Interviews by Brainard Carey

Brainard Carey

Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists Poets and more, like Vasari’s book updated. (Interviews with over 1200 artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Johanna Calle

    Johanna Calle was born in 1965 in Bogotá, where she lives and works. Following her studies in the visual arts at the Talleres Artísticos of the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá from 1984 to 1989, Calle received a British Council scholarship in 1992 to earn a master’s degree at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her work draws on a range of archival and deciphering techniques, often associated with everyday life, to address the violence of recent Colombian history and evoke the victims of forced disappearances. Johanna Calle has been honored with numerous prestigious awards, including major prizes and honorary recognitions in Colombian art salons (1996–2003), a fellowship at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2001), and international grants and residencies in Europe and the United States (2008–2013). She has been included in international biennials such as the Sydney Biennale (2016), the São Paulo Biennial (2014), SITE Santa Fe (2014), and the Istanbul Biennial (2014). Selected exhibitions include Arquitecturas, Bienvenu Steinberg & C, New York (2026); Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2024); Hayward Gallery (2020); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2019); La Maison de l’Amérique latine, Paris (2017); Museum of Modern Art (2017); Silentes 1985–2015, Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá, traveled to Museum Amparo, Puebla, Mexico (2015); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (2013); the Drawing Room, London (2013); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2012); Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California (2012); Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (2012); and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2011). Her work is included in institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art; Tate Modern; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; Museum of Bogotá; National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá; National Bank of the Republic of Colombia, Bogotá; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami; Sur Collection, San Francisco; Comfenalco Antioquia, Medellín; Enersis Collection, Santiago; and Teorética Museum, San José. Johanna Calle Arquitecturas, 2026 Signed and dated on the back Nail polish on chromogenic print (anonymous photograph) Framed in Optium Museum Acrylic 3.5 x 3.5 in (image) Johanna Calle Arquitecturas, 2026 Signed and dated on the back Nail polish on chromogenic print (anonymous photograph) Framed in Optium Museum Acrylic 3.5 x 3.5 in (image) Johanna Calle Abstractas, 2026 Signed and dated on the back Erased found chromogenic print (anonymous photograph) Framed in Optium Museum Acrylic 3.5 x 6 in (image)

    25 min
  2. 1 DAY AGO

    Anna Johnson

    Anna Johnson studied English, Australian literature and Fine Arts at the University of Sydney graduating with a bachelor of arts in 1987. The following year she was appointed Art Editor of Interior Design magazine. Since then, Johnson has been a professional art writer and author contributing to Vogue (UK and Aus), Vanity Fair, Conde Nast Traveller, The Sydney Morning Herald and as a senior arts writer for Artist Profile Magazine. She is the author of several monographs and has been a critic for both television and radio. Holding many detailed artist interviews, provided an immersion in contemporary art three decades deeper than a conventional art school education. Raised in New York in the early 70s, time in her father’s loft studio on the Bowery, as well as the artist enclaves at Max’s Kansas City and Fanelli’s Bar in Soho had a formative impact. Making the gallery rounds each Saturday as a small family, laid the foundations of a lexicon steeped in both Colour Field and Lyrical abstraction. Establishing her own full time studio practice in 2017, three solo shows in Sydney followed, including a museum show at the NERA Museum in Australia. Johnson’s distinct griffe strikes a different chord to the dominant animism of Australian painting. Seven visits to Japan over the last decade, inspired her austere and symbolic use of space. The subtle rituals and expansive space within Heian screens, and calligraphy have been fused to a hyper-sensual use of colour. Her consuming project ongoing are the ‘Nymphaea Nymphaea’ paintings, works that speak directly to the expansive and progressively minimal paintings of the late and post-Impressionists. As her works grow larger and more complex the scope of creating an entire environment without spatial periphery is approached. Anna Johnson, Beau Rivage, 2026, Oil stick and acrylic on linen, 78 3/4 x 72 7/8 in | 200 x 185 cm © Anna Johnson. Photo: Morgan Waltz / Off Photography Anna Johnson, Nuage et Vide, 2026, Acrylic on linen, 78 3/4 x 70 7/8 in | 200 x 180 cm © Anna Johnson Photo: Morgan Waltz / Off Photography Anna Johnson, Tohji, 2025, Oil stick and acrylic on linen, 60 1/4 x 54 in | 153 x 137 cm © Anna Johnson. Photo: Morgan Waltz / Off Photography

    23 min
  3. 5 MAY

    Nicola Tyson

    Nicola Tyson was born in 1960 in London, England. She attended Chelsea School of Art, St. Martins School of Art and Central/St. Martins School of Art in London, and currently lives and works in New York. Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked with photography, film, performance and the written word, in addition to running Trial BALLOON, an NYC project space in the early 90s. In 2023, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022, the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s work to date, was published. In 2011, Tyson released the limited-edition book Dead Letter Men, which is a collection of satirical letters addressing famous male artists. Her unique archive of color photos documenting the London club scene of the late 1970’s — Bowie Nights at Billy’s Club — was the subject of shows, both in New York and London, in 2012 and 2013. In 2025, Tyson was commissioned for Hayward Gallery’s public project banner. Tyson has mounted solo exhibitions at Petzel Gallery, New York (2026, 2025, 2024, 2020, 2016); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2024); Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels (2022); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021, 2017, 2013); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2017); The Drawing Room, London (2017); Nathalia Obadia, Paris (2015); Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); White Columns, New York (2012), among others. She has participated in group exhibitions at the Design Museum, London (2025); The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Fort Worth (2022); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2021); Drawing Room, London (2021, 2018); Drawing Center, New York (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts (2013); and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2012); among others. Tyson’s work is included in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London. Nicola Tyson, Random Attachments, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Nicola Tyson Nature Nurture, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Nicola Tyson Motherload, 2026 Charcoal, conte, pastel on sanded paper 50 x 38 in 127 x 96.5 cm. Photo: Meg Symanow Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

    20 min
  4. 28 APR

    Giordanne Salley

    In this new body of work, Giordanne Salley constructs shifting tableaus that attempt to visualize not time itself, but the feeling of the passage of time. Our experiences of life can often feel like we are riding along on time’s arrow. Days repeat and build like the rhythm of waves lapping at the shore. Each tide brings forth trash and treasures, bits of flora and fauna, before the lunar cycle pulls them back out to sea. So too does one’s conscious experience of life move through time, accumulating, folding in on itself, and gradually building into the future. Ripples and corrugations form over Salley’s images, diffracting their shapes into myriad frames. Like peering at the bottom of the sea through the waves, we see the subjects dance in the minute turbulence. In pieces like Endlings, these scenes verge on abstraction. Though semi-psychedelic in their optical qualities, Salley’s paintings are rooted in the natural world. Animals and human forms bathe in the undulations, adding a moment of specificity while also acting as a tether to reality and a reminder that these patterns depict the fluctuating surface of water. Coursing through glowing layers of energy, works like Infinity Loon pair discernible imagery with vibrating geometry. The waterfowl, leaving a wake in the paint behind it, upsets the lines and creates a cascading pattern that echoes toward the edges of the frame. Though often based around real-world subjects, in these new works, Salley does away with the horizon line in an effort to flatten the surface and invoke a feeling of the infinite. Repetitive and continuous, her lines and patterns are full of potential as they press onward and outward. Finding her color by applying paint in numerous thin layers, Salley works around predetermined lines, building up meditative markings of the hours spent. With every new application, the image grows richer. The use of collage and underdrawing affords each canvas a nuanced texture, both physical and visual. In Time Flows, Salley combines these elements as “a sort of scaffolding to hang the painting on or around.” Intense investigation rewards the viewer with subtle glimpses into the artist’s process. Each piece becomes a palimpsest, offering ghostly reminders of the past that push through to the final image. At the heart of all of this is a potent rumination on universal themes through the lens of Salley’s own subjectivity. Like time, so too do ideas of love, loss, and memory ebb and flow infinitely like the tides. Slipping through fingers like the ocean in our hand, the present is instantaneous and always on the way out. Salley slows down these moments, capturing them in paint and offering a moment of contemplation and reverie, reminding us that everything is always changing and evolving. Reflecting the world around it, offering vital nourishment to life, and functioning as a symbol of the incomprehensible vastness of time and consciousness, water is transformative. Subtle Bodies, 2025, 12 x 14 in, oil and paper on canvas Quasi-Material Woman, 2026, 40 x 48 in, oil and paper on canvas Time Flows, 2026, 60 x 78 in, oil and paper on canvas

    18 min
  5. 22 APR

    Sarah Alice Moran

    Splat Daisies, is a solo exhibition of dreamlike paintings and sculpture by Sarah Alice Moran. Splat is a cartoon word and the spaces in these paintings draw on that system of suspended rationale. By loosening the rules of scale, gravity, and time, Moran creates dreamy pastoral scenes where humans, animals, and nature coexist without hierarchy. The show explores the quiet, almost mystical bonds between humans and animals, and the ways they shape our emotional lives. Moran paints wet-on-wet, letting thin washes of color blend and bleed across the canvas. Sunflowers dissolve into daisies, shadows become shapes, and light seemingly glows from the flowers themselves. Her compositions balance the elastic logic of cartoons with a sophisticated command of color and atmosphere. Figures, rainbows, and blossoms appear in different configurations while animals move through these spaces less as narrative agents but  as symbolic or devotional presences. Among them, inevitably, is the artist’s dog Pepper. Pepper died early in the making of this series, and her prolonged illness ushered in an extended period of anticipatory grief. During this time, Moran found solace in researching ancient Roman dog epitaphs—concise, tender monuments that affirmed the endurance of this bond across millennia. The result is a body of work that is a meditation on companionship, loss, and remembrance—a garden for Pepper to inhabit and for the artist herself to heal within. Two large-scale column paintings, inspired by the artist’s research on ancient Rome, create an architectural space – a temple – for the sculptures to operate as a shrine, and visitors are encouraged to bring their dogs; milk bones will be provided. Sarah Alice Moran, Bodega Flower Dream, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches Sarah Alice Moran, Good Night P, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 48 inches Sarah Alice Moran, Sun (Flower) Bather, 2026, Acrylic on canvas, 11 x 14 inches

    20 min

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Lives of the most Excellent Artists, Architects, Curators, Critics, Theorists Poets and more, like Vasari’s book updated. (Interviews with over 1200 artists and others about practice and lifestyle from Yale University radio WYBCX)

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