Talk Art

We meet artist Aubrey Levinthal from her studio in Philadelphia!!!

Softly-rendered portraits by Aubrey Levinthal explore contemporary psychology. In the works, figures go about familiar daily routines - eating, sleeping and daydreaming. The artist is inspired by a range of modernist painters, from portraitist Alice Neel to collagist Romare Bearden and modernist David Hockney. Her intentionally muted palette of predominantly grey tones is created by layering light washes of oil paint onto panels, and then scraping them down with a blade. This technique renders the skin of her characters as almost translucent - either emerging from, or dissolving into, their surfaces.

Much of Levinthal’s recent work relates to the COVID-19 pandemic. The loneliness and claustrophobia of social isolation is told through melancholic facial expressions and slumped postures. Recurring motifs, such as browning bananas and unfinished meals, allude to the passing of time, while irregularities in proportion and perspective engage the ways in which a home becomes strange when you spend all your time within it. These details embody the crux of Levinthal’s practice - how we inhabit spaces, and how they inhabit us.

Levinthal’s paintings focus on her own daily interiority and the quotidian, mostly situated in the home. More recently, Levinthal reflects on ones’ relationship to the outside world and moves the psychology away from the isolated self to a more unknown drifting space. The paintings are infused with more daylight, colour has become brighter, and the figures are larger. Shared environments, such as neighborhood coffee shops, yoga studios, hospitals, hotels and pools are fraught with nuanced tension and personal connection. Levinthal heightens the psychological space between observing and knowing. The paintings explore a sense of insecurity, self-reflection and curiosity in collective spaces. In Bagel Line (2022), a group of friends situated outside a bagel shop huddle closely together in winter coats. Their expressions range from anxious to annoyed to eager highlighting ones’ own duality. The artist projects an interior life onto these strangers: a barista, a person standing in line, a blue-haired teenager at a take-out counter, or a shopper in a clothing store. Within the paintings, objects take on abstract shapes and act as barriers. In Crab Shack (2022), two brown paper bags give the impression of a wall in front of a pensive young woman.

Levinthal draws inspiration from the Renassiance period to Modernists such as, Mary Fedden (1915-2012), Milton Avery (1885-1965) and Fairfield Porter (1907-1975). Levinthal’s tenderly observed paintings illuminate the strangeness of daily interiority and introspection. In Yoga Mat (2022), the viewer is confronted with a lone woman in a yoga pose. The figure also doubles as an ancient sculpture, most evident in the shapes used and the manner in which the feet are depicted, as if resembling stone. This painting was directly inspired by the Egyptian sculpture titled Statue of Sitepehu (1479-1458 BCE), which is part of the permanent collection at the Penn Museum, Philadelphia.

The artist lives and works in Philadelphia, PA and is represented by Monya Rowe Gallery, NY.

Follow @AubreyLevinthal on Instagram and their official website https://aubreylevinthal.com/

Follow their gallery: @Monya_Rowe_Gallery

Aubrey's new work is included in group show 'Close' at GRIMM Gallery curated by Talk Art co-host Russell Tovey from 4th March - 6th April, 2023 2 Bourdon Street, London (UK).

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New Talk Art! We meet leading artist Sonia Boyce. Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. Last month, she became the first Black female artist to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest international art exhibition. The work she presented in the British Pavilion won the prestigious prize, the Golden Lion. Six years before, she had been the first Black British woman to get elected to the Royal Academy of Arts.

The British Council presents Feeling Her Way by Sonia Boyce at the British Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia, running from 23 April – 27 November 2022. Boyce’s powerful exhibition explores the potential of collaborative play as a route to innovation. The installation brings together video works featuring five Black* female musicians (Poppy Ajudha, Jacqui Dankworth MBE, Sofia Jernberg, Tanita Tikaram and composer Errollyn Wallen CBE) who were invited to improvise, interact and play with their voices. The video works take centre stage among Boyce’s signature tessellating wallpapers and golden geometric structures, and the Pavilion’s rooms are filled with sounds – sometimes harmonious, sometimes clashing – embodying feelings of freedom, power and vulnerability.

This new commission expands on Boyce’s Devotional Collection, built over more than two decades and spanning more than three centuries, which honours the substantial contribution of Black British female musicians to transnational culture.

Artist and academic Sonia Boyce OBE RA (b. London, 1962) came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement of that time with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. In 1987, she became one of the youngest artists of her generation to have her artwork acquired by Tate and the first Black-British female artist to enter the collection. Since the 1990s Boyce’s practice has taken a significant multi-media and improvisational turn by bringing people together in a dynamic, social practice that encourages others to speak, sing or move in relation to the past and the present. Incorporating film, photography, print and sound in multi-media installations, Boyce’s practice is fundamentally collaborative and inclusive, fostering a participatory approach that questions artistic authorship and cultural difference. At the heart of her work are questions about the production and reception of unexpected gestures, with an underlying interest in the intersection of personal and political subjectivities.

Follow @SoniaBoyceArtist and @SimonLeeGallery. Visit https://www.simonleegallery.com/artists/277-sonia-boyce/ and https://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/feeling-her-way

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Talk Art season 13 continues with an art icon!!! We meet leading artist Tracey Emin to discuss her return to her hometown of Margate, her new art school, her current solo exhibition in the town's Carl Freedman Gallery as well as a further new solo show in Edinburgh at Jupiter Artland.

'A Journey To Death' is a comprehensive solo exhibition of new prints, large-scale monotypes and bronze sculptures. The show runs until 19th June 2022 and has been widely critically acclaimed. Free entry, and we strongly recommend visiting Margate for this extraordinary exhibition of new works.

Tracey Emin’s first Scottish show since 2008, 'I Lay Here For You' opens on 28th May and runs until 2nd October. It offers an intimate encounter with love and hope set against the domestic architecture and informal woodland of Jupiter Artland. Imbued with connotations of both warmth and vulnerability, resonating with Tracey Emin’s belief of the ‘personal as political’ the exhibition will feature brand new work by the artist reflecting on the possibility of love after hardship.

Tracey Emin’s participation in Jupiter Artland’s 2022 season begins with the unveiling I Lay Here For You, a six metre bronze sited personally by the artist in an old-growth beech grove. Larger than life, powerful and at ease, the sculpture presents a radically different view of woman’s place in nature, as well as creating a dialogue with the new work presented by the artist across Jupiter’s indoor gallery spaces.

Tracey Emin, CBE, RA is a British artist known for her autobiographical and confessional artwork. Emin represented Great Britain at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007 and was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011. She was awarded the honour of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts in 2012. Tracey Emin’s art is one of disclosure, using her life events as inspiration for works ranging from painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture.

Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures and successes in candid and, at times, excoriating work that is frequently both tragic and humorous. In 2020, a major solo exhibition entitled The Loneliness of the Soul, opened at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibition then toured to the new Munch Museum, Oslo in Summer 2021 to critical acclaim. This summer, Emin will unveil her largest artwork to date, The Mother, a permanent public commission for Oslo’s Museum Island. I Lay Here for You at Jupiter Artland will be Tracey Emin’s first solo exhibition in Scotland since her 2008 major retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.

Tracey Emin was born in 1963 in London. She currently lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK.

Visit: www.carlfreedman.com and www.jupiterartland.org

Follow on Instagram: @TraceyEminStudio, @CarlFreedmanGallery, @JupiterArtland

Thanks for listening!!!

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We meet leading artist RENE MATIĆ to discuss current solo exhibition ‘A Girl For The Living Room’ at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol. This episode includes a special moment with living legend, and focus of Rene’s new show, TRAVIS ALABANZA. We also explore earlier works exhibited at South London Gallery and their solo show at Quench Gallery, Margate. Plus we discuss a series of fifteen photographs that the Tate museum have acquired for their permanent collection - currently on display at Tate Britain's rehang of Modern and Contemporary British Art.

Rene Matić (b. 1997, Peterborough, UK) is a London-based artist and writer whose practice spans across photography, film, and sculpture, converging in a meeting place they describe as "rude(ness)" - an evidencing and honouring of the in-between. Matić draws inspiration from dance and music movements such as Northern soul, Ska, and 2-Tone as a tool to delve into the complex relationship between West Indian and white working-class culture in Britain, whilst privileging queer/ing intimacies, partnerships and pleasure as modes of survival.

In 2022 Martin Parr Foundation commissioned photographic artist Rene Matić to develop a new body of work in Bristol. Rene has created an intimate portrait of their friend Travis Alabanza, a Bristol born and based writer, performer and theatre maker. This new work comprises a mix of portraits alongside diaristic still lifes that document Rene and Travis’s developing relationship as it became “lit by a table lamp instead of a disco ball.”

‘We were excited to discover Rene’s work and started to think about the idea of Rene shooting a project in Bristol and what this might look like. In 2022 we gave them a carte blanche to pursue any subject of their choice for this commission, so long as there was a Bristol connection. In ‘a girl for the living room’ Rene has found a way of capturing and expressing their relationship with Travis Alabanza, a Bristol-born and based artist and performer.’ – Martin Parr

Follow @Rene.Matic on Instagram and their gallery @ArcadiaMissa, 35 Duke Street, London: https://arcadiamissa.com/rene-matic/

A GIRL FOR THE LIVING ROOM BY RENE MATIĆ runs until 17th September 2023 in Bristol.

Visit: @MartinParrFdn and https://www.martinparrfoundation.org/exhibitions/a-girl-for-the-living-room/

Thanks for listening!!!

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We meet SANDRA BERNHARD, performer, actress, singer, comedian, author and ICON!!!! We discover the influence of her artist mother, growing up in Flint Michigan and meeting/collaborating with artists as wide-ranging as Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, John Boskovich, Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, and Keith Haring and her deep admiration for the work of Cindy Sherman. We also learn about her passion for expressing herself via fashion, walking the runway for Chanel and Comme des Garçons, and her iconic performances on Late Night with David Letterman in the 80s and 90s.

Bernhard is currently starring (alongside our very own Russell Tovey) in the new season of American Horror Story: NYC, having previously made a special guest appearance on AHS: Apocalypse. Her successful, decades long television career also saw her as a series regular in the immensely popular FX Television/Ryan Murphy show POSE as brassy but caring Nurse Judy Kubrack, who works with H.I.V. / AIDS patients. She is also currently in her fifth year hosting her weekly radio show Sandyland on Sirius XM's Radio Andy channel 102, for which she won a broadcasting Gracie Award.

She first gained attention in the late 1970s with her stand-up comedy, where she often critiqued celebrity culture and political figures. A pioneer of the one-woman show, Bernhard brings a completely unique and raucous mix of cabaret, stand-up, rock-n-roll, and social commentary to her live stage performances. Just last year she celebrated the 10 year anniversary of her iconic annual holiday shows at Joe's Pub in New York City, while she also continues to tour throughout the country and overseas. Extremely notable past live stage shows, which she has performed both on and off-Broadway, include Without You I'm Nothing, I'm Still Here, Dammit, Everything Bad and Beautiful, and #blessed.

Bernhard's film credits include The King of Comedy, for which she was awarded Best Supporting Actress by the National Society of Film Critics, Track 29, Hudson Hawk, Dinner Rush, and the live performance film Without You I'm Nothing. Past television credits include Two Broke Girls, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, Difficult People, You're the Worst, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Will &Grace, The Sopranos, The Larry Sanders Show and Roseanne. Music albums include I'm Your Woman (Polygram, 1986), Excuses for Bad Behavior (Epic, 1994) and the world music album Whatever It Takes (Mi5, 2009). She has written three books: May I Kiss You on the Lips, Miss Sandra?, Confessions of a Pretty Lady, Love, Love and Love.

Follow: @SandraGBernhard on Instagram. Visit her official website: https://www.sandrabernhard.com/

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