Talk Art

• Dominic Johnson & Jamal Butt on Hamad Butt (presented by Whitechapel Gallery and WePresent)

  WePresent x TalkArt special episode recorded live at Whitechapel Gallery. Recorded in front of a sold out live audience at @WhitechapelGallery we speak with @DominicJohnson and Jamal Butt to explore the current HAMAD BUTT exhibition: his life, art and legacy. ❤️ And published on @WePresent today to accompany our podcast is previously unseen artworks by Hamad Butt to feast your eyes on.Apprehensions is the first major survey of #HamadButt (b. 1962, Lahore, Pakistan; d. 1994, London, UK). One of the most innovative artists of his generation, Hamad Butt was a pioneer of intermedia art, bringing art into conversation with science, whilst also referencing his Queer and diasporic experiences. He offered a nuanced artistic response to the AIDS crisis in the UK, taking a conceptual rather than activist approach.Butt’s conceptually and technically ambitious works seamlessly interweave popular culture, science, alchemy, science fiction, and social and cultural concerns, as forms that are simultaneously poetic and provocative. They imagine sex and desire in a time of ‘plague’ as seductive yet frightening, intimate yet isolating, compelling yet dangerous – literally, in some cases, threatening to kill or injure.Born in Lahore, Pakistan, and raised in East London, Butt was British South Asian, Muslim by upbringing, and Queer. A contemporary of the Young British Artists, and their peer at Goldsmiths’ College, London, Butt was described by art critics as epitomising the new ‘hazardism’ in art of the 1990s, as his works often imply physical risk or endangerment.Follow: @WhitechapelGallery and @WePresent and check out WePresent today to see the series of never-before-seen artworks by Hamad, generously shared by Jamal. Visit: https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/hamad-butt-talkart-whitechapel-galleryThis episode is brought to you by our friends at WePresent, the Academy Award winning arts platform of WeTransfer. Collaborating with emerging young talent to renowned artists such as Marina Abramović, Riz Ahmed and Talk Art's own Russell Tovey, WePresent showcases the best in art, photography, film, music, literature and more, championing diversity in everything it does. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  --------  

  1:12:36

  --------

  1:12:36
• Harland Miller (Live at Nevill Holt Festival)

  Talk Art live! As part of the Nevill Holt Festival 2025, Talk Art hosted a live podcast recording with special guest Harland Miller. From the Nevill Holt Theatre, the world-renowned artist Miller joined Russell Tovey and Robert Diament in conversation to discuss his paintings and lifetime of art making.The Nevill Holt Festival is an annual celebration of arts and culture held in the Leicestershire countryside. Recorded on 12th June 2025, in front of a sold out audience.Artist and writer Harland Miller’s (born 1964) polychromatic and graphically vernacular paintings have garnered a devoted following. Infused with irreverent northern English humour and refined by his lifelong love of language, Miller’s work synthesises references from both high and low culture, spanning literature, music, self-help manuals and medieval iconography.Attesting to his deep-rooted engagement with the narrative, aural and typographical possibilities of language, Miller expressed, ‘People read before they can stop themselves, it’s automatic. Words offer a way into what you’re looking at, but no matter how integrated the text is, no matter how much you might think it’s synthesised into the painting, there is this imbalance in terms of how much the words are doing as words.’Follow: @NevillHoltFestivalVisit: https://nevillholtfestival.com/Learn more about Harland’s paintings: https://www.whitecube.com/artists/harland-millerFollow us on Instagram: @TalkArt📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  --------  

  1:01:41

  --------

  1:01:41
• Charlotte Keates

  We meet painter Charlotte Keates within her new installation ‘Inner Landscapes’. We discover the inspiration behind her epic new commission and explore her lifelong passion for drawing and painting.Keates’ work is inspired by interiors, travels, and architectural composition, in seamless communion with elements from the natural world. Trees push through flat concrete, while perspectives unfold in sheets of glass. These images of modernist leisure leave one with the feeling of having entered a space only recently vacated, dramatizing stillness without surrendering movement. These are environments that suggest, technically as well as artistically, indistinct human activity and motion.Her paintings gently weave together impressions of space and structure with subtle narratives, often emerging through the interplay of distinctive colours and carefully placed objects. These scenes do not depict real places but rather reflect traces of memory and quiet moments of perception. The spaces she constructs are imagined, yet the emotions they carry feel genuine and immediate. Without relying on overt storytelling, her works convey a calm presence and a quiet tension. As art historian Marco Livingstone observed, “the highlighted area acquires a hypnotic presence, as if spotlit into existence from within an atmosphere of ambiguous limitless space.”Keates was born in 1990 in Somerset, United Kingdom, and currently lives and works in Guernsey and London. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Falmouth University. She will show new work in a forthcoming group exhibition at the Ju Ming Museum in October 2025, Taipei, Taiwan.Follow @CharlotteKeates on Instagram.📻 Listen to Talk Art, stream now: @Spotify @ApplePodcasts Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  --------  

  50:11

  --------

  50:11
• Sean Scully

  We meet iconic painter Sean Scully on the eve of his 80th birthday at his studio in North London.Over the course of his 50-year career, Sean Scully has created an influential body of work that has marked the development of contemporary abstraction. Fusing the traditions of European painting with the distinct character of American abstraction, his work combines painterly drama with great visual delicacy. Often structured around stripes or layered blocks of colour arranged on horizontal and vertical axes, the layers in his paintings attain a fine balance between calm reflection and an intrinsic vitality. A forceful, physical artist, Scully creates intentionally compelling spaces, and his art is defined by acute concentration and care, involving constant negotiation between the monumental and the intimate. While giving primary importance to the physicality of the materials he employs, his art is commanded by the idea of humanity’s betterment, and at the heart of each rigorously composed work lies a near-infinite number of expressive, emotional fluctuations.During a trip to Morocco in 1969, Scully was strongly influenced by the rich colours of the region, which he translated into the broad horizontal stripes and deep earth tones that characterise his mature style. Following fellowships in 1972 and 1975 at Harvard University, he permanently relocated to New York. In the early 1980s, he made the first of several influential trips to Mexico, where he used watercolour for the first time in works inspired by the patterns of light and shadows he saw on the stacked stones of ancient walls. The experience had a decisive effect on him and prompted his decision to move from Minimalism to a more emotional and humanistic form of abstraction.Follow @SeanScullyStudio‘Sean Scully: Stories' at Bucerius Kunst Forum @BuceriusKunstForum, Hamburg, Germany is now open and runs until 30th November 2025.Thanks to Faye at Sean’s studio in Tappan, NY and to all of his galleries: @KerlinGallery @ThaddaeusRopac @Lisson_Gallery Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  --------  

  1:15:59

  --------

  1:15:59
• John Cameron Mitchell

  We meet John Cameron Mitchell, groundbreaking American actor, writer and director best known for creating, directing and starring in the Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), a film adaptation of the off-Broadway stage production he co-wrote with composer Stephen Trask. We discuss Claude Cahun, David Bowie and the power of art, ahead of his major live show this Tuesday 8th July at the Adelphi Theatre in London.In 1998, he co-created Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a genre-defying rock musical about a genderqueer East German singer navigating identity, love, and fame. The show became an off-Broadway sensation, earning a cult following. In 2001, Mitchell directed and reprised his role as Hedwig in the film adaptation, which won the Best Director Award and Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. The film’s success cemented his status as a visionary filmmaker.Following Hedwig, Mitchell directed Shortbus (2006), a provocative indie film exploring sexuality and relationships through an ensemble cast. In 2010, he directed Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, a deeply emotional drama about grief, which earned Kidman an Academy Award nomination.Marking 25 years since the London premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, theatrical icon John Cameron Mitchell presents a spectacular one-night-only celebration of his career and of the cult classic that rocked the foundations of music theatre forever. On Tuesday 8th July, the two time Tony Award-winning star of stage and screen will take to the West End stage for the very first time, joined by a host of incredible special guests including Boy George, Divina de Campo, Michael Cerveris, Nakhane, Martin Tomlinson and Mason Alexander Park.Expect the unexpected – from the glittering glam that rocked him as a boy living in early 70’s Scotland, to gut-punching ballads spanning Off-Broadway, Broadway, Hollywood and beyond — as Mitchell opens his heart and history to the city that first embraced Hedwig a quarter-century ago.Dress to Express as we celebrate the transformative power of music, love and radical self-expression. London, it’s been a long time coming, are we ready to ‘Pull that wig down off the shelf’?!Visit: https://lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/john-cameron-mitchell/Follow: @JohnCameronMitchell Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  --------  

  1:09:47

  --------

  1:09:47

More Arts podcasts

Trending Arts podcasts

About Talk Art