Talk Art

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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!!!!…

Robert meets Luis Felber, a London based South-American multi-instrumentalist best known as Attawalpa. His meticulous production, melodies and honest lyrics evoke the future as much as the past. We explore his love of art and growing up with an artist mother Alma Laura de Felber, a prominent Peruvian painter and artist. The Lima-born painter makes colorful, emotionally resonant oil paintings often explore themes of identity, the feminine, and human connection. Born in Winchester, England, Felber spent his earliest years in Peru and Chile before moving back to Britain at age 7. At 17, he skipped university and began pursuing a career in music, playing guitar with several different bands and co-founding influential club night and record label Young Turks. Felber actively incorporates his creative roots into his projects. His mother's art has been featured in his work, and he frequently collaborates with his wife, Lena Dunham including on the soundtrack for her film Catherine Called Birdy and by co-creating and…

Robert meets Belfast-born Kathryn Ferguson, an Emmy and BAFTA nominated, BIFA and IFTA winning director whose innovative and boundary-pushing documentary work has screened globally. We explore art as activism and how film has the power to reveal, and amplify, untold stories. Kathryn studied at Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art, and in 2022 was awarded the inaugural BFI & Chanel Award for Creative Audacity. In 2018, Kathryn's short documentary Taking the Waters about Margate’s open water swimming premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest, and was long-listed for a BAFTA. Then, in 2021, Kathryn worked with Passion Pictures on the short Space to Be for The Guardian's acclaimed documentary series. After a decade of short-form work centred on identity, gender politics, and community, Kathryn recently completed her debut feature documentary Nothing Compares - which takes as its subject Sinéad O'Connor's artistry and activism. The film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 then toured the international…

Robert meets Mariane Ibrahim, leading gallerist and curator, whose mission is dedicated to the elevation and advocacy of diverse global artistic practices, with a particular spotlight on Africa and the diaspora. We explore her galleries in three cities: Mexico City, Paris and Chicago, and the artists she has championed over the past 15 years. Currently representing artists from across the world, Ibrrahim is driven towards expanding the confines of the creative landscape. Ibrahim’s program compels her to act as something of an ambassador for nuance and complexity in an art world still prone to generalisation. While several of the emerging artists she represents hail from African countries or are members of the African diaspora, Ibrahim emphasises that they – and by extension, her gallery – have much more to offer than simplistic regional or heritage based labels could ever contain. Mariane Ibrahim Gallery is a highly influential contemporary art gallery that focuses on supporting and championing artists from…

Robert meets legendary photographer ANTON CORBIJN to discuss his major retrospective opening this weekend in Berlin at Fotografiska museum. The story of Anton Corbijn begins in the quiet corners of a small Dutch island, where he grew up as the son of a vicar. For a young Corbijn, music was an escape, a passion that consumed him. His camera soon became both a tool and a companion, a way to channel his fascination with music and, perhaps more importantly, a means to navigate his own shyness. When Corbijn moved to London in 1979, the city was electric with the energy of bands like The Clash, The Jam, and Joy Division. Within ten days of arriving in England, he managed to photograph Joy Division claiming he was on assignment for a major Dutch magazine, even though he hadn’t been officially commissioned. Now, having celebrated his 70th birthday last year, Corbijn looks back on over five decades of work that spans photography, music videos, and film. Corbijn, Anton celebrates his 50-year career and revisits his…

Robert meets MEEK, an emerging singer-songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist whose new EP Fabulous has become a favourite of the art world, and global queer community, since debuting in February. We discuss how art has inspired her creativity and life, including the work of Magritte, Tracey Emin, Georgia O’Keefe and her passion for the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A and visiting museums in London. We explore her devotion to artistry within her music, visuals and costumes including recent collaborations with filmmaker Sophie Muller and performance artist Theo Adams on her debut music videos, and sold out live shows at the Garage and SXSW. MEEK is not a work in progress. She is fully formed, earned her stripes, comes from nothing, nepo-baby baiting execution of timeless pop brilliance. While sounding directly descended from the DNA of famed countercultural misfits and bona fide pop aces, all strewn across the decades, her music is a no messing, straight shoot for the top. Georgia Meek understands…

Robert meets painter David Dawson to discuss his new large scale landscape paintings, part of an ongoing body of work created en plein air in the artist's county of Montgomeryshire, Mid Wales. From April 25 – October 11, ‘Land, Sky, Light’ is a solo exhibition at Gainsborough’s House featuring fifteen of David Dawson’s (b. 1960) recent large-scale paintings of his native Welsh countryside. Having left Wales for London where he was a student at the Chelsea School of Art and later becoming a model and assistant to Lucian Freud, these paintings represent an artist returning to their childhood home to explore the nature and solitude of its surroundings. The canvases possess a deeply autobiographical nature, being representative of Dawson's formative childhood years in the country side, and his continued experiences of solitude and connection. Initially painted outdoors during each season of the year, the artist continues to work on them in his London studio to then complete them back in the countryside. About…

Robert meets Nick Willing at the studio of his mother Paula Rego (1935–2022) to discuss a major exhibition of drawings and works on paper by Rego, opening this week at Victoria Miro in London. The most comprehensive exhibition of Rego’s drawings to date, Story Line features works from the 1950s until the artist’s death, shining new light on Rego’s evolving use of line in media from pen and ink to pastel, conté, charcoal and pencil, and how it was driven by her unique approach to storytelling throughout her life. The exhibition is accompanied by a new book written by the artist’s son, Nick Willing. ‘When you write your story… invention comes when you do a drawing. As you are drawing something, it very often turns into something else, and you can go with it. It develops in a completely different way, it’s organic and it’s done with the hand. The hand makes it change and so on.’ – Paula Rego, The White Review, 2011 Paula Rego considered herself first and foremost a ‘drawrer’ (her word). From political protest…

@TalkArt continues with an in-depth interview on the work of GWEN JOHN with curator @Lucy.C.Wood to explore a major exhibition Gwen John: Strange Beauties at the National Museum Cardiff. Hosted by @RobertDiament. This once-in-a-generation exhibition brings together over 200 oil paintings, drawings and watercolours from public and private collections across the world with rarely seen works on paper from the artist’s studio collection to celebrate her 150th birthday. Born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, in 1876, Gwen John trained at the Slade School of Art in London and was one of the first British women to receive a formal art education. She later moved to Paris, where she became part of its vibrant artistic community, forging an independent path in a male-dominated art world. Gwen John is one of Wales' most extraordinary artists. She saw the world differently — quietly, attentively, and with extraordinary depth. That difference shaped everything: her subjects, her method, her colours, her words, her work.…

Robert meets Sir Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro gallery in London to explore 4 decades of making art. We also meet Julien’s long term collaborator Mark Nash to explore his major five-screen film installation All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, 2025 and new photographic works. All That Changes You. Metamorphosis is a vivid, sweeping, visual poem about change, what it means to transform, to adapt and to survive. Commissioned to celebrate 500 years of Palazzo Te, Mantua, Italy (where it is currently on view) and exhibited here for the first time as a five-screen installation, Julien’s latest work moves between science fiction, philosophy, ecology and art, imagining new forms of life and identity beyond the human. All That Changes You. Metamorphosis draws inspiration from thinkers who explore how transformation shapes who we are and how we live, including writers Octavia Butler, Naomi Mitchison, Ursula K. Le Guin and philosopher Donna Haraway. Their ideas weave through the film’s layered images and lyrical…

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…

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…

Talk Art Season 27 continues with sculptor Nicolas Deshayes whose works explore the form and materiality of bodies and what happens below their surfaces. Hosted by Robert Diament. Process, or processing, is the impetus for Deshayes’ sculptures, which manage to convey states of liquid, hardness, hot, cold, and mechanically produced objects and systems. Vital processes of ingestion, and circulation, are evoked by elegantly utilitarian forms. Deshayes’ surfaces are consistently impermeable – recalling the architecture of public amenities. Using predominantly casting methods with bronze, iron, or earthenware, Deshayes tends to seek out artisans and factories who specialise in techniques of production; their historical lineages and geographical particularities converging within his conceptualisation of the work as it develops. Extreme heat is used in these casting processes commonly and the materials rely on changes in temperature in order to come alive. But molten metal rapidly hardens into a solid form, its…

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…

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,…

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…

It’s the Talk Art Christmas special! We meet Alison Goldfrapp, the creative force behind some of the most captivating music of the past two and a half decades!!! We celebrate Alison’s new reinterpretation of David Bowie’s Heroes which she has just released with Lorne Balfe for The War Between The Land and The Sea soundtrack, the new TV series starting our very own Russell Tovey. Having set a towering bar for synth-pop in the 21st century, Alison Goldfrapp– the magnetic British songwriter, vocalist, performer & producer – is recognised for approaching each iteration of her stellar career from an innovative new position. With the release of Alison's debut solo album The Love Invention — an electrifying dance-pop suite — her multi-faceted musicianship reaches a new peak. “It feels like a new time, and a new era,” Alison says decisively. The momentum towards her journey into solo music was solidified back in 2021, when she was collabored with Röyksopp on the shimmering track “Impossible”. This led to Alison…

Russell & Robert meet Barbara Dawson for a behind the scenes visit to Francis Bacon’s Studio, installed in Dublin’s iconic Hugh Lane Gallery. The gallery is currently closed to the public for major renovations so we thought it would be a great opportunity to bring the studio and galleries to life with this exclusive audio tour, while closed to public. A visit to Francis Bacon’s Studio at Hugh Lane Gallery gives a unique opportunity to experience the working process of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. Born in Dublin in 1909, Bacon grew up in county Kildare. He left home at the age of sixteen and eventually settled in London where he established himself as one of the leading international artists of his generation. Bacon moved into 7 Reece Mews, London, in 1961 where he lived and worked until his death in 1992 (in Madrid). We also loved seeing photographer Perry Ogden's iconic documentation of artist Francis Bacon's chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, London. In 1998, director Barbara Dawson…

We are delighted to announce the first ever Irish episode of Russell Tovey and Robert Diament’s acclaimed Talk Art podcast, recorded live at the National Gallery of Ireland Lecture Theatre on Saturday November 8th for Dublin Gallery Weekend 2025. Isabel Nolan, Ireland’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale, has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs illuminated with striking cosmic imagery, to…

This episode is a special partnership with BOSS. Special episode recorded during Miami Basel week, December 2025. #AD Russell & Robert catch up with Marco Falcioni, Creative Director of HUGO BOSS. We discuss the Art Basel Awards which BOSS have been partnering with. The BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement was presented at Art Basel Miami Beach to Meriam Bennani for her work entitled “For My Best Family.” The BOSS AWARD for Outstanding Achievement celebrates work that embodies the BOSS values of boldness, personal authenticity, ambition, and responsibility. It honors a singular work, produced within the last 18 months, that has catalyzed change at the intersection of art, technological innovation, social dialogue, and identity. Moroccan-born and New York-based, Meriam Bennani uses a broad range of artistic mediums that include video, sound, animation, sculpture as well as large-scale installations, among others. She’s known for mixing humor, pop-cultural aesthetics and digital language in her storytelling…

We meet curator Kate Bryan and artist David Shrigley to explore their new book How To Art. Recorded live in London, in front of a sold out audience. What is art, where do I find it, and once I’m in front of it, what am I supposed to think about it? Kate Bryan is a self-confessed art addict who has worked with art for over twenty years. But before she studied art history at university, she’d visited a gallery just twice in her life and had no idea she was entering an elitist world. Now, she’s on a mission to help everybody come to art. Like playing or listening to music, or cooking and eating great food, reading or watching films, making art or looking at other people’s deserves to be an enriching part of all our lives. How to Art provides a nifty way to ingest art on your own terms. From where it is to what it is, to tips on how to actually enjoy famous artworks like the Mona Lisa, to how to own art and make art at home, to vital advice for making a career as an artist and even how to make your dog more…

#AD - Cork Street Galleries special episode! We meet art critic Louisa Buck to explore 100 years of Cork Street! Cork Street Galleries this year celebrates its centenary as a pioneering force in the art world, with 2025 marking 100 years as the iconic London art destination. A specially curated programme honours its rich legacy as the historic and enduring home of modern and contemporary art in London. In tribute to the centennial year, a first-of-its-kind initiative, a group exhibition entitled Fear Gives Wings to Courage was staged across all 15 galleries on Cork Street in the Summer, with each gallery presenting a response to a central theme conceived by Tarini Malik, curator of modern and contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Fear Gives Wings to Courage has been commissioned in three parts as a response to the curatorial theme conceived by Malik. This is comprised of Fear Gives Wings to Courage Part I; a new edition of the Cork Street Galleries Banners Commission forming an outdoor…

New @TalkArt podcast episode! We meet legendary artist, potter and author @EdmunddeWaal at his studio in South London!! We explore more than 40 years of making pots, and learn about the first major exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), considered one of the greatest masters of 20th-century ceramic art. This epic new show curated by #EdmunddeWaal (b.1964, Nottingham) is now open at the Hepworth Wakefield, including a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence. Salto was a radical polymathic figure who crossed boundaries from one discipline to another, producing an extraordinary body of ceramic work alongside paintings, wood- cuts, drawings, book illustration and textiles. Salto is internationally renowned for his highly individual and expressive stoneware inspired by organic forms, characterised by budding, sprouting and fluted surface textures that appear to ripple and burst with life. In his own visual art and literary works, Edmund de Waal uses…

We meet gallerist Jeffrey Fraenkel to discuss the work of Diane Arbus, recorded live in London at David Zwirner. — Sanctum Sanctorum: a sacred room or inner chamber; a place of inviolable privacy Diane Arbus: Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of forty-five photographs made in private places across New York, New Jersey, California, and London between 1961 and 1971, is now open at David Zwirner, London until 20 December 2025, before travelling to Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco in spring 2026. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive monograph reproducing all works in the exhibition. Through her singular combination of intelligence, charisma, intuition, and courage, Diane Arbus was frequently invited into homes and other private realms seldom seen by strangers. Though made in intimate settings, her photographs evidence no sense of intrusion or trespass. Instead, they reveal an unspoken exchange between photographer and subject, a moment of recognition in which confidences emerge freely and without…

Russell and Robert meet leading artist Chantal Joffe in her East London studio. We explore I Remember, Chantal Joffe’s fourteenth solo exhibition for Victoria Miro gallery. I Remember takes its title from Joe Brainard’s iconic memoir and is inspired by the late American writer’s poetic prompts that evoke the atmosphere and time of memories. Joffe’s paintings attempt to capture the fleeting yet enduring nature of memory and how it shapes our sense of self. This evocative new series of large-scale paintings explores themes of memory, nostalgia and personal history to offer a reflective and deeply personal journey into the artist’s childhood and family life. The exhibition is accompanied by a new text, entitled Time Transmission, by Olivia Laing. ‘Joe Brainard’s book always makes me list for myself the things I remember and the atmosphere and time that they conjure. These paintings are a sort of memoir of my childhood and of my family, an attempt at a kind of time travel. When I am making them, it’s almost as…

We meet Ginny and Hartley Neel, Executive Directors of the Estate of Alice Neel, and the artist’s daughter-in-law and son. We explore her current exhibition in Belgium at Xavier Hufkens. Alice Neel is widely recognised as one of the great American painters of the twentieth century. Her success, however, has largely been posthumous. In the past decade, interest in her work has grown exponentially, with a series of landmark exhibitions and art historical studies firmly cementing her position on the international stage. Neel’s oeuvre is fascinating on two counts: not only was she an incredibly gifted painter, but also an astute and idiosyncratic chronicler of some of the most tumultuous decades in American history. While she also painted landscapes and still lifes, Neel is best known as a painter of people. Her sitters included artists, writers, intellectuals and family members, as well as people living on the margins of society, particularly immigrants. Deeply committed to equality and social justice, Neel was…

We meet Katy Hessel to discuss her incredible new book How To Live An Artful Life. The year ahead is a gift that has been given to you. What might you do with it? Dive into the year with the wisdom of artists. Gathered from interviews, personal conversations, books and talks, How to Live an Artful Life moves through the months of the year offering you thoughts, reflections and encouragements from artists such as Marina Abramovic, Nan Goldin, Lubaina Himid, Louise Bourgeois and many more. With a thought for every day of the year, whether looking for beginnings in January, freedom in summer, or transformation as the nights draw in, this is a book of words to cherish. The year is full of the promise of work that has yet to be written, paintings that are yet to be painted, people who have yet to meet, talk, or fall in love. With this book in hand, pay attention, and see the world anew. Go out and find it, taste it, seize it, and live it – artfully. Katy Hessel is an art historian and the author of The Story of…

Happy 80th birthday to Maggi Hambling, our guest this week! We meet Maggi in her studio to discuss her 6 decades of making painting and sculpture. Maggi Hambling CBE was born in Suffolk in 1945. She studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1960 under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines, then at Ipswich School of Art, Camberwell, and finally the Slade School of Art, graduating in 1969. In 1980 she was the First Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London, and in 1995 she won the Jerwood Painting Prize (with Patrick Caulfield). Public sculpture includes A conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998) at Adelaide Street, London, facing Charing Cross Station and Scallop (2003), a sculpture to celebrate Benjamin Britten, at Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk and for which the artist was awarded the Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture. A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled in Newington Green, London in 2020. Hambling’s work is held in public collections including at Tate, British…

We meet Rose Blake an illustrator and artist making drawings and pictures in London who has just illustrated Russell & Robert’s first children’s book Art School (In A Book). Rose Blake studied at Kingston University and the Royal College of Art. She was awarded the D&AD Best New Blood Award and was shortlisted for the AOI prize and The World Illustration Awards. She shows with the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, and has had two solo show there; ‘Now I Am An Artist’ in 2015 and ‘Sing Swim Ok Moon’ in 2018. She is a Visiting Lecturer at Kingston University on the Illustration and Animation BA. Art School (In A Book) is out on Thursday 23rd October 2025. Pre-order now from Amazon, Waterstone’s and Bookshop.org An exciting introduction to the world of contemporary art for young creatives from the makers of hit podcast Talk Art, actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament. Do you love art and want to know more but don't know where to start? Introducing Art School (in a book), a virtual gallery where you can see the…

We meet writer Damian Barr to discuss his new book The Two Roberts. This intoxicating, brave and compassionate novel from the author of Maggie and Me reimagines one of the stongest and most passionate love stories of modern British art, following Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde from their encounter at Glasgow Art School to partying with Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon in London as the Second World War draws near. 'He will stay like this forever, Robert's arm draped round him. They will be forever twenty.' Scotland, 1933. Bobby MacBryde is on his way. After years grafting at Lees Boot Factory, he's off to the Glasgow School of Art, to his future. On his first day he will meet another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls - and never leave his side. Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow - its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city - all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will…

We meet Sean Ono Lennon to explore his music and life with art, plus we discuss the forthcoming box set Power to the People, that Sean has produced, of his parents’ Yoko Ono and John Lennon’s 1972 fundraising live New York concert. We consider activism in art, especially the legacy of John and Yoko’s timeless work together (as also documented in the recent One to One documentary). Recorded live at Madison Square Garden, New York City on 30 August 1972, the Power to The People box set includes 31 Live Tracks from John & Yoko's two historic sets at the One To One Concert backed by Plastic Ono Band, Elephant’s Memory and Special Guests. They were John Lennon’s only full-length concerts after leaving The Beatles and the last two full-length concerts that John & Yoko performed together. Released from 10th October 2025. Learn more: https://www.johnlennon.com/news/power-to-the-people-deluxe-box-4lp-2lp-2cd-1cd-preorder-now/ Sean Ono Lennon is a world renowned musician, songwriter, and producer. “He has always…

This episode is a special partnership with BOSS. Special episode recorded in Milan, September 2025. #AD Russell meets Marco Falcioni, Creative Director of HUGO BOSS. We discuss the Art Basel Awards which BOSS have been partnering with, Marcos' beginnings discovering fashion in the clubs of Rome, how art is intrinsic to his designing, and the importance of his weekly practice of visiting art exhibitions including Venice Biennale. Collaborations and partnerships are very important to him and the integrity and respect he has for his close team at BOSS. We discuss Cretto di Burri and Land Art, the paintings of Katharina Grosse, Nicola Samorì, Lucio Fontana, Spatialism, Jannis Kounellis, Arte Povera, and how their art, and the art movements they were part of, opened up his mind to the power of art. BOSS is known for timeless and sophisticated style, and commitment to culture, sport and sustainability, underpinned by technical innovations developed over its century-long history. Russell explores his inspirations…

For six decades American artist Joan Snyder has reimagined the narrative potential of abstraction through her paintings, drawings and prints. She first garnered widespread recognition in the early 1970s with her Stroke paintings that dissect the most fundamental of painterly gestures: the brushstroke. Fuelling abstraction with autobiography, she consciously worked against the male-dominated conventions of Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, which were prevalent in the New York art scene into which she emerged. ‘I wanted more in painting, not less,’ she says. ‘I wanted to tell a story, have a beginning, a middle, an end... to do something else, something much more intense, personal and complex.’ Building a vocabulary of recurring personal motifs – from roses and breasts, to ponds and mud, totems, screaming faces, grapes, scrawled words, cherry trees and moons, pumpkins and sunflowers – she pushes the formal possibilities of paint while developing a complex materiality through an…

Talk Art Live in Berlin. Season 26 of Talk Art begins!!!! This episode is a special Paid Partnership collaboration with Berlin Art Week, who flew Russell & Robert to Berlin. Recorded live, in front of an audience, outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in September 2025. Special guests Peaches @peachesnisker (musician, producer, director, performance artist) and Klaus Biesenbach @klausbiesenbach (Director, Neue Nationalgalerie) join the conversation about art, music, and the Berlin art scene. An iconic feminist musician, producer, director, and performance artist, Peaches has spent nearly two decades pushing boundaries and wielding immeasurable influence over mainstream pop culture from outside of its confines, carving a bold, sexually progressive path in her own image that's opened the door for countless others to follow. She’s collaborated with everyone from Iggy Pop and Daft Punk to Kim Gordon and Major Lazer, had her music featured cultural watermarks like Lost In Translation, The Handmaid's Tale, and Broad…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

New @TalkArt podcast episode. We meet Ann Carrington @anncarringtonart at her studio in Margate! Ann Carrington sculpts fantastical metal sculptures that evoke the age of aristocracy. She gathers found and discarded objects to shape her artworks, which often take the form of bouquets, vases, and oversized busts. The use of discarded, found and multiples of objects is a fundamental element of Ann’s sculptures and wider practice. All objects are saturated with cultural meaning which, as an artist, she seeks to explore, unravel and investigate. Mundane objects such as knives and forks, barbed wire, pins and paintbrushes come with their own readymade histories and associations which can be unravelled and analysed if rearranged, distorted or realigned to give them new meaning as sculpture. Carrington’s chosen medium of manipulating, forging, and sculpting metal is laborious and intricate. She works with heating techniques like soldering and welding, the latter of which she learned about a decade ago specifically…

We meet Gary Schneider to discuss his photography, and his collaboration printing for Peter Hujar and other aritsts. Born in South Africa, Gary Schneider is a photographer whose early practices in painting, performance, and film remain integral to his explorations of portraiture. He strives to marry art and science, identity and obscurity, figuration and abstraction, the carnal and the spiritual. He was raised during apartheid, emigrating to New York in 1977 at the age of 22, and much of his work is informed by the racial issues he grew up with. Genetic Self-Portrait (1997-1998), for example, is a series of images of his own genetic material in which nothing identifies race. Also included in this exhibition are forensic images that use the strategies he developed in Genetic Self-Portrait. These include body imprints of himself and John Erdman, his muse since 1977, and a handprint portrait of the South African artist Senzeni Marasela. It is from a project produced between 2011-2015 funded by a Guggenheim…