Talk Art

Russell and Robert chat to music legend & flamboyant superstar Sir Elton John CBE from lockdown at his home in Los Angeles. We discuss art collecting, a lifelong obsession that began by collecting dinky toys and vinyl records during childhood, buying Man Ray posters at Athena when he first started songwriting with Bernie Taupin, why he started his photography collection in the early 1990s, wha...

Russell and Robert meet British artist Somaya Critchlow whose figurative paintings of women explore facets of race, sex and culture. Working mostly on a small scale, her works depict bold, curvaceous and self-possessed female characters, of her own creation, that simultaneously combine and subvert the culture expectations of race, gender and power in the history of portraiture. They are self-refle...

Ladies and Gentleman, the category is TALK ART!!!! Russell and Robert chat to superstar Billy Porter, the leading actor, singer, writer, fashion icon and star of award-winning TV show POSE. We chat about the lockdown closure of Broadway and New York's theatres, losing two friends to the Coronavirus pandemic, his appreciation for Lady Gaga, Erykah Badu, Boy George and Madonna, writing new music and...

Russell and Robert meet artist Doron Langberg, an Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based painter. Langberg paints in the style of genre painting and portraiture, addressing issues of gender and sexuality creating a shared experience of love and desire through the surface and subjects of his paintings. Langberg paints large-scale portraits of family, close friends and lovers. These visualizations of queernes...

Russell and Robert return for Season 5! Recorded primarily during quarantine lockdown, we’ve reached out to international creative guests from art, design, music, sport, fashion, TV and film. Every Tuesday & Friday (yes, twice a week!) we will bring you voices that inspire us and that we hope will inspire you too. These are unprecedented, scary, challenging and deeply sad times. We strongly be...

Robert & Russell meet Mark Gatiss, the influential British actor, screenwriter, director and novelist. We discuss Mark's recent BBC4 art documentary 'John Minton: The Lost Man of British Art', celebrating the life and work of the highly prolific and successful 20th century English artist whose work is now all but forgotten. A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Minton suffered psyc...

Russell & Robert meet leading British photographer Alasdair McLellan. World-renowned for his sensitive approach to photography across fashion, portraiture, landscape or documentary, his work embraces references high and low, classical and pop, and continues to reflect contemporary conversations around gender, sexuality and identity. McLellan’s photography has been exhibited at the ICA, Somerse...

Robert & Russell meet the one-and-only legend that is Princess Julia!!!! We discuss her endless creativity across different worlds of music, fashion and art, life-drawing and her weekly trip to ‘Sketch Sesh’, her friendship with DJ Jeffry Hinton, and how she started DJing herself at queer spaces in London. We find out what it’s like to be photographed by Wolfgang Tillmans, her memories of bein...

Russell & Robert meet British artist Ima-Abasi Okon. Ima's current solo exhibition is at VOID, Derry~Londonderry and runs until 25th April 2020. This episode was recorded in July 2019 during an earlier iteration of Ima's solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London. Ima works with sculpture, sound and video to produce installations that explore exhibition-making as an exercise in syntax, adop...

Russell and Robert meet American artist Louis Fratino in London! Drawing inspiration from personal experience and, more recently, photographic source material, Fratino makes paintings and drawings of the male body. His work includes portraits, nudes, and intimate scenes of male couples engaged in activities ranging from the mundane to the graphically sexual. The result is a body of work that is a...

Talk Art NYC!!! Russell & Robert meet artist Brian Donnelly aka KAWS at his Brooklyn studio for a rare glimpse into the private world of one the world's most iconic creative figures. KAWS engages audiences far beyond the museums and galleries in which he regularly exhibits. His prolific body of influential work straddles the worlds of art and design to include paintings, murals, large-scale sc...

Russell & Robert meet Tai Shani, multidisciplinary British artist and joint-winner of the Turner Prize 2019. Shani’s practice encompasses performance, film, photography and sculptural installations, frequently structured around experimental texts. She is currently a Tutor in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art. Taking inspiration from disparate histories, narratives and...

Robert & Russell meet legendary British artist Denzil Forrester. We discuss 40 years of painting, his childhood in Grenada, the impact of moving to London in 1967 aged 11, his memories of making drawings in London's dub & reggae nightclubs of the late 1970s-80s, his admiration for Jah Shaka's sound system and the drive to create paintings that documented the club scene he cherished. We lea...

Robert and Russell meet leading gallerist & ceramicist Tommaso Corvi-Mora. We discuss growing up in Italy, moving to Germany for a pivotal first summer job working with Alighiero Boetti for a Bonner Kunstverein show, becoming a gallery assistant with Esther Shipper in Cologne, his early love of artist Joseph Beuys, and his longterm passion for the late Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torr...

Russell and Robert meet artists Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. We explore the challenges & benefits of making art as a duo, letting go of your ego when collaborating, their decision to build their own @GayBar venue where they hosted one-off events over a 4 year period in their South London studio (complete with a bouncer, actual cocktail glasses and the occasional police raid!!!). We learn...

Russell & Robert speak with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, an artist, audio investigator and recent Turner Prize joint-winner. Lawrence's work explores ‘the politics of listening’ and the role of sound and voice within the law and human rights. He creates audiovisual installations, lecture performances, audio archives, photography and text, translating in-depth research and investigative work into affec...

Talk Art returns for Season 4!! Robert & Russell meet Grayson Perry CBE, the legendary English artist, Royal Academician, writer and broadcaster. Best known for his ceramic vases, tapestries and cross-dressing, as well as his observations of the contemporary arts scene, and for dissecting British "prejudices, fashions and foibles". We discuss Essex & the 'Cockney diaspora', the relationshi...

It’s the holidays... and our gift to you is the gift of laughter!!! What better way to celebrate Christmas than to chat (and laugh lots) with our dear friend LONDON HUGHES??!! London is a pioneer, rebel and renaissance woman: stand-up comedian, presenter (Alan Carr was her early mentor), podcaster (Spotify's 'London Actually'), actor ('Fleabag') and now screenwriter with a forthcoming USA TV serie...

This special episode of Talk Art is an interview with the late, great, legendary artist Joyce Pensato. Joyce was one of Russell & Robert’s favourite painters, who in recent years became a close friend to both. We were honoured to be invited by Joyce to visit her in New York on 28th May 2019 to record what became her last interview. We discuss growing up in Brooklyn, the encouragement of her fa...

Robert & Russell meet British artist Haroon Mirza, best known for installations that test the interplay and friction between sound, light waves and electric current. He devises sculptures, performances and immersive installations, such as  The National Apavillion of Then and Now  (2011) – an anechoic chamber with a circle of light that grows brighter in response to increasing dr...

Talk Art New York!!!! Russell & Robert meet multidisciplinary artist Jon Key. Key is a queer black man originally from the small rural town Seale, Alabama now living and working in Bushwick, NY. A writer, designer and painter, his work excavates the lineage and history of his identity through four themes: Southerness, Blackness, Queerness, and Family. Through the process of writ...

Talk Art Live in London! Russell & Robert meet British artist Helen Cammock, nominated for the Turner Prize 2019 and winner of the 2018 Max Mara Arts Prize for Women. This special episode was recorded live in front of a sold-out audience at Art Assembly in Walthamstow, organised by Art Fund and the National Art Pass. Learn more at: www.artfund.org/talkart Helen Cammock works across film, photo...

WARNING: this episode of Talk Art contains strong language! Russell & Robert meet legendary English artist Caroline Coon. We discuss 50 years of painting in Ladbroke Grove, feminism, her longterm political activism, the importance of being socially conscious, decriminalising sex work, growing up in Kent, punk rock, managing The Clash & writing for Melody Maker in the 1970s. We explore the...

Russell & Robert meet artist David Dawson for a private, after-hours tour of 'Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits', the breathtaking new exhibition he has curated at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. We discuss being assistant/head of studio for the last 20 years of Freud's life, Leigh Bowery, going to Taboo nightclub, Freud's early drawings and paintings inspired by surrealism, his grandfather...

Russell & Robert meet iconic British actor Sir Ian McKellen CBE at his home in East London. We have a private tour of Ian’s art collection including stunning works by L.S. Lowry, David Hockney, Andrew Logan, textile artist John Allen and an Antony Gormley cast iron figure he chose to display in the River Thames at the end of his garden! We learn about Ian’s childhood in Bolton and how his fath...