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Talk Art

Talk Art

Russell Tovey and Robert Diament
The Graham Norton Podcast

The Graham Norton Podcast

BBC Radio 2

Season 28, Episode 9

Christian Levett (FAMM Mougins)

Robert meets Christian Levett, a British collector, philanthropist, and former investment fund manager. He is the founder of FAMM (Female Artists of Mougins Museum)(opens in a new tab), the first museum in the world outside of the USA to hold a permanent collection dedicated to A+ female artists from impressionism to contemporary art. Opened in 2024, FAMM reflects his long-standing commitment to addressing structural gender imbalance in art history through exhibitions, research, and public programming. Christian Levett began collecting at the age of seven, initially focusing on medals and coins. Christian Levett began collecting Old Master paintings and antiquities early in his life, developing a particular interest in Greek, Roman and Egyptian archaeology. In 2011, he founded the Mougins Museum of Classical Art (MACM), where antiquities were displayed in dialogue with modern and contemporary works. Since 2016, his collecting has focused primarily on women artists. His collection today comprises nearly 2,000 artworks, including over 700 works by women artists, among them approximately 150 works by key figures of Abstract Expressionism, making it one of the most significant private holdings in this field. Over the past decades, Levett moved towards the wider art market and began building an important collection of 20th and 21st century art. This includes, amongst others, post-war American art, Zero movement art and African contemporary art. In the last few years, he has built a significant collection of abstract works by female artists. This is now displayed in his home in Florence, an Italian palazzo transformed into an inspiring gallery in its own right, having hosted private tours for museum patrons and university groups, including Harvard, Stanford, and New York University, the Palazzo Strozzi, the Bargello Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Tate. His Florentine palazzo, hung exclusively with works by women artists, regularly hosts museum patrons and academic groups from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and NYU. He has commissioned three major scholarly books: Abstract Expressionists: The Women(2023), the FAMM museum catalogue Female Artists of Mougins Museum, France (2025), and In Their Own Words, which brings together the letters and writings of more than 100 women artists. A committed philanthropist, Christian Levett has supported over 50 exhibitions at major institutions worldwide, including the British Museum, The Met, the Royal Academy, Tate, and Palazzo Strozzi, as well as archaeological excavations and restoration projects. He has served on the boards of the Ashmolean Museum and The Met, is currently a board member of Palazzo Strozzi, and is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford. Follow: @FAMM_Mougins Visit: https://famm.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 1

John Currin

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 8

Harold Offeh

Robert meets Harold Offeh, an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. Offeh is interested in the space created by the inhabiting or embodying of histories. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture. We discuss Harold Offeh’s TRUSTFUL STRANGERS INDUCE FEARLESS WALKS, the third iteration of the Paddington Square x The Showroom annual billboard commission. The project developed from a series of workshops and conversations between Offeh and a group of young people from The Showroom’s Imagining Futures programme. Through a process of gathering materials, collage, role-play and writing, they explored the idea of public space and the importance of building communities that care and look out for each other, fostering trust in strangers. In generating the phrase ‘Trustful Strangers Induce Fearless Walks’ they created a statement that speaks to their hopeful desire to increase empathy and mutual trust between anonymous passers-by as they encounter each other in London’s streets and public spaces. The work is presented on a giant billboard at Paddington Square on the corner of Tanner Lane and Praed Street, extending beyond the billboard’s physical borders via audio clips of spoken-word, poetry, streams of consciousness, reflections and song by the young collaborators. These are accessible via a QR code onsite. The billboard stands in dialogue with Offeh’s exhibition at The Showroom TRUSTFUL STRANGERS INDUCE FEARLESS ALIENS which brings together a selection of works from Offeh’s 25-year practice; confronting dominant histories and present-day cultural norms. The exhibition runs until 15 August. Together the two presentations look back and look forward, positioning imagination as a powerful tool for creating more hopeful futures. He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito. He studied Critical Fine Art Practice at The University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and recently completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and works in London, UK. He previously held the role of Reader in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and was a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Art, UCL, London. He is currently the Head of Programme in MA Contemporary Art Practice and a visiting lecturer in MA Print at the Royal College of Art. Follow: @Harold_Offeh Visit: https://haroldoffeh.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 3

Eileen Cooper

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/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 6

Johnny Marr

Robert meets legendary musician Johnny Marr to celebrate the launch day of his brand new album The Age Of Everything, out today!!! Johnny Marr is one of the most creative, singular and influential guitar players in the history of pop music. He created a shimmering sonic framework for 1980s indie in his visionary work in The Smiths that continues to be foundational and endlessly emulated to this day. He’s been a member of The The, teamed up with New Order’s Bernard Sumner to form the electronic pop outfit, Electronic, and has also had stints in bands such as Modest Mouse, The Pretenders, The Cribs as well as contributing guitar for Pet Shop Boys. But despite a lifetime of collaborations, Marr is in something of a new chapter of his career as a solo artist. In the last 13 years he has released five albums, with the latest undoubtedly his best yet: The Age of Everything. The Age Of Everything is Johnny Marr's fifth full length studio record. 10 new songs that he describes as the most cathartic songwriting of his career. Written in London, developed live on the road across the East Coast of North America and recorded in Manchester, The Age Of Everything captures the energy and tensions of the city. Sharp, fast and dynamic, filled with ideas and possibilities. Introducing the album, Johnny Marr said: “This is the record that’s been the most cathartic. The title came to me early in the process and became an inescapable idea.It seemed to sum up the way I think a lot of people are feeling. It’s all encompassing, but it's not necessarily a negative statement. There’s a sense of overwhelm in the culture brought about by technology, but looking at it with a different light, there could also be a sense of possibility.” It is the unique dialogue that exists between Johnny Marr and his audience that has turbo-charged the sound of The Age Of Everything. Whilst touring the East Coast of North America in late 2025, more than half of the set consisted of brand new and unheard music. This research and development in the field brought a new energy to the songs, something inspired by what Johnny describes as a preoccupation with perception. How we perceive things as we move through life. Considering the possibility of everything: good and bad. Choosing the promise of the future, with defiance and resistance. Few artists remain as relentlessly creative as Johnny Marr. Since launching his solo career he has scored five UK Top 10 albums, released a Sunday Times bestselling autobiography Set The Boy Free, recorded the James Bond theme for No Time To Die with Billie Eilish, received the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award, an Academy Award nomination for his work with Hans Zimmer on Inception, NME's Godlike Genius honour, and played sold-out tours and major festivals across the world. The years that have elapsed since the release of 2022's Fever Dreams Pts 1-4 album signalled a new era, bringing the career-spanning collection Spirit Power: The Best Of Johnny Marr, the acclaimed photobook Marr's Guitars, full orchestral concert A Night With The Johnny Marr Orchestra, the Look Out Live! album, as well as writing and recording with Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and performing on the HELP(2) album with Grian Chatten (Fontaines DC) and Kae Tempest - the latest in a long line of exciting and unexpected collaborations. Listen to The Age Of Everything here. The new album is available on CD, black vinyl and limited edition red vinyl. Follow @JohnnyMarrGram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 4

Lykke Li

Robert meets Lykke Li to discuss her new album The Afterparty, collaborating with artist Monty Richthofen on the cover artwork, and her powerful, ongoing creative partnership with experimental filmmaker and director Theo Lindquist. We explore her friendship and duet with the late David Lynch, and also look back to when Lindquist, Lykke Li, and artist Nick Verstand created their immersive, hyper-sensory multimedia installation at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition projected Lindquist's visual loops in high-resolution spatial audio to simulate a "cathedral of female romantic fantasy". We learn about the inspiration Lykke finds in the work of artists including Helen Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon, Cindy Sherman, Pina Bausch, Tracey Emin, Marina Abramović, Jordan Wolfson, as well as Patti Smith, Joan Didion, Claire Denis and Isabelle Huppert. Plus, this week also sees Lykke Li perform live at The Met museum in New York, just as her song I Follow Rivers reached one billion streams on Spotify. Lykke Li is a singular force in Swedish pop, where fragility hits the bullseye every time. She makes music as if it were both a diary and a spotlight, an intimate confession and a cold, unblinking stare straight back. They She broke through with her debut album Youth Novels in 2008, in which the echoes of 60s girl-group pop took on a new kind of electric solitude. Her second album, Wounded Rhymes, tightened the rhythm and the shadow until it started to glow. In that era, I Follow Rivers became an international breakthrough moment. This song escaped into clubs, festivals, and headphones as a shared language and found a second life through remixes. Her third album, I Never Learn, made heartbreak big, bare, and unflinching. Then came a turn toward a shinier present on the so sad so sexy era, and Eyeyequieted everything again until even a whisper feels like bass. Now she is already pointing toward what comes next. New music is now here, with the new album, Afterparty, and its monumental first single Lucky Again. Lykke Li is an artist the whole world watches, but she refuses to pose for that gaze. She creates a space where pop is art, emotion is physical, and beauty is allowed to be a little ugly. It is confident, a bit ruthless, and dangerously addictive at the same time. The kind of music you dance to, only to realise later that something went straight under your skin. And even though attitude does not need metrics, the scale is still there. She is not just a critic’s secret favourite, but a maker who has taken major Swedish honours, moved across the world’s biggest stages, and written songs that stay alive in a way very few can manage. This is the point where she stops explaining herself and simply owns the room. Follow @LykkeLi The Afterparty is out now on Vinyl and CD via Neon Gold Records. Buy the limited blue or clear vinyls from LykkeLi.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 7

Emii Alrai

Robert meet artist Emii Alrai to explore her new exhibition Lures at Carl Freedman Gallery in Margate. Emii Alrai is an artist whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Her practice weaves in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. The installations physically weave together hand built clay vessels which are patinated to look like ancient artefacts, steel braces and polystyrene hewn into amorphous landscapes. Mimicry and theatricality are at the heart of the work, with forms covered in gypsum, sand, tar and various pigments to create monumental environments that replicate the ideas of a romanticised past and the histories of archaeological excavation. In this material exploration in relation to bodies of research, Alrai’s practice allows for conversations around memory, nostalgia and language to surface critiquing current structures of rigidity and how these may stem from the lasting shadow of imperialism. Beyond merely critiquing or reproducing these structures, the work’s bending of time and space imagines ways in which to go forward in our understanding of history, its retelling and its romanticism and opens dialogue with the ways we engage history in our construction of the future. In 2026, Alrai completed residencies at the Tracey Emin Foundation, Margate and the Pilchuck Glass School, Tacoma (founded by Dale Chihuly). Lures, a solo exhibition by Emii Alrai, runs @CarlFreedmanGallery from 27th September until 8th November 2026. Open from Wednesday - Sunday, 12-5 pm 🔗 Follow @EmiiAlrai #EmiiAlrai Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 5

Lewis Hammond

New Talk Art podcast episode! Robert meets artist Lewis Hammond to explore his first museum presentation in the UK, featuring a new body of paintings developed specifically for The Hepworth Wakefield. A graduate of the Royal Academy School in 2017, Hammond’s practice reflects a fascination with the materiality of oil paint and the evocative power of dark, earthy tones. His charged, fantastical paintings interweave mythological elements with contemporary themes and explore the interplay between personal relationships and global socio-political events. Drawing inspiration from Old Masters like Caravaggio, Velåzquez, and Goya, he creates haunting, statuesque figures that traverse boundaries between the individual and the archetypal. At The Hepworth Wakefield, Hammond explores the theme of home and what defines a place of belonging. He examines how various states of existence can strip us of this sense, leaving us to confront the dislocation and alienation that arise from being without a place to call home. Hammond’s paintings serve as love letters to both notions of home and to those who are without one. As an artist who has spent several years based in Berlin – and is now returning to the UK to establish his studio – this exhibition serves as both a homecoming and a reflection on themes of disconnection and ways of coming together. 🔗 Follow @LewisLHammond 🖼️ Lewis Hammond: Crystal in the Shade is open now at The @HepworthWakefield, running until 1st November 2026. Visit: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/lewis-hammond/ Special thanks to Rozsa and the team at @ArcadiaMissa, who represent Lewis in London. 📻 Listen to @TalkArt podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! Hosted by @RobertDiament. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 28, Episode 2

Raymond Antrobus

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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 27, Episode 3

Catherine Chinatree

Catherine Chinatree is a socially engaged multi-disciplinary artist based in Margate. She works in various contexts, including in the public realm. Her work focuses on the idea of shared “reality,” with an emphasis on identity, dualism, and cultural fluidity. This exploration is supported by research in anthropology, social surrealism, and human behaviour. Being of Welsh, Caribbean and Irish descent, she is deeply rooted in hybrid culture and seeks inspiration from the outside world of everyday life, our daily activities, symbolism, rituals, and the people she meets. Chinatree’s recent series of works invites the viewers on a visual journey through the realms of personal and subcultures exploring ideas of youth, class, memory and nostalgia, it highlights optimism & transformative moments that can alter society. Chinatree aims to evoke a palette that reflects the bass-heavy underground movement, artificial lighting and a sense of the unknown going hand in hand with the uncertainty of teenage years. At that time, pioneers of a new music genre looked to the future, with nods to outer space, and ideas of otherworldly beings, all of which are reflected in this work. The Crystallisation of the urban experience is layered and sampled, reconnecting it with the present. Working-class youth - black, brown and white united to dance is a testament to sound system culture and the creation of a new reality reflecting urban Britain, black roots & experimental sounds. With close ties to Leicester, Chinatree’s hometown, the work is supported by research and recordings from original attendees, event organisers, the venue’s history and future plans. Blending new footage, lived experiences and digital memories. Described by many as one of the darkest raves attended “Some shadow demon business”, the work illuminates its legacy. Catherine Chinatree studied at Wimbledon College of Arts, graduating with a Masters in Fine Art. She was awarded the Ferdynand Zweig Arts travel Scholarship award, and set up a collaborative engagement project between the UK and Havana, Cuba. She has been shortlisted for the Mercury Music Arts Prize, Nasty Woman NYC and The Griffin x Elephant New Graduates Arts Prize. She completed an artist residency with Elephant Magazine and has been sponsored by Liquitex Paints. She was commissioned by Artquest for their 20th anniversary, which was subsequently displayed at UAL in Holborn, London. Recently she was commissioned by Artist Globe for The World Reimagined project, which is on permanent show at the World Museum in Liverpool. She created a mural for Rise Up Residency Mural in Margate and as part of the Commemorative Installation Campaign, created a Tapestry for the UK Covid-19 Inquiry. She recently co created a billboard Artwork with Kent Refugee action network, and is a panelist for Artcry, supporting artists to make work in response to social and political events. Follow @CatherineChinatree on Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 1, Episode 9 Bonus

Against the Rules Presents: Cautionary Tales

A new show from Pushkin Industries: Cautionary Tales. We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable life lessons, but these Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups – and they are all true. Tim Harford (Financial Times, BBC, author of “Messy” and “The Undercover Economist”) brings you stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, daring heists and hilarious fiascos. They'll delight you, scare you, but also make you wiser. Featuring original music and an award-winning cast including Alan Cumming and Archie Panjabi (The Good Wife), Toby Stephens (Die Another Day), Russell Tovey (Quantico) – and Malcolm Gladwell. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Season 27, Episode 6

Tracey Emin

Season 27 @TalkArt continues with TRACEY EMIN. Hosted by @RobertDiament. An exclusive new interview recorded in Margate within Crossing Into Darkness, a group exhibition curated by Dame Tracey Emin including works by 21 international artists. Crossing Into Darkness brings together a group of artists whose works confront the darkness inherent in human experience, not as something to be feared but as a necessary threshold toward renewal. In times marked by upheaval and uncertainty, this journey feels both universal and deeply personal. Featuring works by David Altmejd, Georg Baselitz, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, Tracey Emin, Laura Footes, Antony Gormley, Francisco Goya, Gilbert & George, Celia Hempton, Anselm Kiefer, Joline Kwakkenbos, Mark Manders, Danielle Mckinney, Lindsey Mendick, Juanita McNeely, Edvard Munch, Hermann Nitsch, Janice Nowinski, Anna Pakosz and Johnnie Shand Kydd. The title of the show is very self explanatory, especially for the times we are living in. But even so we have always had our own journeys. And I feel that we have to cross into darkness to find light. I’d like this show to be very emotionally immersive and people to feel the strength and vibrations within the works. I want people to know that art isn’t just something that you look at. That it has a deeper purpose and can penetrate all souls. I love the idea of people coming to Margate on the greyest of winter days with gale force winds and crashing waves to make the pilgrimage to see the show. – Dame Tracey Emin Follow @TraceyEminStudio Special thanks to @CarlFreedmanGallery This powerful group show runs until Sunday 12th April at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate. Free entry, no booking required. Tracey Emin’s major solo exhibition A Second Life runs until Sunday 31st August 2026 at Tate Modern, London. Tickets available from Tate. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 27, Episode 1

Holly Blakey

Season 27 begins! This new season is hosted by Robert Diament. Robert meets Holly Blakey, one of the foremost choreographers of her generation and one of the few female choreographers in the UK creating large-scale work. Her practice attends to the honest entanglements of embodied vulnerability, grief, and joy, always rooted in an intersectional feminist frame. Her live performance work has been presented at major cultural institutions Southbank Centre, Hales Gallery and Théâtre National de Chaillot. As a director and choreographer, she has collaborated with music stars including Robyn (for her new Sexistential album), Rosalía, Harry Styles, Celeste, and Florence + The Machine, alongside visual artists Linder Sterling, Jeremy Deller and Tai Shani,and with fashion houses such as Vivienne Westwood, Burberry and Dior, and in films including Urchin (2025) directed by Harris Dickinson and Harvest directed by Athina Tsangari, interweaving live and commercial contexts, much of her practice often plays on the relationship between these distinct but not wholly separable worlds. We explore her 2026 collaboration with the Rambert dance company, as well as a new collaboration with artist Tai Shani, her 2025 ambitious double bill (for the Southbank Centre) titled Phantom, and A Wound with Teeth, which took her choreography to a new level of intensity, intimacy and international visibility. Holly Blakey’s new full-length work Lo will premiere in 2026. Both works develop Blakey’s fascination with social and folk dance forms, which began with her use of line dance in the Cowpuncher series and continues into Phantom and Lo with exploration of collective responsibility and euphoria through this form. For the first time, they both begin from a highly personal place and are developed through close collaboration with the dancers, drawing on their own experiences of grief and estrangement on the one hand, and pleasure and self-assertion on the other. A Wound with Teeth: How can loss of memory be a site of potential? In this excerpt from the new full-length work, Lo, Blakey uses her own experience of forgetting to create a work that questions our ability to remember, and also to imagine and invent, at the border of the rational and the irrational. In a world that is sometimes terrifying and perverse, fighting for our own survival also means creating stories, and our own monsters and beasts. Phantom: Carried by ten dancers engaged in a choreography on the verge of ritual, Holly Blakey explores with tenderness, honesty and strength a particularly painful episode of her personal journey: her miscarriage. In collaboration with Emma Chopova and Laura Lowena, creators of the Chopova Lowena brand and on a composition by the musician Gwilym Gold. We also learn about her work in film including Harvest (2024) directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, where the entire movie revolved around choregraphy and movement. Follow @HollyTBlakey and visit https://www.hollyblakey.co.uk/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 27, Episode 5

Collier Schorr

Talk Art Season 27 continues with COLLIER SCHORR. Over four decades, Collier Schorr has used photography to scrutinise the conditions and realities of contemporary subjectivity and what it means to visually represent a body - and a self. Motivated, in part, by an underlying search for alternatives to the desirous heterosexual gaze; her work has remained focused on several key themes including beauty, desire, selfhood, and masculinity and its discontents. Schorr’s early work was made in the 1980s and 1990s in New York and Germany, during the coalescence of postmodernism and identity politics. Her work from that period navigated the tension between documentary and fiction, and tested out the capacity of photography to unveil desire and repression, explore taboo identities, and highlight the contradictions inherent in subjectivity, especially in relation to gender norms. In more recent times, the artist has incorporated dance into her practice predominantly through adapting Chantal Ackerman’s film, ‘Je Tu Il Elle’ (1975), into a full-length filmed ballet performance featuring Schorr as Ackerman and a core group of professional dancers collaborating to create a multi-channel video installation. Schorr’s new exhibition in Paris is now open. ‘Problems and other stories’ brings together photographs, collages, notes, drawings and video produced over the past seven years that reconsider who an artwork is for, the multitude of places people belong and the way Schorr encounters different worlds. The title is drawn from John Updike’s collection of short stories written over the 1970s. For Schorr, the ‘problem’ opens out into a place of resistance and exploration, rather than a limitation or constraint. Runs until 4th April at Modern Art, Paris. Follow @CollierSchorrStudio Visit: https://www.modernart.net/en/exhibitions/collier-schorr-2026 Special thanks to @StuartShaveModernArt & @303Gallery Listen to Talk Art podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 27, Episode 16

Matthew Slotover (Live at Maison Estelle)

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!!!! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 19, Episode 1

Marina Abramović

It's the FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of TALK ART!!! And what better way to CELEBRATE than meeting one of our all-time favourite artists, the warrior of performance art, Marina Abramović. We meet in her hotel room in Green Park to discuss more than 5 DECADES of making art. An art world icon and a performance art pioneer – Marina Abramović has captivated audiences by pushing the limits of her body and mind, for the past 50 years. Marina Abramović Hon RA has earned worldwide acclaim as a performance artist. She has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work, subjecting herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death. In her early work Rhythm 0, Abramović invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose – famously resulting in a loaded gun being held to her head. Her later work The House with the Ocean View saw the artist live in a house constructed in a gallery for 12 days. Held in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the performance invited audiences to witness and share in the simple act of living. This major exhibition presents key moments from Abramović’s career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. Works such as The Artist is Present will be strikingly re-staged through archive footage while others will be reperformed by the next generation of performance artists, trained in the Marina Abramović method. Live performance art can be both startling and intimate. For Abramović it also has the power to be transformative. Experience this yourself through performances of Imponderabilia, Nude with Skeleton, Luminosity and The House with the Ocean View. Visit the Royal Academy's major retrospective of 50+ years of Marina's work until 1st January 2024. Buy tickets here: https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/marina-abramovic Follow @AbramovicInstitute on Instagram and @RoyalAcademyArts #MarinaAbramovićRA Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 11, Episode 4

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood

RADIOHEAD x Talk Art EXCLUSIVE EPISODE! Russell and Robert meet Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood at the Standard Hotel in London to discuss 30 years of friendship and their ongoing, longterm artistic collaboration. Initially meeting at Exeter University, Donwood has created the cover art for Radiohead’s ground-breaking albums since The Bends in 1996. Six of his paintings from the album sleeves were recently on display at Christie’s headquarters in London, alongside drawings, lyrics and digital art curated by the artists. We explore Radiohead's forthcoming release KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION: an upside-down digital/analogue universe created from original artwork by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood and sound design by Nigel Godrich to commemorate 21 years of Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums. KID A MNESIA EXHIBITION will be available beginning November 18th as a FREE download for PlayStation 5 (HERE), PC and Mac at EPIC GAMES STORE. A trailer is now live at: https://youtu.be/AOinMjQ9jo8 PLUS! Buy their new hardback book "Kid A Mnesia: A Book of Radiohead Artwork" at Waterstones (click here). A celebration of the process and artwork created for the Radiohead albums Kid A and Amnesiac. Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies. The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago - but so much remains the same. Follow @Radiohead, @ThomYorke, @StanleyDonwood on Instagram. Special thanks to @TheStandardLondon. This episode was recorded live at the Library Lounge Sound Studio in The Standard, London in October 2021. For images of all artworks discussed in this episode visit @TalkArt. Talk Art theme music by Jack Northover @JackNorthoverMusic courtesy of HowlTown.com We've just joined Twitter too @TalkArt. If you've enjoyed this episode PLEASE leave us your feedback and maybe 5 stars if we're worthy in the Apple Podcast store. For all requests, please email talkart@independenttalent.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 27, Episode 2

Georg Wilson

Talk Art season 27 continues with British painter GEORG WILSON!!! Hosted by Robert Diament. A spirit of place informs #GeorgWilson’s practice. Drawing inspiration from ancient English folklore, poetry and painting, the artist depicts bountiful landscapes that exceed the natural; devoid of human presence, they are instead inhabited by wildling creatures that live harmoniously with the land. Wilson’s world-building is enriched by her unique approach to texture and mark-making that unifies all surfaces, forms and beings. Painting with the seasons, Wilson’s work captures the cyclical rhythm of our existence, where birth meets growth, growth meets death and death awaits resurrection. Vibrant reds and bright greens shift to vivid yellows and deep browns as the seasons turn, and the land that was once overflowing with abundance is ready to lie dormant as the year comes to an end. This new series of paintings explores the folklore and historic uses of uncultivated poisonous plants, species such as henbane, thorn-apple and nightshade that grow abundantly across the UK, that have long but frequently forgotten histories in both folk and modern medicine. Drawing on historic texts about poisonous flora, Wilson highlights the gradual erosion of plant knowledge in Britain, a process that began as early as the fifteenth century, following the enclosure of common land and the subsequent rise of industrialisation. Against Nature, a solo exhibition of new works by Georg Wilson, runs at Pilar Corrias until 7th March on Savile Row, London, and Georg’s debut institutional exhibition The Earth Exhales runs until 1st March at Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh. 🔗 Follow @Georg.Kitty Thanks to @PilarCorriasGallery and @Jupiter.Artland 📻 Listen to Talk Art podcast, stream now: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 25, Episode 4

Joe Bradley

We meet artist Joe Bradley, on the eve of his new solo show of new paintings in London. Animal Family is Bradley’s second exhibition with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in May 2023. His celebrated debut at David Zwirner New York, Vom Abend, was presented in spring 2024. In November 2025, a major survey of Bradley’s works from the past ten years will open at Kunsthalle Krems, Austria. In these new paintings, figurative elements—which Bradley had begun to develop in previous works—emerge as central compositional structures. ‘I have never really felt comfortable calling myself an abstract painter,’ says Bradley. ‘There have always been flashes of figuration in my work. For whatever reason, at this moment, I feel ready to let it all come to the surface.’ 1A group of horizontal paintings feature black contour lines that serve as scaffoldings for swaths of colour, floral blots of brushy paint, and scraped and stippled textural patches, which coalesce into hulking, animal-like forms that fill the surface of the support. Bradley builds up these forms until they achieve a loose balance between assembled wholes and disparate parts, establishing a dynamic tension in the work between cohesion and dissolution. In one painting, pinkish triangles read like teeth extending along a pronounced blue-and-white snout. Lines, shapes, and blots of colour momentarily read like a tail or paw but just as quickly come to stand as distinct visual components. This figural mass rests against a black ground dotted with white, suggesting a dark, star-filled sky. While related to those paintings, several vertical canvases represent a notable evolution in Bradley’s work in which the human form becomes a broad organising principle. Shades of mid-century deconstructed figuration and other art-historical references and associations come through in these large, frontally oriented figures. Like his constant working and reworking of the formal and compositional elements in his paintings, such associations are part of Bradley’s open and deliberative method of painterly accumulation and adaptation, whereby he constantly reacts and responds to the process of creation itself. In some of these paintings, the figure is quite discernible. In others, the formal elements share only a general relationship to the human form with eyelike ovals or leglike protrusions suggesting bodily architectures. Like the animal associations in the horizontal canvases, these roughly human-scale paintings reinforce such bodily associations, reflecting Bradley’s sensitivity to the formal, compositional, and material qualities of his medium. Joe Bradley (b. 1975) is widely recognised for his expansive visual practice that encompasses painting as well as sculpture and drawing. Over the past twenty years, Bradley has constantly reinvented his approach to his art, creating a distinctive body of work that has ranged from modular, minimalist-style paintings and sculptures to rough-hewn, heavily worked surfaces featuring pictographic and abstract elements to refined and layered compositions that, as critic Roberta Smith notes, “balance gracefully between representation and abstraction.” Bradley was born in Kittery, Maine, and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He presently lives and works in New York. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Season 19, Episode 7

Andrew Cranston

We meet painter Andrew Cranston from his studio in Glasgow, Scotland to discuss his major new solo exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield. Andrew Cranston was born in Hawick in the Scottish Borders in 1969, and now lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland. Cranston studied at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen and then completed his postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art, where he was taught by Peter Doig and Adrian Berg. Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here? features 38 new and recent paintings that range from large-scale canvases to intimate works painted on old linen-bound book covers, comprising subjects that include still life, landscape, seascape, portraits, and interior scenes. This is the first public gallery to present a solo exhibition of his works. Engaging with the layered emotional quality and pathos of everyday life, as well as a strong sense of place, be it real or imagined, Cranston’s evocatively titled paintings contain compelling and intriguing narratives that have the collaged dream-like quality of recollection and what he calls ‘creative misremembering’. His formally inventive and highly intimate paintings find new ways to connect the personal and art historical past with the present through a gamut of visual and literary references and shared experiences. The paintings exploit what is perhaps only glanced existing in the periphery of vision and embody a sense of revelation, wonder and oddness in familiar situations. Connections and highly personal associations are deeply entwined in these works creating a rewarding and memorable experience. On display at The Hepworth Wakefield for the first time is one of Cranston’s most recent paintings entitled, A snake came to my coffee table on a hot, hot day to drink there (2023), which has been generously acquired for Wakefield’s art collection through the JW Anderson Collections Fund. It features what Cranston says is ‘an intrusion of something alien into the familiar, an unlikely presence and threat into the domestic’. A large number of other works in the exhibition, lent from private collections, have never been shown publicly before. Follow @Andrew.Cranston on Instagram and @HepworthWakefield. Andrew Cranston: What made you stop here? is now open and runs until 2nd June 2024 Exhibition entry is £13 / £11 / FREE for Members, Wakefield District residents and under 18s. Visit: https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/andrew-cranston/ Visit Andrew's galleries: Ingleby @InglebyGallery Modern Art @stuartshavemodernart and Karma @KarmaKarma9. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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