Robert meets painter Eileen Cooper RA to discuss her new London solo exhibition Learning to Fly, whilst also exploring her evolution across numerous bodies of work made across the past 5 decades. World renowned for her work as a painter and printmaker, Cooper also embraces drawing, collage, ceramics, and sculpture in her expansive practice.

Eileen Cooper was born 1953 in Glossop, in the Derbyshire Peak District. Having studied at Goldsmith’s College, Cooper completed her Master of Arts in Painting at Royal College of Art in 1977. Throughout her career Cooper’s work has contained a strong autobiographical element. However, her vision is always more allegorical and poetic than anecdotal, her concerns and experiences as relevant and timeless as those of the human spirit itself.

A strong colourist and described as a magic realist, Cooper brings an unapologetically female perspective to her subject matter, encompassing sexuality, motherhood, life and death. Her images, simultaneously bold and tender, reveal a range of feeling that is both deeply engrossing and readily accessible, yet very much part of contemporary art practice.

During the 1980s she became a major figure, well known and regarded for her strong and passionate figuration. Cooper has always taught part time in numerous institutions including St Martins, Royal College of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. She became a Royal Academician in 2001 and served as Keeper of the Royal Academy between 2010 and 2017, making her the first woman in the history of the Academy to do so.

Sometimes described as a magic realist, Eileen Cooper brings an unapologetically female perspective to her subject-matter, which encompasses sexuality, motherhood, life and death. Her richly diverse images, simultaneously bold and tender, reveal a range of feeling that is both deeply engrossing and readily accessible, yet still very much part of contemporary art practice.

An oversized woman floats in the sky as if dropped from a plane or whipped up in a hurricane, her limbs caught up in currents of air. Below her are rolling mountains, a river, skeletal trees with new leaves on their branches – a sign of spring, fresh beginnings, a period of becoming. This is Learning to Fly, the titular painting of Eileen Cooper’s solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellgjerde Gallery, Tower Bridge, which leads us through spaces – and states – of transition and creativity. 

Learning to Fly, a new solo exhibition by Eileen Cooper is now open runs until 3rd October 2026 at Kristin Hjellegjerde gallery in London’s Tower Bridge.

Follow: @Eileen_Cooper_RA

Visit: https://kristinhjellegjerde.com/exhibitions/582/overview/

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New Talk Art podcast! Robert meets Raymond Antrobus MBE FRSL, a British Jamaican poet, educator, and writer. His work explores themes of sound, language, identity, and memory. 

Born in Hackney, London, Antrobus was diagnosed as deaf at age six. He discovered he had missing sounds - bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn’t believe he was deaf at all.

His writing reflects a lived experience shaped by both mainstream and deaf schooling, and a profound engagement with questions of communication and belonging.

The Quiet Ear tells his story - from childhood to fatherhood - and the stories of other D/deaf cultural figures, from painters to silent film stars, poets to performers - the inspiring models of D/deaf creativity Antrobus did not have growing up.

Told with the electrifying prose of a poet, this groundbreaking and moving memoir explores family, identity, history and language, and what it means to be in a world saturated with noise.

Widely celebrated, his poetry has earned the Ted Hughes Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In 2019, he became the first poet to win the Rathbones Folio Prize for best work of literature in any genre. His poems have been added to the GCSE syllabus in the UK, and his children’s book Can Bears Ski? was the first book to be read using BSL on the BBC, by Rose Ayling-Ellis.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2020 and appointed an MBE in 2021. This year, Antrobus served as a judge for the Booker Prize 2026.

The Quiet Ear, his first work of prose, is a groundbreaking memoir and cultural history of deafness. Raymond currently lives and works between New Orleans, US and Margate, UK.

Follow @Raymond_Antrobus

Buy Raymond Antrobus’ new paperback here, out now in the UK and worldwide.

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It’s Season 28!!! New Talk Art podcast hosted by Robert Diament.

Robert meets painter John Currin, recorded at his solo show Opening Credits at Sadie Coles.

Currin is widely recognised for his figurative oil paintings in which themes of sexual personae and historical painterly genres appear in surreal and at times, disconcerting guises. Oscillating between a graphic sexuality and playful symbolism, Currin captures the tones and textures of everyday life with an acute sensitivity and a meticulous attention to detail.

John Currin’s show at Sadie Coles’ Savile Row gallery focuses on a new series of paintings that set pairs or triplets of women with exaggerated physiques in ornamental, Arcadian landscapes. In the sequence of twelve mid-size paintings, performative models, reinterpreted from the pages of 1970s clothing catalogues, are poised in a confident display that provides Currin with the means to explore classical painting. In his rendering of the tension of fabric stretched tight across breasts, the light on feathered leaves and gnarled trunks, the radiant softness of flesh and hair, and the self-conscious assembly of limbs, these tableaus allow Currin to make masterful paintings that replace a disappointing contemporary world, with a ‘lost golden world’ that holds his nostalgia for the past. A group of five new drawings in ink on washed paper interpret the paintings in a new medium and sketches from his process are shown alongside the finished works. 

Currin was the opening exhibition of the gallery in 1997, and in the nearly thirty years since, his combination of academic virtuosity and contemporary fetish has unapologetically progressed his painterly agenda. His male and female figures are an endlessly exciting architecture for paint; these new works show bodies that are various and imperfect, that perhaps suggest the ageing process and remind us that Currin has always made works that are in some way autobiographical. There is surprise in the dimensions of these bodies, an affectionate gag on the changing physiognomy of age, when shapes slip from the ideal to the fantastic.

However, these imagined inhabitants of Arcadia present the easy confidence of maturity, of serenity and luxury, and capture the mutual misunderstanding of a child’s view of adults and an adult’s view of childhood. Pairing an imaginary landscape familiar in Poussin or in Watteau’s romanticised and fantastical Journey to the Isle of Cythera, 1717, with the reality of Acadia National Park in Maine, Currin gives us an ornamental landscape bearing the animated actors, hilltops, weather and clouds of both the idealised past and the current self.

John Currin Opening Credits runs until 12th September 2026 at Sadie Coles, 17 Savile Row W1S.

Follow @SadieColesHQ and @TalkArt for

imsges of all artworks discussed in this episode.

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New @TalkArt podcast episode! Season 27 finale!

Robert meets Matthew Slotover OBE, legendary publisher and entrepreneur. This episode was recorded live from Maison Estelle in London.

Matthew Slotover co-founded the art magazine Frieze in 1991 and grew into a major media and events company that has a focus on the art scene and since 2003 produces the annual Frieze Art Fair in London, later joined by fairs in New York, Los Angeles and Seoul.

In 2021 he opened Toklas, a Mediterranean restaurant in London, and in 2022, he launched Fort Road Hotel in Margate.

Matthew is currently chair of Turner Contemporary, Margate, and a board member of Sadlers Wells and the Walpole Group.

He is a founding member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, and a founding board member of Murmur, an environmental charity dedicated to using the Arts to combat climate change. Matthew served as a trustee of the Arts Foundation until 2024.

Follow @MSlotover

Thanks for listening to Season 27. I will return soon for a whole new series!!!!

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Robert meets Luis Felber, a London based South-American multi-instrumentalist best known as Attawalpa. His meticulous production, melodies and honest lyrics evoke the future as much as the past.

We explore his love of art and growing up with an artist mother Alma Laura de Felber, a prominent Peruvian painter and artist. The Lima-born painter makes colorful, emotionally resonant oil paintings often explore themes of identity, the feminine, and human connection.

Born in Winchester, England, Felber spent his earliest years in Peru and Chile before moving back to Britain at age 7. At 17, he skipped university and began pursuing a career in music, playing guitar with several different bands and co-founding influential club night and record label Young Turks.

Felber actively incorporates his creative roots into his projects. His mother's art has been featured in his work, and he frequently collaborates with his wife, Lena Dunham including on the soundtrack for her film Catherine Called Birdy and by co-creating and scoring the Netflix comedy series Too Much.

Recording and performing under the name Attawalpa (his middle name, after the 16th-century Incan ruler Atahualpa), his albums Experience and Presence are both available now on vinyl and at all streaming platforms.

Follow: @Attawalpa

Visit: https://attawalpa.com/

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Robert meets Belfast-born Kathryn Ferguson, an Emmy and BAFTA nominated, BIFA and IFTA winning director whose innovative and boundary-pushing documentary work has screened globally. We explore art as activism and how film has the power to reveal, and amplify, untold stories. Kathryn studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and in 2022 was awarded the inaugural BFI & Chanel Award for Creative Audacity. 

In 2018, Kathryn's short documentary Taking the Waters about Margate’s open water swimming premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest, and was long-listed for a BAFTA. Then, in 2021, Kathryn worked with Passion Pictures on the short Space to Be for The Guardian's acclaimed documentary series. 

After a decade of short-form work centred on identity, gender politics, and community, Kathryn recently completed her debut feature documentary Nothing Compares - which takes as its subject Sinéad O'Connor's artistry and activism. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 then toured the international festival circuit, where it picked up multiple awards, before hitting cinemas in October 2022. It has received over thirty award nominations internationally, including Emmy, Critics Choice, IDA, and PGA Awards, and was awarded winner of Best Feature Documentary at BIFA 2022 and IFTA 2023. Nothing Compares is now available to watch on Showtime and Sky. 

Her second feature, Bogart: Life Comes in Flashes (Universal), was released in US cinemas in 2024. 

In 2024 she also co-founded Tara Films with producer Eleanor Emptage; their latest, Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story, premiered at TIFF 2024, and the company is currently developing a slate of non-fiction and drama projects. Alongside her film work, Ferguson has directed campaigns for Nike, Selfridges, Amnesty International, and Air France, and collaborated with artists such as Lady Gaga and Neneh Cherry. 

Nostalgie, Kathryn's first drama short starring Aiden Gillen, about a faded 80's pop star, has recently been nominated for a BAFTA and won Best Short Film at the IFTAs 2026. The film is available to watch on Channel 4. 

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Robert meets Mariane Ibrahim, leading gallerist and curator, whose mission is dedicated to the elevation and advocacy of diverse global artistic practices, with a particular spotlight on Africa and the diaspora. We explore her galleries in three cities: Mexico City, Paris and Chicago, and the artists she has championed over the past 15 years.

Currently representing artists from across the world, Ibrrahim is driven towards expanding the confines of the creative landscape. Ibrahim’s program compels her to act as something of an ambassador for nuance and complexity in an art world still prone to generalisation. While several of the emerging artists she represents hail from African countries or are members of the African diaspora, Ibrahim emphasises that they – and by extension, her gallery – have much more to offer than simplistic regional or heritage based labels could ever contain.

Mariane Ibrahim Gallery is a highly influential contemporary art gallery that focuses on supporting and championing artists from the African diaspora and diverse global backgrounds. Founded in 2012 by Somali-French art dealer Mariane Ibrahim, the gallery has experienced a phenomenal international expansion, establishing a presence across three different continents.

Follow @MarianeIbrahimGallery

Visit: https://marianeibrahim.com/

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Robert meets legendary photographer ANTON CORBIJN to discuss his major retrospective opening this weekend in Berlin at Fotografiska museum.

The story of Anton Corbijn begins in the quiet corners of a small Dutch island, where he grew up as the son of a vicar. For a young Corbijn, music was an escape, a passion that consumed him. His camera soon became both a tool and a companion, a way to channel his fascination with music and, perhaps more importantly, a means to navigate his own shyness.

When Corbijn moved to London in 1979, the city was electric with the energy of bands like The Clash, The Jam, and Joy Division. Within ten days of arriving in England, he managed to photograph Joy Division claiming he was on assignment for a major Dutch magazine, even though he hadn’t been officially commissioned.

Now, having celebrated his 70th birthday last year, Corbijn looks back on over five decades of work that spans photography, music videos, and film. Corbijn, Anton celebrates his 50-year career and revisits his extensive body of work. Here, you will encounter nearly 150 pieces: iconic portraits of legends like Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, and Marlene Dumas, as well as German icons Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wim Wenders. His signature black-and-white grainy aesthetic became a defining visual language in his work.

A polymath in photography, music videos, feature films, graphic design, and commercials, Dutchman Anton Corbijn is perhaps best known for immortalizing some of the greatest artists of our time. His iconic portraits of musicians, directors, and artists, such as Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Marlene Dumas among others, are praised for the way they capture the soul and charisma of his subjects.

Effortlessly moving in the early 80s from photography into music videos, Corbijn has since made over 80 promos for people like U2, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Coldplay, and The Killers. He is the Artistic Director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode. For U2 he has done the principal promotion and sleeve photography for four decades.

In 2006 Corbijn started working on his first feature film Control about the life, and death, of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s lead singer. The film won many awards worldwide, including 5 BIFAs and the Camera d’Or Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival 2007. Corbijn has since made The American starring George Clooney (2010), A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John Le Carré and featuring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (2014), and Life, about James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock, which stars Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan (2015).

In 2023, Corbijn released his first feature documentary Squaring The Circle about the iconic album art design studio Hipgnosis. In 2025, he directed his fifth feature film titled Switzerland starring Helen Mirren.

Follow: @AntonCorbijn4Real

Visit the exhibition: @Fotografiska.Berlin

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Robert meets MEEK, an emerging singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose new EP Fabulous has become a favourite of the art world, and global queer community, since debuting in February. We discuss how art has inspired her creativity and life, including the work of Magritte, Tracey Emin, Georgia O’Keefe and her passion for the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A and visiting museums in London.

We explore her devotion to artistry within her music, visuals and costumes including recent collaborations with filmmaker Sophie Muller and performance artist Theo Adams on her debut music videos, and sold out live shows at the Garage and SXSW.

MEEK is not a work in progress. She is fully formed, earned her stripes, comes from nothing, nepo-baby baiting execution of timeless pop brilliance. While sounding directly descended from the DNA of famed countercultural misfits and bona fide pop aces, all strewn across the decades, her music is a no messing, straight shoot for the top. Georgia Meek understands that people like her only get one chance to make a first impression.

Frequently, her songs will open out with a stringent big note, a walloping guitar figure, the best hook in her almanac of songwriter-ly resources. Because they have to. “I’ve never had the option to ask,” she says. “I’ve always had to take. I’ve always had to force my way through closed doors. That’s what shapes my sound. Yes, we will start with a huge vocal note to make people turn around and listen. Yes, I will say in the studio, give me some hair-raising guitar windmills. Let’s do that. You waste thirty seconds and you’ve lost it.”

Equally, MEEK’s visual aesthetic is once seen, never forgotten. She wants to reclaim dressing up for everyone, not just those that can afford to indulge in the monied whimsy of high fashion. “I have a clear visual thing for myself, which is basically prom outfits for poor people.” She’s the Cinderella who flipped a finger at the Ugly Sisters, then invited them along to join in the fun, too. “It’s about being absolute glam-trash and owning it. That pink tulle over a stained Adidas jacket? Throw it on. I just want it to feel like something anybody can put together themselves, a sustainable way to look fucking wild. Why not?” 

The best thing about MEEK? There is a point to her. She is as if the comedy queen, Daisy May Cooper stumbled into a charity shop, found a bunch of glittering second hand couture, dolled herself up shamelessly in it, injected the raw spirit of Freddie Mercury and emerged, Mr Ben style, as a fully-fledged MEGASTAR in the making out of the changing rooms, then lead a troubadour of misfits singing down the high street. There is not what you might call a shortage of self-confidence in MEEK. As she sings herself, on a calling card anthem which is sure to become the earworm of the nation once unleashed upon its airwaves: “I’m so f*cking fabulous.”

This week sees MEEK performing live on numerous TV shows including Saturday Night Live UK, with Aimee Lou Wood as well as her USA TV debut with Jimmy Fallon.

Follow @MustBeMeek

Listen to Meek’s new EP Fabulous out now:

https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/meek/1784432868

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Robert meets painter David Dawson to discuss his new large scale landscape paintings, part of an ongoing body of work created en plein air in the artist's county of Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales.

From April 25 – October 11, ‘Land, Sky, Light’ is a solo exhibition at Gainsborough’s House featuring fifteen of David Dawson’s (b. 1960) recent large-scale paintings of his native Welsh countryside. 

Having left Wales for London where he was a student at the Chelsea School of Art and later becoming a model and assistant to Lucian Freud, these paintings represent an artist returning to their childhood home to explore the nature and solitude of its surroundings.

The canvases possess a deeply autobiographical nature, being representative of Dawson's formative childhood years in the country side, and his continued experiences of solitude and connection.

Initially painted outdoors during each season of the year, the artist continues to work on them in his London studio to then complete them back in the countryside. About this creative process, which can take years, the artist states: 

“Painting to me is about the reality of being in the land and making marks that correlate to me reacting to that experience. You paint what you think you know. When I’m in the land, I always get surprised by what I see, even if I thought I knew the landscape in which I grew up so well. That’s why I need to be there, en plein air. Painting to me is very much about being in the presence of the land”.

Forcing the artist to be alone in the fields, exposed to the elements, Dawson’s canvases are deeply autobiographical as they connect him to his formative years growing up in the countryside, when the artist learned about solitude.

Dawson describes his practice in almost meditative terms: painting the Welsh landscape and its waterfalls, “being in the presence of the land”, becomes a way of getting rid of his ego, to reach a feeling of connection and communion with nature. 

Follow @DavidEliDawson and @GainsboroughsHouse

David is represented by @GalleriaLorcanONeill

Visit the exhibition: https://gainsborough.org/event/land-sky-light-new-landscapes-by-david-dawson/

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Robert meets Nick Willing at the studio of his mother Paula Rego (1935–2022) to discuss a major exhibition of drawings and works on paper by Rego, opening this week at Victoria Miro in London. 

The most comprehensive exhibition of Rego’s drawings to date, Story Line features works from the 1950s until the artist’s death, shining new light on Rego’s evolving use of line in media from pen and ink to pastel, conté, charcoal and pencil, and how it was driven by her unique approach to storytelling throughout her life. The exhibition is

accompanied by a new book written by the artist’s son, Nick Willing.

‘When you write your story… invention comes when you do a drawing. As you are drawing something, it very often turns into something else, and you can go with it. It develops in a completely different way, it’s organic and it’s done with the hand. The hand makes it change and so on.’ – Paula Rego, The White Review, 2011

Paula Rego considered herself first and foremost a ‘drawrer’ (her word). From political protest to personal introspection, activism to domestic power games, subversive humour to challenging family relationships, it was through drawing that she understood herself and the world around her, discovering ways of expressing complex

ideas through a single image. As Nick Willing comments, ‘A Rego drawing is never just one thing, but many feelings working together to reveal the truth. They not only helped her understand the world but can also help us understand it too.’Driven by her distinctive approach to storytelling, this exhibition demonstrates how Rego adapted her line to

emphasise the emotional nuance of the stories she told, and how her drawing techniques also reflected her interior emotional narrative. The works reveal the unique development of an artist whose visual storytelling, drawn from a wide variety of sources, spoke directly to us about the essential human traits of desire, loss, violence and power.

The works on show vary from intimate drawings which have never been exhibited before to studies for some of Rego’s most recognisable paintings. These are accompanied by notes, letters, sketchbooks, photographs and other archival material from throughout Rego’s life – among myriad rarities is a drawing Rego made when she was nine years old of her grandmother, while the exhibition concludes with works including a drawing she made of her own granddaughter.

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