Talk Art

Russell and Robert meet Edward Enninful OBE, editor-in-chief of British  Vogue . Over the past two and a half years as editor-in-chief of the famed publication, he has helped shape a new vision for fashion media — not just in the UK, but globally — where he has placed a “diversity of perspective” at its core. Enninful has described his vision for British  Vogue  as “about being incl...

Russell & Robert meet leading artist Amoako Boafo. Best known for his contemporary portrait paintings, Boafo’s portraits are enticing in their lucidity, accentuating the figures in each work, who are regularly isolated on single colour backgrounds, their gaze the focal point of each work. Combing brushwork with finger painting, his use of paint is thick and gestural, the contours of the b...

Russell and Robert meet American basketball legend Kevin Love and leading British art advisor Jane Suitor. Love is best known for playing for the NBA's Cleveland Cavaliers. He is a five-time All-Star and won the 2016 NBA championship with the Cavaliers. Outside of sport, Love is a passionate art collector, closely advised by Suitor. Beginning his collecting journey in his late 20s, he has already...

Russell and Robert meet legendary art critic and writer Jerry Saltz for a feature-length special QuarARTine episode, as critical times call for critical thinking!!!! We discuss the future of art and the art world after coronavirus, what he remembers from the early 90s crash and his respect for how British artists responded and thrived. We find out why he wrote his new book 'How To Be An Artist', t...

Russell and Robert chat to legendary artist Lisa Yuskavage. Best-known for her groundbreaking, provocative figurative paintings, Lisa‘s images occupy a space between high and low; the sacred and the profane. In this feature-length special episode, we discuss her journey to making the work she truly loved, combatting working-class guilt whilst studying at Yale (and her friendship with architectural...

QuarARTine continues!! Russell & Robert chat with gallerist, writer and curator Rózsa Farkas. Founder and Director of Arcadia Missa, a gallery focusing on “contemporary art with intent” that “began as a self-organised space in austerity Britain”. Beginning in 2011 as a multi-platform Peckham project space, it evolved into a commercial gallery by 2014 and is now located in Soho, central London....

Russell and Robert chat to Maria Balshaw CBE, Director of Tate, a family of four art galleries in London, Liverpool and Cornwall known as Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Balshaw is Tate’s first female Director. We discuss the effect of the lockdown on Tate museums, filming guided tours for their website of the on-hold blockbuster Andy Warhol and Aubrey Beardsl...

Russell and Robert meet leading artist Jordan Casteel who has rooted her practice in community engagement, painting from her own photographs of people she encounters. Posing her subjects within their natural environments, her nearly life-size portraits and cropped “subway” compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. In February 2020, Casteel opened a major solo exhib...

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...