Talk Art

Russell Tovey and Robert Diament

Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament discuss the world of art on this weekly podcast with exclusive guest interviews from artists, curators, gallerists and occasionally their talented friends from other industries like acting, music and...

  • 1 hour 8 minutes
    Leilah Babirye

    We meet artist Leilah Babirye to discuss her inspiring multidisciplinary practice, her major solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and new sculptures in the Venice Biennale 2024.


    Transforming everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights, the artist fled her native Uganda to New York in 2015 after being publicly outed in a local newspaper. In spring 2018 Babirye was granted asylum with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.


    Composed of debris collected from the streets of New York, Babirye’s sculptures are woven, whittled, welded, burned and burnished. Her choice to use discarded materials in her work is intentional – the pejorative term for a gay person in the Luganda language is ‘abasiyazi’, meaning sugarcane husk. “It’s rubbish,” explains Babirye, “the part of the sugarcane you throw out.” The artist also frequently uses traditional African masks to explore the diversity of LGBTQI identities, assembling them from ceramics, metal and hand-carved wood; lustrous, painterly glazes are juxtaposed with chiselled, roughly-textured woodwork and metal objects associated with the art of blacksmithing. In a similar vein, Babirye creates loosely rendered portraits in vivid colours of members from her community. 


    Describing her practice, Babirye explains: “Through the act of burning, nailing and assembling, I aim to address the realities of being gay in the context of Uganda and Africa in general. Recently, my working process has been fuelled by a need to find a language to respond to the recent passing of the anti-homosexuality bill in Uganda.”


    For her Yorkshire Sculpture Park solo, Babirye spent the summer of 2023 at YSP making a clan of seven larger-than-life-size figures in wood and five coloured ceramics. Supported by YSP’s technical team, the seven sculptures were carved using a chainsaw and chisels from trees that had reached the end of their life on site. The artist describes being guided by the wood itself, sketching the initial forms directly onto the sectioned tree for carving. Once carved, the figures are refined and their surfaces sanded to highlight the grains of the tree. The sculptures are then burned a deep black, the charring once used to make the works ‘disappear’ but which is now a gesture of celebrating their beauty. Details of the sculptures are treated with a blowtorch before the surfaces are carefully waxed to acknowledge the skin of the piece and the tree from which it came. The final stage is one Babirye calls ‘taking the girls to the salon’, in which found elements complete the sculptures, including bicycle chains, nails and copper from a dismantled boiler, as well as redundant stainless steel teapots.


    Follow @BabiryeSculptor and @YSPsculpture


    Visit: https://ysp.org.uk/profile/leilah-babirye


    Leilah Babirye: Obumu (Unity) runs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until Sunday 8th September 2024.

    https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/leilah-babirye-obumu-unity


    Her work is also part of the Venice Biennale 2024


    Thanks to YSP, Stephen Friedman Gallery and Gordon Robichaux.


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    2 May 2024, 11:00 pm
  • 1 hour 28 minutes
    Pet Shop Boys

    New @TalkArt! We meet the PET SHOP BOYS to explore their new album NONETHELESS!!!


    Recorded in London’s Kings Cross, we chat to Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe about their history as the UK’s most successful pop duo, their mutual love of art, collaborations with artists throughout their 40 year career including Derek Jarman, Eric Watson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and most recently Tim Walker, plus we explore Neil’s interest in the Arts & Crafts movement, and for collecting & living with art. 


    This feature-length exclusive episode celebrates today’s release (April 26th 2024) of their incredible new album Nonetheless, via Parlophone Records. This is their 15th studio album, and since releasing their debut single back in 1984 they’ve gone on to sell more than 50 million records worldwide.


    ‘Nonetheless’ features 10 brand new tracks and is available now digitally and in various physical formats, including CD, black vinyl, clear vinyl, grey vinyl and cassette. Recorded and mixed in London last year, the album is the duo’s first with producer James Ford at his studio in East London. The orchestra and backing vocals were recorded at The Church studio in North London. 


    This is one of our favourite PSB albums they’ve made! Be sure to download or buy it now. The album also sees the duo return to Parlophone, the label which released their iconic and massively successful material spanning 1985 – 2012. 


    🔗 Follow @PetShopBoys on Instagram.

    Visit: https://www.petshopboys.co.uk


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    25 April 2024, 11:00 pm
  • 1 hour 15 minutes
    John Akomfrah and Tarini Malik, presented by Burberry

    Talk Art live at the Venice Biennale, presented by Burberry. Recorded at the St Regis Library, we meet leading artist Sir John Akomfrah CBE RA and Tarini Malik, the curator of the British pavilion 2024.


    The British Council is delighted to present Listening All Night To The Rain by John Akomfrah at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024.


    The exhibition runs from 20 April to 24 November 2024.


    Exploring post-colonialism, environmental devastation and the politics of aesthetics, Listening All Night To The Rain is Akomfrah’s boldest and most ambitious commission to date.


    The exhibition draws its title from 11th century Chinese writer and artist Su Dongpo’s poetry, which explores the transitory nature of life during a period of political exile. Organised in a series of song-like movements, or ‘cantos’, the exhibition brings together eight interlocking and overlapping multimedia and sound installations into a single and immersive environment that tells stories of migrant diasporas in Britain. It is the result of decades of extensive research by the artist and his team, using historical records to contextualise our experience of the present day.


    Listening All Night To The Rain weaves together newly filmed material, archive video footage and still images, with audio and text from international archives and libraries. The exhibition tells global stories through the ‘memories’ of people who represent migrant communities in Britain and examines how multiple geopolitical narratives are reflected in the experiences of diasporic people more broadly.


    Each gallery space layers together a specific colour field, influenced by the paintings of American artist Mark Rothko, in order to highlight the ways in which abstraction can represent the fundamental nature of human drama.


    Listening All Night To The Rain positions various theories of acoustemology: the study of how the sonic experience mirrors and shapes our cultural realities. Akomfrah draws on an acute acoustic sensitivity influenced by a variety of formative experiences, from protests to club culture in 1970s-80s London. Each of Akomfrah’s ‘cantos’ is accompanied by a specific soundtrack, which layers archival material with field recordings, speeches and popular and devotional music. Extending the sense of hybridity in the filmic collages, Akomfrah’s use of sound encourages us to consider the breadth of cultural identity in Britain more broadly.


    Follow @Smoking_Dog_Films, @AkomfrahJohn @TariniMalik, @BritishArts Presented by @Burberry


    Thanks @Lisson_Gallery and @LaBiennale


    Learn more at Lisson: https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/john-akomfrah






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    19 April 2024, 4:02 pm
  • 1 hour 44 minutes
    Antony Gormley

    TALK ART EXCLUSIVE! We meet Sir Antony Gormley OBE RA to discuss his forthcoming solo show 'Aerial' at White Cube New York, USA and his epic new 'Time Horizon' public installation of 100 sculptures which is about to open at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK. We explore his entire career across this intimate, highly detailed, feature-length special episode recorded in person at his London studio.


    Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. Gormley’s work is concerned with the experience of being in the world and an expression of how it feels to be alive. Through a critical engagement with his own physical existence, Gormley identifies art as a place where new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise. For him, art can be a place of becoming where, collectively, we can think about our role as creators of the future: ‘I want it to be about life. I want it to be about potential.’


    We explore his new works made for ‘Aerial’, an exhibition by Antony Gormley in New York, in which the artist considers sculpture as an instrument for proprioception – the body’s innate capacity to sense and perceive its position, movements and orientation in relation to itself and the environment. The exhibition features two recent developments in Gormley’s practice: one explores physical proximity in mass and scale, where two over-life-size bodies merge as one, while the other endeavours to catalyse space almost without mass.


    Whilst 'Time Horizon', one of Antony Gormley’s most spectacular large-scale installations, is currently being shown across the grounds and through the house at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. Featuring 100 life-size sculptures, the works are distributed across 300 acres of the park, the furthest away being approximately 1.5 miles on the West Avenue. The cast-iron sculptures, each weighing 620kg and standing at an average of 191cm, are installed at the same datum level to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape. Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography. Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface. Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four meters off the ground.


    Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the Praemium Imperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.


    Antony Gormley's 'Aerial' runs from 30 April – 15 June 2024 at White Cube New York.

    ‘Time Horizon’ runs concurrently at Houghton Hall, Norfolk from 21 April – 31 October 2024, the first time the work has been staged in the UK.


    Follow @WhiteCube and @HoughtonHall


    Visit: https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/antony-gormley-new-york-2024

    and

    https://www.houghtonhall.com/antony-gormleys-time-horizon-2/


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    11 April 2024, 11:00 pm
  • 1 hour 16 minutes
    Brook Hsu

    We meet artist Brook Hsu. We discuss other worlds, the power of storytelling, the colour green, the drive to make paintings and making art at your own pace.


    BROOK HSU (b. 1987 Pullman, Washington) deploys and weaves the autobiographical and the mythopoetic into paintings using an array of materials, including ink, oil paint, industrial carpets, and off-cuts of ready-made lumber. The sources for Hsu’s imagery come from her own observations, sometimes arising from art history, film and literature.


    Working across painting, drawing, sculpture and writing, her works aim to question how we define representation today, producing abstract and figurative works that employ a host of signs and motifs, recounting stories of love, pain and humor. Hsu says of her practice, 'I seek to understand what we value in life by asking how we value the world.'

     

    Taiwanese-American artist Brook Hsu grew up in Oklahoma, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. Hsu currently lives and works in New York and Wyoming. 


    Recent solo exhibitions include: Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2022); Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin (2021); Manual Arts, Los Angeles, USA (2021); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2019). Group exhibitions include: Reference Material, Adler Beatty, New York (2022), The Practice of Everyday Life, Derosia Gallery, New York (2022), Sweet Days of Discipline, Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles (2022); kaufmann repetto, New York and Milan (2021), More, More, More (curated by Passing Fancy), TANK, Shanghai (2020); LIFE STILL, CLEARING, New York (2020); The End of Expressionism, Jan Kaps, Cologne (2020); Polly, Insect Gallery, Los Angeles (2019-2020); A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Château Shatto, Los Angeles (2019); Finders’ Lodge, in lieu, Los Angeles (2019); and Let Me Consider It from Here, The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2018-2019).


    Her work is part of the collections of X Museum, Beijing; Long Museum, Shanghai.


    Follow @Broooooooooooooook on Instagram. Thanks to Brook's galleries @KraupaTuskanyZeidler

    and @KiangMalingue


    Visit KT-Z: https://www.k-t-z.com/artists/94-brook-hsu/


    Visit Kiang Malingue: https://kiangmalingue.com/artists/brook-hsu/


    See also Gladstone Gallery: https://www.gladstonegallery.com/exhibition/10551/brook-hsu/info

    and this article from Various Artists: https://various-artists.com/brook-hsu/


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    4 April 2024, 11:00 pm
  • 1 hour 5 minutes
    Judith Bernstein

    Season 21!!! We are back with an icon of art, the one and only Judith Bernstein (b. 1942, Newark, New Jersey) to discuss almost 60 years of art making.


    Since graduating from Yale in 1967, Bernstein has developed a reputation as one of the most unwaveringly provocative artists of her generation. Steadfast in her cultural, political and social critique for over 50 years, she surged into art world prominence in the early 1970’s with her monumental charcoal drawings of penis-screw hybrids; early incarnations of which were exhibited at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooks Jackson Iolas Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, and MoMA P.S.1, among other institutions. In reviewing Bernstein’s 2012-13 solo exhibition at the New Museum in NY, Ken Johnson, critic at the New York Times, referred to these words as “bravura performances of draftsmanship” and “masterpieces of feminine protest”. Bernstein was a founding member of A.I.R. Gallery – the first all-female artists gallery in the United States – as well as an early member of many art and activist organizations including Guerrilla Girls, Art Workers’ Coalition and Fight Censorship.


    We explore Bernstein’s first exhibition in London in over a decade at Emalin gallery. TRUTH AND CHAOS comprises works spanning thirty years of her practice. Direct and confrontational, they are inspired by outrage and violence, the American military industrial complex and the private scribbles of the Yale University men’s bathroom stalls. The exhibition presents historical works from her 1990s ‘word drawings’ series alongside the maximalist phallic screw drawings that Bernstein has been making since 1969 and that initiated her complicated relationship with censorship and popular recognition amidst 1970s second-wave feminism.


    Judith Bernstein is concerned with the psyche of men and whatever men may stand for. She observes the scribbles and cartoons they leave behind in bathroom stalls, their furious impotence and possessiveness, the overpowering penetration of their violence and its statistics in war. Most of all, she watches their self-involvement: there is nothing beyond the raging ego, no depth to their own picture-plane. Detaching the symbol of an erect penis from any personhood and mounting it as a standalone totem of military violence and industrial extraction, she hacks with charcoal and oil paint at the abuse of power she witnesses. Symbols of American capitalism scratch their way into the work: guns are dicks, dicks are screws, screws are missiles, missiles are Mickey Mouse and the artist’s signature is an ejaculation. Words and forms are disgorged onto paper – Bernstein’s own subjectivity ejects mark-making.


    Follow @Judith_Bernstein and visit @EmalinOfficial


    Judith's solo exhibition Truth and Chaos is now open and runs until 15 June 2024. Free entry:

    https://emalin.co.uk/exhibitions/truth-and-chaos



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    29 March 2024, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 3 minutes
    Otamere Guobadia (Live in Margate)

    Talk Art Live! We meet Otamere Guobadia, a multidisciplinary writer, poet, and columnist whose work focuses on desire, art, adornment, queerness, and agency, within culture high, low, and popular.


    Recorded live in Margate @FortRoadHotel. Thanks to @TheMargateBookshop & @QuenchGallery. 💕🎙️ We discuss lyricism, queerness, love for the Women in our families and friendships, Yves Klein blue and how art and poetry are interconnected!


    Otamere’s work has appeared in British Vogue, i-D, Dazed, GQ, The Guardian, Vogue Italia, Wonderland, The BBC, The Independent, and AnOther Magazine, among other publications. His first book, Unutterable Visions, Perishable Breath is available now from all good bookstores.


    Otamere Guobadia’s debut, UNUTTERABLE VISIONS, PERISHABLE BREATH, published by Broken Sleep Books, is a gorgeous collection of writings which embody poetic sequences and fragmented poetry as queer forms, a coruscating interplay between language and desire.


    A look at how love, lovelessness, agency, and destiny constellate and complicate each other while refracting these notions, and Guobadia’s own personal histories, through a distinct and unabashedly sentimental lens. This is Otamere Guobadia’s Lusk letter, a record of ‘love in bones and air and stars.’


    🔗 Follow @Otamere


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    22 March 2024, 4:00 am
  • 1 hour 4 minutes
    Li Hei Di

    We meet artist Li Hei Di on the eve of their debut UK solo exhibition 700 Nights of Winter at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London.


    In new paintings, Li explores primal, sexual urges with their signature fluid application of paint. Balanced on a knife edge between abstraction and representation, paintings feature figures that swim in and out of view beneath diaphanous veils of paint; each layer offers a different world, or a portal to an altered oneiric space, guided by desire and emotion. Multiple perspectives collide and overlap, creating dynamic compositions that offer manifold realities within a single work. Luminescent orbs appear as though submerged in deep water, giving the compositions a nebulous quality.


    Li’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with repressed desire, rooted in personal experiences of navigating hetero-normative environments that obstruct open expressions of queerness. Their work eschews rigid sexual codes and gender categories in favour of a liberated approach to fantasy and beauty, which exists apart from hierarchical and dominant social structures. For Li, the dichotomous relationship between sexual arousal and repression finds a parallel in the covert ways in which erotic love flourishes on cold winter nights, as bodies become entangled in pursuit of warmth, lost but for the other. The existential threat posed to romantic love by the culture of narcissism engendered under globalised capitalism sets the stage in Li’s work for the negation of the self, in the radical recognition of another, as espoused in the writings of cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han.


    This commingling of two entities is found not only in humankind but in the natural world too, and Li’s work explores the role animal pollinators play in the reproductive lives of plants. Such co-evolved relationships encapsulate the exuberance of life in connection with erotic activity and, therefore, death.


    In this new body of work Li also investigates the ways in which desire manifests and, notably, declines under the ‘pharmacopornographic regime’, a term coined by philosopher Paul B. Preciado to describe the intersection of the pharmaceutical and pornographic industries.

     

    Li Hei Di (b. 1997, Shenyang, China) lives and works in London and received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and a BA (Hons) from Chelsea College of Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art. In 2024, Li will have a solo exhibition at Pond Society, Shanghai and will be part of a group exhibition at Le Consortium, Dijon. Recent exhibitions include Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); X Museum Triennial, Beijing (2023); Marguo, Paris (2023); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas (2023), TX; CICA Vancouver (2023); Gagosian, Hong Kong (2023), and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2023), amongst others.


    Li Hei Di’s new solo exhibition runs from 15th March - until 20th April 2024. Free entry.


    Follow @Plum_Black_Field and @PippyHouldsworthGallery

    Visit: https://www.houldsworth.co.uk/exhibitions/146-li-hei-di-700-nights-of-winter/press_release_text/


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    15 March 2024, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    Andrew Logan

    We meet living LEGEND, the English sculptor, performance artist, jewellery-maker, portraitist and all-round cultural ICON... Andrew Logan!!!!! We learn about his friendships with Zandra Rhodes, Vivienne Westwood, Derek Jarman, Angela Flowers, Brian Eno and his recent collaboration with Stella McCartney for her Paris catwalk show.


    Logan (b. 1945) belongs to a unique school of English eccentrics. One of Britain’s principal sculptural artists, he challenges convention, mixes media and plays with our artistic values. Since its beginnings, Logan’s work has depended on the inventive use of whatever was to hand. With flair and fantasy he transformed real objects into their new and different versions. His artistic world includes fauna, flora, planets and gods. His love of travel provides the bases for several series of work.

    Born in Oxford in 1945, he qualified in architecture in the late 1960s and has worked across the fields of sculpture, stage design, drama, opera, parades, festivals and interior design. To him, “Art can be discovered anywhere.”


    Logan crosses cultures and embodies artistic fantasy in a unique and unprecedented way. His work is the art of popular poetry and metropolitan glamour. From his early fame amongst London’s fashionable crowd, he has become an influential artist of international stature, with exhibitions as far afield as Los Angeles (USA), Monterrey (Mexico) and St Petersburg (Russia).


    Versatile and enterprising designer and sculptor, born in Witney, Oxfordshire, who graduated with a diploma in architecture from Oxford School of Architecture, 1964–70. He “experienced Flower Power” in America in 1967. Did a hologram course at Goldsmiths’ College, 1982. Logan was noted for projects carried out with a showbiz flair, who to some dressed weirdly, producing camp sculptures, costumes and jewellery out of mirror and lurid plastic, but who was undeniably dedicated and persistent. He said that his aim was “to bring joy and happiness to the world”.


    Logan was most famous as the inventor and impresario of The Alternative Miss World, which began in 1972, the series continuing periodically at various venues. The first showing of the film The Alternative Miss World was held at the Odeon, Leicester Square, 1979, followed by the Cannes Film Festival, 1980.


    Follow @AndrewLoganSculptor and his official website: https://www.andrewlogan.com/ Visit the @AndrewLoganMuseum in Wales.


    Logan had his first solo show at New Art Centre, 1973. Other events in his multi-faceted career included Egypt Revisited, sound and light spectacular in a tent on Clapham Common, 1978; decorations for Zandra Rhodes’ fashion show, 1980; Snow Sculpture World Championships, Finland, 1982; piece in Holographic Show, York Arts Festival, 1984; debut as a theatre designer, Wolfy, Ballet Rambert, Big Top, Battersea, 1987; retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1991, with tour; Jewels Fantasy Exhibition, Victoria & Albert Exhibition, 1992; a show at Cheltenham Art Gallery, 2000–1, and watercolours at A&D Gallery, 2002, in the same year there sharing an exhibition with Duggie Fields. In addition, Norwich Gallery held Logan’s Alternative Miss World Filmshow 1972 to 2002. In 1991 the Andrew Logan Museum of Sculpture opened at Berriew, Powys. In 1993 the National Portrait Gallery bought two portraits. Was based at The Glasshouse, Melier Place, where he also held exhibitions.


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    8 March 2024, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 11 minutes
    Grace Campbell

    We meet stand up comedian, actress and author Grace Campbell to discuss her experiences with art! We discover that in spite of growing up with artist friends, she had a childhood fear of galleries, her admiration for artists Tracey Emin, Judy Chicago, Marilyn Minter, Elmgreen & Dragset and living with artworks by Marcelina Amelia, Mr Brainwash, and more. Plus we learn about her close friendship with art historian Katy Hessel, her collaborations with illustrator Alice Skinner, and we discuss a new documentary about sex educator and feminist Shere Hite.


    Grace Campbell is a riotous force of nature. The stand up comedian, author, and actor, is on a constant, rebellious mission to undermine most of the bullshit we are taught by society. An acclaimed stand-up, and host of the popular comedy night the Disgraceful Club, currently holding a residency at Bush Hall, Grace’s comedy is wild, glamorous, fiery, and provocative.


    Grace has just announced a UK tour Grace Campbell Is On Heat

    from October to December 2024. Buy tickets now via TicketMaster: https://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/grace-campbell-tickets/artist/1832543 or visit Grace’s website.


    Follow @DisGraceCampbell on Instagram and visit https://www.disgracecampbell.com/ 🎧💘 We also highly recommend ‘28 Dates Later’ Grace’s new podcast, available to download wherever you get your podcasts.


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    1 March 2024, 12:00 am
  • 1 hour 12 minutes
    Doron Langberg (with Victoria Miro and Glenn Scott Wright)

    We meet artist Doron Langberg at his new exhibition in London at Victoria Miro Gallery. Night is a hymn to nocturnal worlds both interior and exterior, and the spaces of ambiguity, opportunity and liberation – physical and psychological – that open up after dark. We also meet Doron's gallerists Victoria Miro and Glenn Scott Wright.


    Doron Langberg’s intimate yet expansive take on relationships, sexuality, nature, family and the self proposes how painting can both portray and create queer subjectivity, forging a relationship between interior and exterior realities and the ways in which they shape and are shaped by one another.


    Titled after queer New York parties and club nights such as Merge and Wrecked, the spaces in these new paintings are worlds in themselves, sites of multiple layers and levels of experience and connection. Together, the works create a narrative arc that follows the course of an evening, a night out becoming the morning after as we move from Basement to Sunrise. The exhibition is accompanied by a new essay by New York-based writer and therapist Hannah Baer.

      

    Prominent among a new generation of figurative painters, Doron Langberg creates luminous works that celebrate the physicality of touch – in subject matter and process. Depicting a range of subjects, from queer love to wildflowers and sweeping landscapes, the broad scope of themes and experiences in Langberg’s work are underscored by his deeply felt use of paint. Aspects of nature are an enduring source of inspiration, resonating feelings of connection through flowers depicted in close up or as part of enveloping vistas.


    The works on view in Venice were painted en plein air at different times of the year and include cultivated garden plants as well ostensibly wild or self-seeded varieties – such as ragwort, thistle and dandelion. Langberg paints these fleeting moments spontaneously in one session, alighting on patches of ground and recording them in bursts of activity. Flowers and foliage spring from the whiteness of the canvas in flurries of brushstrokes, preserved by the artist as if moments of revelation.

     

    For the artist, painting nature as an ‘embodied experience’ is key. Capturing both external realities and internal states of mind, he makes a connection with artists across history – for example, the landscapes of Munch or Van Gogh. The work points to the broader significance of landscapes exterior and interior, and how they relate to or signify our own emotional states.


    Doron Langberg: Night, featuring large-scale tableaux of nightclub and nocturnal beach scenes, is on view at Victoria Miro, London, is now open and runs until 28 March 2024. Free entry. Visit: https://online.victoria-miro.com/doron-langberg-london-2024/


    Victoria Miro, Venice is concurrently presents an exhibition of landscapes and flower paintings by Langberg, whilst Part of Your World, the artist’s first solo institutional presentation in Europe, on view at Kunsthal Rotterdam runs until 26th May 2024.


    Follow @DoronLangberg and @VictoriaMiroGallery on Instagram. Thanks for listening! Visit @TalkArt for images and more details.


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    23 February 2024, 12:00 am
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