Talk Art

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 the African diaspora and diverse global backgrounds. Founded in 2012 by Somali-French art dealer Mariane Ibrahim, the gallery has experienced a phenomenal international expansion, establishing a presence across three different continents.

Follow @MarianeIbrahimGallery

Visit: https://marianeibrahim.com/
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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 extensive body of work. Here, you will encounter nearly 150 pieces: iconic portraits of legends like Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, and Marlene Dumas, as well as German icons Nina Hagen, Herbert Grönemeyer, Einstürzende Neubauten and Wim Wenders. His signature black-and-white grainy aesthetic became a defining visual language in his work.

A polymath in photography, music videos, feature films, graphic design, and commercials, Dutchman Anton Corbijn is perhaps best known for immortalizing some of the greatest artists of our time. His iconic portraits of musicians, directors, and artists, such as Joy Division, Depeche Mode, Tom Waits, U2, the Rolling Stones, Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Gerhard Richter, Ai Weiwei, Marlene Dumas among others, are praised for the way they capture the soul and charisma of his subjects.

Effortlessly moving in the early 80s from photography into music videos, Corbijn has since made over 80 promos for people like U2, Johnny Cash, Arcade Fire, Depeche Mode, Nirvana, Metallica, Nick Cave, Coldplay, and The Killers. He is the Artistic Director behind the visual output of Depeche Mode. For U2 he has done the principal promotion and sleeve photography for four decades.

In 2006 Corbijn started working on his first feature film Control about the life, and death, of Ian Curtis, Joy Division’s lead singer. The film won many awards worldwide, including 5 BIFAs and the Camera d’Or Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival 2007. Corbijn has since made The American starring George Clooney (2010), A Most Wanted Man, based on the novel by John Le Carré and featuring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (2014), and Life, about James Dean and photographer Dennis Stock, which stars Robert Pattinson and Dane DeHaan (2015).

In 2023, Corbijn released his first feature documentary Squaring The Circle about the iconic album art design studio Hipgnosis. In 2025, he directed his fifth feature film titled Switzerland starring Helen Mirren.

Follow: @AntonCorbijn4Real

Visit the exhibition: @Fotografiska.Berlin
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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 that people like her only get one chance to make a first impression.

Frequently, her songs will open out with a stringent big note, a walloping guitar figure, the best hook in her almanac of songwriter-ly resources. Because they have to. “I’ve never had the option to ask,” she says. “I’ve always had to take. I’ve always had to force my way through closed doors. That’s what shapes my sound. Yes, we will start with a huge vocal note to make people turn around and listen. Yes, I will say in the studio, give me some hair-raising guitar windmills. Let’s do that. You waste thirty seconds and you’ve lost it.”

Equally, MEEK’s visual aesthetic is once seen, never forgotten. She wants to reclaim dressing up for everyone, not just those that can afford to indulge in the monied whimsy of high fashion. “I have a clear visual thing for myself, which is basically prom outfits for poor people.” She’s the Cinderella who flipped a finger at the Ugly Sisters, then invited them along to join in the fun, too. “It’s about being absolute glam-trash and owning it. That pink tulle over a stained Adidas jacket? Throw it on. I just want it to feel like something anybody can put together themselves, a sustainable way to look fucking wild. Why not?”

The best thing about MEEK? There is a point to her. She is as if the comedy queen, Daisy May Cooper stumbled into a charity shop, found a bunch of glittering second hand couture, dolled herself up shamelessly in it, injected the raw spirit of Freddie Mercury and emerged, Mr Ben style, as a fully-fledged MEGASTAR in the making out of the changing rooms, then lead a troubadour of misfits singing down the high street. There is not what you might call a shortage of self-confidence in MEEK. As she sings herself, on a calling card anthem which is sure to become the earworm of the nation once unleashed upon its airwaves: “I’m so f*cking fabulous.”

This week sees MEEK performing live on numerous TV shows including Saturday Night Live UK, with Aimee Lou Wood as well as her USA TV debut with Jimmy Fallon.

Follow @MustBeMeek

Listen to Meek’s new EP Fabulous out now:
https://music.apple.com/gb/artist/meek/1784432868
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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 this creative process, which can take years, the artist states:
“Painting to me is about the reality of being in the land and making marks that correlate to me reacting to that experience. You paint what you think you know. When I’m in the land, I always get surprised by what I see, even if I thought I knew the landscape in which I grew up so well. That’s why I need to be there, en plein air. Painting to me is very much about being in the presence of the land”.

Forcing the artist to be alone in the fields, exposed to the elements, Dawson’s canvases are deeply autobiographical as they connect him to his formative years growing up in the countryside, when the artist learned about solitude.

Dawson describes his practice in almost meditative terms: painting the Welsh landscape and its waterfalls, “being in the presence of the land”, becomes a way of getting rid of his ego, to reach a feeling of connection and communion with nature.

Follow @DavidEliDawson and @GainsboroughsHouse

David is represented by @GalleriaLorcanONeill

Visit the exhibition: https://gainsborough.org/event/land-sky-light-new-landscapes-by-david-dawson/
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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 to personal introspection, activism to domestic power games, subversive humour to challenging family relationships, it was through drawing that she understood herself and the world around her, discovering ways of expressing complex
ideas through a single image. As Nick Willing comments, ‘A Rego drawing is never just one thing, but many feelings working together to reveal the truth. They not only helped her understand the world but can also help us understand it too.’Driven by her distinctive approach to storytelling, this exhibition demonstrates how Rego adapted her line to
emphasise the emotional nuance of the stories she told, and how her drawing techniques also reflected her interior emotional narrative. The works reveal the unique development of an artist whose visual storytelling, drawn from a wide variety of sources, spoke directly to us about the essential human traits of desire, loss, violence and power.

The works on show vary from intimate drawings which have never been exhibited before to studies for some of Rego’s most recognisable paintings. These are accompanied by notes, letters, sketchbooks, photographs and other archival material from throughout Rego’s life – among myriad rarities is a drawing Rego made when she was nine years old of her grandmother, while the exhibition concludes with works including a drawing she made of her own granddaughter.
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