female figure, Foreign Body, in the Joshua Tree National Park, in the Mojave Desert, as part of “High Desert Test Sites 2020”, curated by Iwona Blazwick—again, something which has had to be postponed for the time being.

Read my interview for Sculpture Magazine here

Interview with Sarah Muirhead

16/11/20

Edition 3 of The Flux Review

Interview with Anita Glesta

16/11/20

Edition 3 of The Flux Review

Interview with Leonor Antunes

16/11/20

Edition 3 of The Flux Review

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

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 Shani Rhys James

04/08/20
Interview with Shani Rhys James

Published in full in edition 2 of The Flux Review

Interview with Joana Vasconcelos

04/08/20

Interview with Joana Vasconcelos

Published in full in edition 2 of The Flux Review

NA Meets: Kristin Hjellegjerde, gallerist

24/07/20

NA Meets: Kristin Hjellegjerde, gallerist

Following several years moving around the world, Norwegian gallerist Kristin Hjellegjerde and her family settled in London, where she opened her first exhibition space in Wandsworth in 2012.

Today she has established herself as one of the most successful gallerists on the international art scene, with a second UK gallery (in London Bridge), one in Berlin, and a newly-established summer venue in a former shrimp factory in the Norwegian fishing village of Nevlunghavn.

With a stable of 35 international artists, and a distinctive programme for each of her galleries, Hjellegjerde is busier than ever, unflustered by the global pandemic. Norwegian Arts spoke to Hjellegjerde about her familial approach to exhibiting art, what she looks for in artists, and how she has maintained momentum in trying times.

Read the full interview here