Show Notes
Pio Abad talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Abad explores objects and images that have personal resonance and political potency. His primary medium is installations comprising multiple materials, forms and methods, from fine pen drawings and textiles to photography and text. The foundation of his work is an engagement with the history and present of his homeland, the Philippines, where he was born in 1983, and where his parents were involved in the struggle against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s and 1980s. The conditions of that brutal regime, its propaganda and visual excess, the international power structures of which it was part, and its legacies today have been fundamental to his practice. In recent years, he has expanded his work to explore broader themes relating to collections of art and artefacts, and the histories of violence, theft and exploitation that underpin them.
He discusses his interest in the seductive power of objects in telling complex stories and reflects on the importance of writing and drawing to his work, how his large-scale forensic drawings are a means of “excessively remembering” to counter forgotten histories, and about honouring unnamed artists from non-Western cultures through painstaking depicting their works. He recalls his memories of his aunt, the artist Pacita Abad, and her formative effect on his own artistic trajectory, as well as his position as curator of her estate. He reflects on the importance of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, especially in his balance between weighty subject matter and formal economy, the drawings of Henri Michaux and Egon Schiele, and the writers Jorge Luis Borges, Hisham Matar and Teju Cole. He gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Look out for a video version of this interview on the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects.
Pio Abad, In Minor Keys: 61st Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, until 22 November. Watch the full-length video version of this interview on the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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George Shaw talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Shaw, who was born in 1966 in Coventry, UK, makes paintings and drawings that are a response to a particular place but also a deeply personal engagement with memory. Although his paintings depict identifiable locations within Tile Hill, the postwar housing estate on which he grew up in the suburbs of Coventry in England’s Midlands region—from the houses and garages on the estate, to playing fields, community centres, pubs and shops and the woods beyond—they are steeped in recollection, potent with signs of human presence, including Shaw’s, but barely ever occupied by people, and even then only by the artist. As a result, these paintings have a curious relationship with time, a factor only enhanced by his use of his own photographs as the source image for his compositions. Tile Hill is the setting in which his identity was formed as a young person, in which he became himself, and the hundreds of paintings he has made of it since follow its changing face, moments of aging, destruction, dereliction and renewal. Over time, this lifelong magnum opus has come to tell a multi-volume story of Shaw’s life—a multifaceted self-portrait. He reflects on this idea of reflecting a person or body through place, with reference to one of his more enduring heroes, James Joyce. He also discusses the symbiosis of his subject matter and his use of enamel paint and the relationship between his photographs of Tile Hill and the paintings he makes from them. He reflects on the importance of music and the social and political culture around it in defining his identity and its legacy in his life and work today. He discusses the role of imagination in the extraordinary output of William Blake, his early response to fantasy artists like Chris Fosse, and a huge wealth of historic painters that have been important to him since, from John Everett Millais to John Constable, Mike Kelley, Titian and Rembrandt. He also reflects on the role of his father’s “curriculum” of films that he watched from his youth onwards, and its significance in relation to his paintings. Plus, he gives insight into his studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Gabriel Orozco talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. You can also watch this conversation as a video on the YouTube channels of The Art Newspaper and Bloomberg Connects.
Cecilia Vicuña talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Born in 1948 in Santiago, Chile, Vicuña is both a poet and a visual artist and intertwines these two artforms to produce work across a range of media. Among much else, she has a singular narrative painting style, makes huge suspended installations using found materials and textiles, stages performances and makes ephemeral sculptures. From the start, she has been deeply embedded in politics and social concerns, including human rights abuses in Chile, conflicts in different parts of the world, Indigenous culture and colonialism, and the climate catastrophe. Her work is underpinned by a profound engagement with different forms of Indigenous language allied to a response to prominent developments in Modern and contemporary art, from Surrealism to Postminimalism and Conceptualism. She discusses the symbiosis of word and image in her work, the wordplay that underpins some of her key concepts and strands of work, and how art-making is a full-body experience. She reflects on her early fascination with pre-Renaissance painting, the influence of her aunt, the artist Rosa Vicuña, on her experience of pre-Columbian art and languages, her admiration of Doris Salcedo, and the visceral shock of seeing medieval sheela na gig sculptures in Ireland. Plus, she gives insight into studio life and daily rituals and answers our ultimate question: what is art for?
Sunil Gupta talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to film-makers, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Across more than half a century Gupta has explored queer identity, migration and race through photography. Born in New Delhi in 1953, but based in Canada and the UK as well as India since he became an artist, he has reflected on his personal background and autobiography to explore a wealth of social and political themes, from queer desire and relationships, to the social and geographical environments in which LGBTQ life and love happens, to political violence and the oppression of queer people, and the HIV/Aids crisis and its legacy. He has said that he “couldn’t separate the living from the art-making”. Working in series that often have novel conceptual structures and explore different modes of presentation and expression in the photographic space, Gupta is both an artist and activist, with a long-held conviction to represent his own experience and that of people and communities like him in cultural fields where they have largely been absent. In this podcast, he reflects on his discovery of photography and his early experiments, the politics around photographic depiction and his alignment with community and political subjects versus a more commercial or reportage approach. He discusses great photographers including George Platt Lynes, Duane Michals and Paul Strand, expresses his admiration for Shilpa Gupta, his early passion for the tragicomedy of Bollywood and his enjoyment of writers including Flannery O’Connor, and his response to Chris Marker’s La Jétee in his work Sun City. Plus, he gives insight into his life in the studio, as well as answering our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Richard Tuttle talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Tuttle, who was born in 1941 in Rahway, New Jersey and grew up in nearby Roselle, lives today in New York, Abiquiú, New Mexico, and Mount Desert, Maine. He combines elements of drawing, painting, sculpture, artist books, printmaking and textiles, often arranged in lyrical installations, yet does not settle in any one discipline or medium. Pushing and pulling between different forms and modes, and between two and three dimensions, he has developed a singular response to architecture, which is often activated in unexpected ways by the placement of the objects he makes and their arrangement in spatial compositions. And while the meaning of the works is often as elusive as their form, they offer poetic enticement for their audience through a delight in broad and often humble materiality and a fertile relationship with different forms of language. Tuttle is seen as a leading figure in Post-Minimalism and certainly contributed to the liberating approach to form, matter and content unleashed by that tendency from the 1960s. But any attempt to neatly categorise his output is profoundly inadequate and limiting. Experiencing his exhibitions, one feels part of a philosophical response to the world, a questioning of what it is to inhabit it and what it might mean to make art in it. As Richard himself said in 1975, “if the artist does a piece of real work and we see it, it’s as though we ourselves are doing it”.