Darling Killers

Darling Killers’ 1st season closes with a very special extended episode featuring the artist Melanie Bonajo in discussion with members of the Dead Darlings collective. We recorded in Berlin before our auction at Heimathafen with our twentieth anniversary show in W139 still months ahead, so the timing was perfect to dive deep into conversations about collectivity, authorship and collaboration, and...

Born in Harare, currently based in NYC and Amsterdam, James Beckett is what Jane Austen might call “very accomplished”. Winner of the Prix de Rome for Art in Public Space after a residency at the Rijksakademie, he has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, with work in the permanent collections of places like Stedelijk Museum and Centre Pompidou, yet still, he can’t resist the urge to kill a darling he...

Uta Eisenreich is an Amsterdam-based artist and visual researcher. Born in Germany into a family of teachers — a forgetful mathematician, an erratic elementary school teacher, a dancer, and a teenage amateur magician — she grew up channeling these diverse influences. She graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, with humorous photographic works that reveal and question the hidden rules and structure...

"I had the pleasure of sitting down in the studio with Lieve Hakkers, recipient of the prestigious Royal Award for Free Painting in 2025. Layered and mysterious, her work draws you in with its melancholic intensity. We talk about method, paint, and the body. We talk about her large-scale work, Circle Jerk - a bold painting in six panels that came with a sexual content warning! Lieve is a painter’s...

For this episode of Darling Killers, I sit down with the illustrious Ruth Van Beek, and it immediately becomes painfully obvious that I can barely disguise my greed for the small sculpture she brought along as her contribution to this month’s Resurrauction. Well, I am only human! Ruth’s collages obfuscate and reveal in equal measure. Ruth doesn’t hesitate to destroy images in order to create image...

A tall impeccably dressed red headed Italian man with an uncanny resemblance to Vincent van Gogh, and the gift of the gab, is currently working on a series of collectable sculptures and prints, based on a delirious yet adorable inner world. J is for jaded. A is for art lover, C for cringe. O for omg, and the final "P-O" stands for Premature Osteoporosis. Born and raised in Firenze, the cradle of t...

In this episode of Darling Killers, Aurélien Lepetit sits down with Jessie Gong. Their conversation touches on the technical, and practical aspects of his practice, the homage to a family tradition, and the moral implications of working with textiles and technology in terms of sustainability. Aurélien works at the crossroads of textile techniques, computing, and plant-based processes, transforming...

Charlott Markus didn’t so much kill this darling, as wish to resurrect it! Pygmalion 09, a work from her exam show at the Rietveld Academy, is for all intents and purposes ‘dead to the world’, buried in the past, yet already containing the seeds of themes and patterns that reappear and evolve throughout her work. Extended still lives, activism, textiles, memento mori, the colour blue and last but...

Our first guest on Darling Killers, Finn Godwin wakes up every morning and gets to work. His embracing of the ethos of homework on the kitchen table is admirable, and his “restless hand syndrome” requires that he keeps busy. Ink drawings in the morning, paintings in the afternoon, intricate collage work in the evening. A lot of time and craftsmanship goes into creating each and every elaborate vig...

Hanna, Lina, Tania and Jessie, aka the Dead Darlings Collective, got together in Amsterdam to record a conversation about things to come! We talk about our origins, the ideas baked into the work we do, and we introduce Darling Killers, the podcast where artists are interrogated about an artwork they killed. This work will subsequently be available on our website, where anyone can bid for it at our...