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Katy Hessel

Created off the back of @thegreatwomenartists Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating women artists. Presented by art historian and curator, Katy Hessel, this podcast interviews artists on their career, or curators, writers, or general art lovers, on the female artist who means the most to them.

The Great Women Artists

In this very special BONUS EPISODE of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews one of the most renowned artists alive today, Marina Abramović.

*BOOK NEWS!* I have written a book! Order The Story of Art without Men here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-story-of-art-without-men/katy-hessel/9781529151145

**This episode is brought to you by Alighieri jewellery: www.alighieri.com – use the code "The Artist is Present" at checkout for 15% off!**
 
The “grandmother” of Performance Art, Marina Abramovic has been instrumental in pioneering the genre as a visual art form for the last five decades – a genre defined by risk taking; being present; a state of mind; emptying yourself; and connecting the energies with the surrounding public.

Born in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia in 1946, to communist hero parents, Marina Abramović experienced a strict upbringing. Until the age of 29, she was under a curfew of 10 o’clock – resulting in the artist running away a few months later.

Since the beginning of her career in the 1970s, Marina Abramović has stretched the limits of the body and mind as both object and subject. Early works include Rhythm 0 (1974), where she became an object of experimentation for the audience – laying out 72 objects, including a pistol, and stating they could be used on her as desired; or Rhythm 5 (1974), where she lay in the centre of a burning five-point star. She has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in her quest for emotional and spiritual transformation.

Never slowing down, in 1997 she won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for a work that commented on war in Yugoslavia, and in 2010, she took over MoMA for The Artist is Present, where she sat motionless in a chair for eight hours a day – the show broke records, attracting 850,000 visitors.

In 2012, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art, and has since exhibited at the world’s most prestigious institutions, earning her a global following. And in 2023, she will be the first woman to have a solo exhibition in the main galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

TODAY Marina Abramović launches The Hero 25FPS – @artistispresent / NFT.CIRCA.ART

For her first performance launching today on the blockchain, Marina Abramović revisits one of her most personal and autobiographical works ‘The Hero (2001)’ to present in collaboration with The Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Art (CIRCA) this digital exploration of time, immateriality and audience participation. Filmed at 25 frames per second, never before seen footage has been separated into 6,500 unique frames to create The Hero 25FPS, a genesis NFT collection by the warrior of performance art.

A call for today’s new heroes! Upon completion of THE HERO 25FPS, Marina Abramović, @nadyariot (Pussy Riot) and CIRCA will award a series of Hero Grants to people working within Web3 who demonstrate a desire to make the world a better place.

ENJOY!!!

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner
Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

Marina Abramović

Welcome to the FINALE of Season 12! I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed writer, Sheila Heti.

Born in 1976 in Toronto, where she lives today, Heti is the author of eleven books, from novels to novellas, short stories and children’s books. Most recently, her acclaimed books have included Alphabetical Diaries, that ordered a decade worth of diaries in alphabetical order; Pure Colour (2022), a novel that explores grief, art and time; Motherhood (2018), a meditation on whether or not to become a mother in a society that judges you whatever the outcome. Heti’s writing is some of the most honest, thoughtful I’ve ever read, and throughout weaves in the broad subject of art, whether it be paintings or her protagonists’ professions…

Heti also wrote for the literary journal the Believer, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including conversations with Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, who are among some of the artists we are going to be, very excitingly, discussing today. 

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Sheila Heti on Jenny Holzer, Berthe Morisot, Margaux Williamson, and more

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most renowned painters working in the world right now: Jenny Saville.

Hailed for her at times colossal paintings of the human form – from close ups of the face, to examinations of exposed flesh – Saville is fascinated with the complex vessels that we all live inside. Theatrical and grotesque, beautiful and painful, her presentations of the body can feel almost like a landscape, pressed up against the surface of the canvas, in her masterful handling of paint that ranges from wet, to dry, oily to thin, thick and with shards and smears of colour. 

At once uneasy, raw, tense, and animal-like, Saville’s portrayals of the body show how it transforms, grows, decays, and breathes… While full of contradictions, there is always a beauty, from the colours Saville uses to the golden light and textures that accentuate a knee, or finger. 

Born in Cambridge in 1970, as one of four siblings, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the 80s and 90s, and spent her final year in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was exposed to a new set of American artists and feminist thought. In the 1990s, Saville quickly became one of the most anticipated painters challenging not just the medium of paint, or the depiction of the body, but reinventing the female nude or semi-nude body as a subject that has been entrenched in a male-gazed art history. 

Tackling Biblical and mythological narratives, referencing ancient Venus-like figures, as well as her own experience as a mother, Saville has constantly configured new ways of presenting the body, and in more recent years, has turned to stark, saturated colouring 

This year, she will open exhibitions at the Albertina, Vienna, her first major solo show in Austria; Anatomy of Painting at the National Portrait Gallery, London – that will bring together 50 works – and will travel to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, for us to see the incredible trajectory of an artist who keeps reinventing flesh with paint – and I can’t wait to find out more…

LINKS!
Albertina: https://www.albertina.at/en/exhibitions/jenny-saville/
NPG: https://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2025/jenny-saville/?_gl=1*136gpph*_up*MQ..*_gs*MQ..&gclid=Cj0KCQjwv_m-BhC4ARIsAIqNeBt-ZzQivw0289iG5mzsW59uEmn-IUiod6qXx6jVk9rOLTLV9trgo20aAiw7EALw_wcB

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Jenny Saville

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the acclaimed painter, Rose Wylie!

Born in 1934, as the youngest of seven children to Victorian parents, Wylie spent her early childhood in India before coming to England aged 5. This was in 1939, in the midst of a bomb-filled Second World War and increasingly fractured world. She went on to study figurative painting, at Folkestone and Dover College of Art in Kent from 1952–56, at a time when tutors would say to her ‘It’s no good bothering with you, you’re a girl, you’ll get married, have children and that’ll be that.’ … It was then to a teacher training programme at Goldsmiths before putting art aside to raise three children. This was, until 1979 when Wylie returned to the studio enrolling at the Royal College of Art, in her early 40s. 

Her first solo exhibition came a few years later in 1985, but despite Wylie working in her cottage-slash-studio in Kent for the last 50+ years – where we are very excitingly recording today – it was not until the last 10–15 years that her work has been given the attention and acclaim it has always deserved. 

Playful and fractured, featuring text overlaid with image, witnessing a Rose Wylie painting in person is to see the world in a different way. Wylie takes recognisable elements from pop culture, history, mythology, sport, even the Bible – from flowers, battenberg cakes, sportstars, queens, to the likes of Nicole Kidman and Emily Maitlis – and shows us them anew, in her paintings that are void of perspective to the point that there is no indication of where the work starts or ends. 

Her paintings are sometimes full of movement – like a football being kicked, almost balletically, with players, clad in yellow, darting across the dotty canvas that surrounds its viewer. At other times they remind me of a film playing out – like the blood-clad figure lying on the floor in Kill Bill – or even a script with stage directions featuring phrases like “getting dark” or “yellow” … Wylie’s paintings are full of decisions, ideas, and the more I look at them, the more her world opens up…

Now 90 years old, after a celebrity-filled birthday bash, Wylie is back better than ever for her exhibition at David Zwirner London “When Found becomes Given”, opening on April 3rd, and I couldn’t be more delighted to be speaking to her at her Kent-based studio today.

Exhibition: https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/2025/rose-wylie-when-found-becomes-given

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Rose Wylie

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the brilliant New York based painter, Katherine Bradford. 

Hailed for her luminous paintings of swimming pools and cosmic skies, ballet dancers and bicycle riders, Bradford takes us to imaginary worlds full of freedom, togetherness and wonder. Not usually specifying the figures in her work, instead she offers us a universal depiction of humanity – that any of us can apply ourselves or relate to – playing with scale and perspective, and getting us to think hard about our place on this earth.

Born in 1942, and raised in Connecticut, Bradford didn’t always start off as an artist. A woman of stifling 1960s America, she was married with twins in her 20s, but aged 37, swapped this life, bringing her kids along, to become an artist in New York City, and never looked back. 

Making her way by teaching from the 1980s to the 2010s, becoming the senior critic on the faculty of Yale School of Art and being awarded Pollock Krasner grants and Guggenheim Fellowships, Bradford – although painting for decades – has received major recognition in the past decade, such as her recent survey show at the Portland Museum of Art. 

And thank goodness she carried on painting, because especially at a time like this, of despair and uncertainty, we can look to Bradford’s paintings for hope, visualisations of freedom that prioritise inclusiveness and community – as she has said: “It’s important to me to make upbeat paintings. If anything, I’m making paintings about enchantment.”

Looking at Bradford’s painting is like being transported into another world, whether it be outer space or in cosmic waters, it’s like they are lit with a glow akin to a blanket of stars. There is nothing artificial about them: they are spellbinding, and her canvases become a springboard for the most magical scenes, an “intentional place for imagination” as she says “as they convey a personal universe of my own making, populated with characters who explore who we are, how we fit together visually, and how we all stand next to each other.”

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Katherine Bradford

I am so excited to say that my guest, the esteemed art historian, Andrew Hottle, will be discussing SYLVIA SLEIGH!

Currently the Professor of Art History at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, Hottle has dedicated his research and writing to focussing on women artists, with specialization in feminist art of the 1970s. 

He is the author of a definitive monograph on the American realist painter Shirley Gorelick, and his detailed book about The Sister Chapel reignited interest in a historic collaboration by thirteen women artists. 

But he is also a world expert on one of those artists featured in this chapel: Sylvia Sleigh, who was born in Wales and died in 2010, having been based in New York City for most of her life, and known for her unique realist painting style immortalising those in her community and the culturally significant. Identifiably recognisable by their meticulously rendered details, body hair and tan lines, Sleigh’s paintings were always created from her acutely feminist viewpoint. Painting seductively effeminate male nudes in poses that evoke Titian’s Venus of Urbino, or Ingres’s Turkish Bath, the Welsh-born artist – famed for her contribution to the Women’s Liberation Movement, as a prominent member of AIR Gallery – said of her work: “I liked to portray both man and woman as intelligent and thoughtful people with dignity and humanism that emphasised joy.”

Although in my opinion far too overlooked for far too long, Sleigh is having somewhat of a renaissance. Earlier this year, Ortuzar Projects in NYC staged a solo exhibition of her work to acclaim – her first in 15 years, and this spring, she is showing alongside her contemporaries Alice Neel and Marcia Marcus, at Levy Gorvy Danyan in New York, that runs until 21 June: https://www.levygorvydayan.com/exhibitions/the-human-situation-marcia-marcus-alice-neel-sylvia-sleigh

And it is very much thanks to Hottle, who is currently in the process of compiling her catalogue raisonne, as well as writing a book about the founder artist-members of SOHO 20, a historically significant feminist cooperative gallery, of which Sleigh was one, established in 1973, that she is finally coming back into the spotlight. 

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Andrew Hottle on Sylvia Sleigh

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the world renowned artist, Bharti Kher. 

Known for a seemingly limitless practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, found objects, and more; that explores hybrid beings – fusing animals and humans, objects and nature – Kher’s extraordinary art-making looks at and exists both in the real world and imaginary. She is astute at seeing the potential in something, whether it be the magical superpowers of the human body or extent to which she can push materials into something they’re not, transforming them into something full of wonder. From using bindis like tiny paint strokes, melted down bangles to form a tower of bricks, animal heads and or plant-like forms that transform a human from something real to into something mythical – looking at a Kher work is to see alchemy play out in a solid object. 

Born in England to Indian parents in 1969, Kher studied at Newcastle Polytechnic, before venturing to India, where she has lived since 1993. Settling in New Delhi, where she works in an almost fantastical four-story laboratory-like studio (+roof) that I was lucky enough to visit earlier this year, Kher has become one of the most celebrated artists in Asia, and beyond, exhibiting at institutions all over the world. 

Often taking the female body as a framework for her ideas – a form that, although prevalent in historical sculpture, has rarely been depicted by the female itself – Kher focuses on its multitudinous aspects. She adds leaves, horns and mannequins to show the many universes it contains, and to push against the rigidity of around who we are – as she has said, “what we are, how we function, what we do, where we sit, where we don’t sit.”

Drawing on religion to mythology, womanhood and more, Kher’s works feel ancient, present, and futuristic and, in a time like today when we are looking to alternative stories away from the ones dominating our world, forever enchanting and enriching, guiding us to seeing how extraordinary beings can be. Her current exhibition, aptly titled Alchemies, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park brings together work from the last few decades, both small and colossal, and gets us to think about how the ultimate job of the artist is as an alchemist: someone who can transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, see the myriad possibilities in a single medium, and show us something we instantly recognise despite never having witnessed it before…

Kher's exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park!
https://ysp.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/bharti-kher?gad_source=1&gbraid=0AAAAADfc_iZaY34c9UpnqEXtFtVVvF0Pg&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2ZfABhDBARIsAHFTxGwcjlobrI69KMnQTB7ikxghVWdGF-6i2Ly8BM1VTYAYqjtAlSAsFnYaAo96EALw_wcB

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Bharti Kher

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most anticipated and exciting painters working today – Danielle McKinney. 

Born in Alabama, and based in New Jersey, McKinney is hailed for her small, contemplative, introspective and intimate paintings of women. Caught in moments of rest, relaxation and repose, McKinney’s works, to my mind, are a collective portrait of the joys of female solitude. Painted on a black-coloured canvas emphasising the twilight time in which they appear to be set, McKinney’s seductive and alluring paintings situate the figure swept up in their own world. Although she uses only a few thick, washy strokes of paint, each has significance, whether it be to evoke a dress, a hint of a cigarette flame, or a glow of light under a low-lit lamp in their soft-focus interiors. Never fussy or over-painted, they show just how much something so simple like a woman in her private space can be so powerful. 

While we aren’t told much about them, it’s up to us as the viewers to imagine their lives. I like to read stories into them, trying to understand where they are, and on what day and which time, they can also be read as interior moods. Full of atmosphere, it’s almost like you can hear a soundtrack of Sade blasting softly in the background – one of McKinney’s great inspirations. 

But painting wasn’t always something she had pursued. While she had a great love of the medium in childhood, McKinney’s training is in photography, having graduated from Parsons School of Design in 2013. Fascinated by humanity and movement, and the framing of an image, McKinney had a career as a photographer before turning to painting during the Covid-19 pandemic. Shut inside her New Jersey home, she hid herself away, bought some cheap canvases and turned her focus to painting – and hasn’t stopped, and come five years later today, she has exhibited across the world. 

Recent bodies of work include an Edward Hopper-inspired series – which gets me to think about the connection between the solitude of 1930s America with today. But unlike Hopper, McKinney paints exclusively women, always inside, and resting in still, private moments – as she has said: “That’s what I really try to capture in this beautiful solitude … Some of the ladies are very tense in those moments with a cigarette, and then sometimes they’re asleep and beautiful. But those moments are theirs.

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Danielle Mckinney

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is one of the most exciting painters working in the world today, Michaela Yearwood-Dan.

Hailed for her works that bloom, dance, and come alive when you are witness to them, with an abundance of textures, weathers, colours, mark-makings, and more, Yearwood-Dan intertwines the botanical with abstraction, and brings painting back to its natural-like essence. Never restricting herself to just one medium, Yearwood-Dan works across ceramics, sound, installation, performance, and all-encompassing paintings that can range from small to the colossal, with some measuring up to 8-metres-wide. See them in the flesh and it’s like seeing an entire ecosystem unfold, embedded with hidden languages, whether it be the symbolism she uses or the small elements of text, poetry and song lyrics, that add another dimension to her rich, embellished worlds. 

Raised in London as the youngest of three girls, by parents and grandparents that taught her about craft, weaving, seamstressing, Yearwood-Dan completed her studies at Brighton from 2013–2016, where she graduated top of her class, before going onto experiment with an artistic language that has constantly been growing and reinventing, and pushing paint to its limits. While early work – at the time I met her in around 2019, when she invited me for a studio visit when we were both in our mid 20s – explored more interior images intertwined with house plants, it has been incredible to watch her work mould into spaces of abundance, possibility and exhilaration. 

And indeed, her work has been described by the renowned writer and curator Ekow Eshun as having “a sense of boundless possibility”, which feels apt for a time like today, when it feels more than ever for art to be our guide to expanding our imagination, and also joy in times of despair. This is exactly the topic of Yearwood-Dan’s new exhibition, opening at Hauser & Wirth in London on 13 May, titled No Time for Despair, referencing a line from Toni Morrison’s 2004 article for The Nation, which states, “in times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.” – and I can’t wait to find out more…

Exhibition page: https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/michaela-yearwood-dan-no-time-for-despair/

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Michaela Yearwood-Dan

I am so excited to say that my guest on the GWA Podcast is the esteemed American artist, Lorna Simpson. 

Working across photography to painting, video to collage, Simpson is a multimedia artist who – since the 1980s – has gained widespread acclaim for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Whether it’s fusing text with image, obscuring her subject’s identity, using techniques such as repetition, collage or manipulation – Simpson has conjured a plethora of ways to reinvent the image, and, by doing so, raises questions about gender, race, memory, and history. Her work, mostly centred on the female body, is full of seemingly open-ended narratives – as she has said: “I think the idea of identity or persona is interesting to me in that it is malleable and fluid. And that has always been part of the work in terms of [thinking about] who gets to determine who we are. Do we get to determine that, and what are the parameters of that, given the society that we live in?”

Engaging with found images and objects, whether that be cut-outs from Ebony or Jet Magazines, or photographs she finds on eBay, which she melds with inks or collages of jewels, Simpson has continuously reconfigured what painting and photography means. 

Born in 1960, and raised in Queens and Brooklyn in a childhood that put the arts first, Simpson received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and following that, an MFA from the University of California San Diego, where she began to focus on the portraits of Black women she found in magazines, adding suggestive phrases from elsewhere. 

By 1990, she had a major exhibition at MoMA, and throughout the decades has continued to push boundaries with her seemingly limitless approach to materials. But in 2015, she turned to painting, showing her first nine-feet-tall canvases at the Venice Biennale, and this month will present a major exhibition – that considers the entirety of her painting practice – at the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York – where we are recording today. 

Titled “Source Notes”, it will feature Simpson’s monumental and spellbinding paintings, which, steeped in monochromatic blues, silvers, blacks and greys, appear in settings that evoke the cosmological or natural world. An extension of her photographic work, Simpson’s paintings see the manipulated figure and body pressed into landscapes akin to waterfalls or meteorites, and I can’t wait to find out more…

https://lsimpsonstudio.com/

Lorna Simpson: Source Notes – 
https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/lorna-simpson-source-notes?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=&utm_term=lorna%20simpson%20art&utm_content=39536&mkwid=s&pcrid=743882408399&pmt=b&pkw=lorna%20simpson%20art&pdv=c&slid=&product=&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22399716678&gbraid=0AAAAADmlGN7UtMbglt7UAR4dicGAOa9Vx&gclid=CjwKCAjw24vBBhABEiwANFG7ywIA72_JjPaxVUdfQSWW_h8NFYNWzddlSHz6KV38M9zgiG4rs_9UNxoCVFkQAvD_BwE

https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2860-lorna-simpson/

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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:

https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037

Follow us:
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael
Music by Ben Wetherfield

Lorna Simpson

In episode 87 of The Great Women Artists Podcast, Katy Hessel interviews the very brilliant young painter, ANTONIA SHOWERING!!!

*BOOK NEWS!* I have written a book! Order The Story of Art without Men here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-story-of-art-without-men/katy-hessel/9781529151145

Acclaimed for her richly layered paintings of family, friends, lovers and more that occupy spaces between reality and surreality, memory and imagination, Antonia Showering paints her subjects full of conviction and full of emotion. 

Layered with narratives of, in her words, ‘stacked recollections’, her paintings can appear at once haunting and ethereal, ghoulish yet protective, and although they are personal to her, they can speak for us all. Infused with both an acidic and muted colour palette, with thick impasto and washy strokes, Antonia’s paintings deal with universal subjects on a personal level. 

Speaking about the canvas, she has said: 
“I see the canvas as a physical space where feelings of belonging or displacement, love or loneliness, intergenerational memory, superstitions and regrets can be turned into something visual and shared with the viewer.” 

Born in London, and raised in Somerset, to an English father and Swiss-Chinese mother, Antonia’s upbringing, family and heritage play central roles in her work. 

Having completed her foundation year at Chelsea, her BA at City and Guilds, and then her MFA at the Slade School of Art, Antonia, in just a few years, has become one of the most exciting young painters of her generation. Featured in exhibitions at Stephen Friedman Gallery and TJ Boulting, New Contemporaries and of course The Great Women Artists Residency at Palazzo Monti, Antonia recently had her first solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor which was met with acclaim. 

ENJOY!!!

Follow us: 
Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Research assistant: Viva Ruggi
Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner
Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

Antonia Showering

Lyt når som helst, hvor som helst

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