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 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 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

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 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 Joana Vasconcelos

04/08/20

Interview with Joana Vasconcelos

Published in full in edition 2 of The Flux Review

Interview with Robert Fitzmaurice

20/05/20

Interview with Robert Fitzmaurice

Robert Fitzmaurice was born in 1960 in Nuneaton in Warwickshire and studied fine art in Sunderland and Reading in the 80s. Following a 27-year career in commerce, he has returned to being an artist full-time, and is lucky enough to have a painting studio, and a smaller studio – with its own printing press and etching facilities – in his attic. He was working hard towards a joint exhibition with the architect and stone carver James Dunnett – Of Geometry and Gods, Side by Side at the Sandham Memorial Chapel – which has now been postponed because of Covid-19.

I spoke to Fitzmaurice, while under lockdown, about his work for this exhibition – which includes his first bronze since his student days – and the ideas and art historical references that inform his wider practice.

Read the interview here

Preview of Tantra: Enlightenment to Revolution at the British Museum, London

23/03/20

Published in the spring 2020 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview with Ifeoma U Anyaeji

05/06/19

Published in the summer 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Preview of Dorothea Tanning at Tate Modern

25/03/19

Published in the spring 2019 issue of Art Quarterly

Interview: Cathie Pilkington at Pallant House Gallery

Published in the autumn 2018 issue of Art Quarterly magazine

Interview with John Powers

 06/07/18

Interview with John Powers

Bruges Triennial 2018: Liquid City

Inspired by the many almshouses of Bruges – the idea of medieval social housing and a sense of civic ownership that survives to this day – New York-based artist John Powers (b1970, Chicago) further drew on the city’s folkloric story of the beheading of Pieter Lanchals. A confidant of Emperor Maximilian I, Lanchals was decapitated by the people of Bruges and, as a form of punishment and remembrance, Maximilian obliged the city to keep 52 white swans on its canals in perpetuity. Powers’ site-specific work for this year’s triennial is named after the legend and echoes the elegant S-curve of a swan’s neck. 

Studio International spoke to Powers, who expanded on his inspirations, talked about his process of planning and constructing the 15-metre-tall steel tower, and explained how Lanchals fits into his wider practice.

Read the full interview here

Review of Bruges Triennial 2018: Liquid City

05/07/18

Bruges Triennial 2018: Liquid City

Various locations, Bruges
5 May – 16 September 2018

Having been resuscitated in 2015 for the first time since 1974, this second of the contemporary iterations of the Bruges Triennial, curated once again by Till-Holger Borchert, director of Musea Brugge and head curator of the Groeningemuseum and Arentshuis, and Michel Dewilde, curator of visual arts at the Cultural Centre, Bruges, with invaluable support from Els Wuyts, takes the title of Liquid City. There is a double meaning to this, in that Bruges, of course, is itself a liquid city, known as the Venice of the North for its picturesque canals, but questions are also raised, by the curators and the artists behind the 15 works of public art on display, about how a historic city such as Bruges might become metaphorically liquid, flexible and resilient in an age when nothing seems certain and established ways of thinking are increasingly coming under pressure. The concept itself derives from the Polish sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), who wrote of a “liquid modernity” and “the growing conviction that change is the only permanence, and uncertainty the only certainty”.

Read the full review here

Feature: Katrina Palmer's The Coffin Jump at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

10/06/18

Katrina Palmer: The Coffin Jump

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

16 June 2018 - 16 June 2019

Published in the Summer 2018 issue of Art Quarterly

Review of Marino Marini: Visual Passions at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

05/04/18

Marino Marini: Visual Passions

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice

27 January – 1 May 2018

Marino Marini (1901-80) is largely synonymous with equestrian sculpture, his depictions of horse and rider having developed, from their first appearance in 1936, to reflect the artist’s changing sociopolitical and philosophical views, as well as his existential anxieties, and epitomised by The Angel of the City (1948), standing proud, horse’s neck and rider’s limbs (all five of them) erect, outside the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on Venice’s Grand Canal. However, as shown by this touring retrospective, which opened last autumn at the Palazzo Fabroni in Pistoia (the Tuscan city where Marini was born) before moving, appropriately to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni), his legacy is far greater than just this. With more than 50 of his works on display, the exhibition has been cleverly and informatively curated so as to place Marini’s work within the wider art-historical context, ranging from early Etruscan sculpture, through 15th-century Florentine works, to Auguste Rodin and even Henry Moore. Each room juxtaposes works by Marini with works by his contemporaries, or those who influenced him, highlighting the development of his thought and practice.

Read the full review here

Review of Camille Claudel at Musée d’Orsay

20/02/18

Camille Claudel

Musée d’Orsay
9 January – 11 February 2018

With 2017 marking the centenary of the death of Auguste Rodin, many exhibitions are looking back and celebrating the French sculptor’s life. But what of his student, lover, assistant and contemporary, Camille Claudel (1864–1943), who, after the breakdown of their affair and the death of her father, was committed, by her younger brother Paul, to an asylum, where she lived out her remaining 30 years in misery, dying at the age of 78?

Despite critical acclaim and respect from her peers during her lifetime, her affair with Rodin and her struggles with mental illness have cast a shadow over contemporary interpretations of her work. Her brother, a poet, dramatist and diplomat, to whom she was once very close and of whom she sculpted numerous busts, organised an exhibition of her sculptures at the Musée Rodin eight years after her death, but even he, shortly thereafter, spoke of her life in derogatory terms, saying: “My sister Camille had an extraordinary beauty, moreover, an energy, an imagination, a quite exceptional passion. All these superb gifts came to nothing: after an extremely painful life, it ended in complete failure.”1 And yet there are works that, even today, have not decisively been attributed to either Claudel or Rodin, so symbiotic was their practice and so similar their style.2 Why, then, is she not up there on the pedestal with him?

Read the full review here

Interview with Jason Brooks

13/02/18

Interview: Jason Brooks

Jason Brooks: The Subject is Not the Subject
Marlborough, London

9 February – 10 March 2018

For his third exhibition with Marlborough, London, Jason Brooks (b1968) has put together a three-part show of staggering proportions. One room is filled with his huge, incredibly detailed and cinematically cropped, black-and-white portraits of friends and people he considers to have a “discerning eye”. In fact, the airbrushed works are painted solely in black, with any white areas being the paper showing through. Familiar faces surround the viewer – writer and political commentator Will Self, artist Sue Webster, war photographer Don McCullin, fashion designer Erdem – names we probably recognise, but whose faces we maybe do not. Standing under the gaze of so many supersized pairs of eyes, we, the viewer, become the viewed – an intriguing, but unsettling experience.

In another space, Brooks is showing his landscape works: remakes of amateur paintings he has collected over the past couple of decades at car boot sales. Taking these vignettes as inspiration, he “goes on a journey” with them, combining airbrush, acrylic and oil paints in such a way as to explore all aspects of painterly language, as well as his place within art history. In his Gloucestershire studio, he showed us two small works bought on separate occasions, inspired by John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821), and clearly part of a diptych. In the gallery, viewers can see Brooks’s response to these.

For the final space – conceived as a darkened chapel – Brooks has created a three-metre-tall, black sculpture of the Virgin Mary, veiled, and based on a 19th-century bust. She is surrounded by devotional imagery of Christ and vanitas paintings.

While these three strands are quite disparate and one might be forgiven for not immediately recognising them all as the work of one and the same artist, Brooks argues that there is a common thread running through his work, namely, as the title of the exhibition states, that the subject is not the subject. What you think you are seeing is not necessarily what you think it is at all. But this is really only something you can discover by getting up close and personal with his work, uncovering the startling trompe l’oeil effects, seeing the painterly pixellation in his otherwise hyperrealist portraits, and entering into the cinematic world that Brooks creates.

Watch this interview here

Interview with Alex Katz

23/10/17
Interview with Alex Katz

Born in Brooklyn in 1927 to Russian parents, Alex Katz entered the prestigious Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan in 1946, where he was taught to paint from drawings, and exposed largely to modern art. Throughout the period of abstract expressionism, Katz remained a staunch figurative painter, spending his summers in Maine, where he made landscapes en plein air. In the early 60s, influenced by film, television and advertising, he began painting large-scale works, with dramatically cropped faces. His work is often described as “very American”, but Katz seemingly has no agenda. His motivation is to capture what he sees before him, be it landscape, cityscape, or portrait, and, unlike many artists, he doesn’t hanker after timelessness or immortality, recognising, rather, that time keeps moving and reality doesn’t exist beyond what he terms the “immediate presence”.

For Katz's latest exhibition in London, gallerist Timothy Taylor has chosen to bring out some very early pencil and ink drawings made by the artist on the New York subway during his student days and to show these alongside recent landscape paintings and sculptures. 

Read the interview here