Since launching in 2022, Young Space has cultivated an environment where artists collaborate and thrive. Below, we ask some of its residents to highlight their favourite objects in the space, and the role these items play in their everyday lives
Photography Dan Tobin Smith
Young’s founding principle – that a good space can facilitate great, surprising creative work – isn’t necessarily new. Its approach, though, might be. Launching in July 2022, the UK indie label Young (formerly known as Young Turks and founded by Caius Pawson) built Young Space as an incubator for creatives, sitting in a former millinery works in east London’s De Beauvoir Town, hemmed in by housing on either side.
When stepping into the late 19th-century structure, which was redesigned by British architect John Pawson, visitors will likely see singer Sampha recording in one of its five studios, or Grace Wales Bonner designing her latest collection in a workspace. But for the most part, it’s “for artists and people who support artists”, as stated on its website, spanning freelance and company-based residents across fashion, music, visual art, furniture, food and publishing.
Practically, freelancers occupy a core and yet precarious position in the creative world, acting as iconoclastic sources for new creative thinking some of the time, or at other times as the glue or the oil in a creative engine. The problem with that duality is that they’re scattered, often isolated, but inextricable from exciting creative work – a freelancer commissioned this story, another freelancer photographed it. Yet another freelancer will have combed through these words before you read them.
It’s not in Young’s mission to set out a goal for itself or its residents – one gets the sense that’s exactly what they’re trying to avoid. If we were to apply one to what’s been built so far, though, it might be to bring freelancers together under one roof with as few prescriptions as to what they do there as possible. On the day I visit, there’s an A&R meeting for the label, a visiting dog, a delicious communal lunch and a reading in the evening. You can do pretty much anything here, Beth Davies, Young Space’s strategist and development consultant, tells me, “as long as you put the tables back”. To dig into some of what happens there, we asked residents to contribute objects as well as explanations around them.
Kwes Darko, producer – Palo santo
Young is a space built on the energy of creative fluidity, as well as a safe space for all to freely connect and grow creatively; a space for all to feel comfortable from the moment they step in the building. That ethos runs through all parts of the space, including the studios – mine is a sacred room of free flow and spirituality. The palo santo stick is an important part of my studio, as it provides calm and a cleanse of any bad energy that may try to interfere with the core foundation and comfort of being. The scent complements the aura of Young and emits positive vibrations and peace.
Sienna Murdoch, artist, (gelines, 2024)
Prompts for fantasy, amplifying elements of things we consume every day. They feel familiar but they are something else now. They could transform you if only you could touch them, which is happily encouraged.
Clem Macleod, founder – WORMS, Bookworm candle
We believe that a sense of calm is imperative for the creative process. At Young Space, we begin each of our writing workshops with a meditation. Light a candle, get comfortable and ignite the flow state.
John Glacier, musician – Microphone
In relation to this space, the microphone is one of the most crucial objects. It’s as important to me as it is to others. It’s where sounds are transmitted to give life to a space called Young.
Luc Wilkinson, musician – Dungeons and Dragons Dice Sets, various
I love all things fantasy. As adults, we don’t often get to truly remove ourselves from reality and indulge in the freedom of make believe. Dungeons and Dragons allows you to do just that: play. It’s fun to bring this game to the space and play with people you’d normally interact with in a professional context. You see different sides of people.
Rhys Coren, artist – Sample of ‘Filter Sweep’, a table by Rhys Coren and Peter Noyce created for the Young Space Garden
‘Filter Sweep’ references feedback loops and resonance, mirroring the cross-pollination at Young Space. This piece is the first of a new series of works, and is created using Italian marble and granites from India and Brazil.
Luke Pryde, manager and A&R – Chess Board
Chess is an unfiltered conversation between two people’s minds, it can tell you a lot about a person and about how they think. It’s a fun way for two minds to come together and challenge each other, not unlike that of Young Space. Every day, we meet new people and are challenged by others’ thoughts and ideas. This brings out the best in people – food for thought nourishes the mind.
Charlie Hedin, co-founder and creative director – Tekla Tekla red mohair blanket, by John Pawson
At its core, the blanket draws from the specific visual memory of a graphic interaction between architectural space and light. Through its function, it transfers feelings of home to Young Space.
Mafruha ‘Maf’ Ahmed, chef, and Nancy Andersen, chef and musician – Rings, St Christopher, Best Friend Charm and Taja Guirey Chain
Wearing jewellery in the kitchen is somewhat forbidden but holds so much identity for myself and Nancy. Whilst cooking at Young Space, we wear our jewellery as a statement of our individualism. The dining room at Young Space is a minimal communal area and, though we take our jewellery off to cook and mix with our hands, we show it off whilst serving lunch, as an extension of our personalities.
Milo Cordell, head of A&R Young and founder Open by Appointment – Jack Lamp by Tom Dixon
The space is a minimalist haven, a place where conversation, community and calm take precedence over anything else. Sometimes I just want to spray paint over all the walls and let the chaos in. I see the lamps as pieces of physical graffiti.
Foundation FM, music label – Butterfly T-shirt designed by Dolly
Dolly’s name kept appearing at Young Space, literally in large type on the leg of her signature baggy shorts. You’d see it worn by radio show guests, by our friends at WORMS publishing and in the kitchen. When we were talking about designers who we should collaborate with, she was first on the list.
Caius Pawson, co-founder and board of trustees chair, Murmur – ClientEarth book This book was co-written by James Thornton, a poet, Zen Buddhist and tough-as-nails climate lawyer. James founded ClientEarth, and both the organisation and the book have been a point of reference and an inspiration for Murmur.
Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, a new release from Inventory Press, pairs Peele’s critically acclaimed screenplay with in-depth annotations from cultural commentators such as artist Theaster Gates. In one of Peele’s iconic scenes, Gates outlines his personal reflections, exploring themes of identity and horror, and how the doppelgänger is used as a lens to examine the self and society’s deepest fractures
Act 3
EXT. BOARDWALK — DAY
Adelaide walks briskly down the empty boardwalk. A few bodies litter the ground.
EXT. BEACH BY BOARDWALK — DAY
In the near distance, a line of people hold hands, facing away from her. The line extends from the water’s edge to past the amusement park and into the distance. One of the men on the line is the man Jason saw earlier. He has the same face as the homeless man who was stabbed in the beginning.
Courtesy of Universal Studios.Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Adelaide turns to the Merlin’s Forest entrance and walks inside.
INT. MERLIN’S FOREST — MIRROR ROOM — DAY
Adelaide walks into the dark maze. It’s the same as before inside. She retraces her steps from twenty-five years earlier. She finds her way to the same corridor where the attack occurred.
Courtesy of Universal Studios.
She walks through the dark opening Young Red came from. She finds a wall and pushes the surface, it opens a crack, and then the door swings open. A white rabbit hops out of the open door at Adelaide’s feet. Adelaide steps over the rabbit and cautiously into the empty dark space. NOTE (This is the location of Gates’ annotation)
INT. CONTROL ROOM — DAY
She’s ready to strike. Inside is a maintenance and technical control room.
At the end of the control room there’s a wall. She pushes it and it opens like a door revealing…
INT. ESCALATOR ROOM(TOP) — DAY
Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Adelaide gets on a downwards escalator.
INT. ESCALATOR — DAY
Adelaide stands and waits. She moves down through the darkness. Eventually she sees light below.
INT. THE UNDERPASS — ESCALATOR LANDING — DAY
Adelaide exits into a room that looks like a corner of an underground mall. She turns a corner into—
INT. THE UNDERPASS — MAIN TUNNEL — DAY
Courtesy of Universal Studios.
The tunnel feels like a publicly funded underground compound. The only beings are rabbits that hop around freely. All the doors are open.
Adelaide walks cautiously, stepping past and over rabbits, down the hallway.
INT. THE UNDERPASS — DAY
She passes the first open door. The cafeteria is empty of people. The rabbit cages are all open and empty. Adelaide keeps walking.
EXT. STREET — DAY
Zora helps Gabe hobble toward the boardwalk. Bodies are scattered. The sun rises. She holds her golf club and Jason’s geode. They get close to the boardwalk. An abandoned ambulance is parked in the street, its rear doors open.
GABE: Here. We can hide here. They got bandages and stuff. Mom knows what to do.
ZORA: Look. It’s the line.
Gabe does. Far head of them is the line of people holding each other’s bloody hands. The line starts at the shore and disappears through the city.
GABE: What is that, some kind of… fucked up performance art?
Courtesy of Universal Studios.Courtesy of Universal Studios.
Zora looks at her dad like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Notes from Theaster Gates
The bunnies, a sign of ongoing scientific experimentation and genetic mutation, are the first things we see as Adelaide descends the escalator to confront her double, Red, and where one of the engrossing complexities of Us takes place. We begin to understand that she has entered a world gone wrong, an industrial underworld of doppelgängers just below the house of mirrors. The bunnies have been released from their cages and the early reflections on this underworld are made more substantial because Adelaide is confronting her adult self. Adelaide’s doppelgänger, Red, speaks, explaining the scientific experiment, the underworld that mimics the things and people above, but in the experiment, those below become mad, unable to live true lives like those above. The doppelgänger says, “God brought us together that night,” and immediately after, we see the biblical quote Jeremiah 11:11, which states, “I am about to bring on them disaster that they cannot escape. They will cry out to me, but I will not hear them.” Adelaide confronts Red as a deconstructed version of “I’ve Got 5 On It” begins to play. This scene is core to my own reflections on Jean Paul’s interpretation of the word doppelgänger which means the one who walks by the side and usually denotes a double or an evil twin. In this scene, we later learn that through a very sophisticated turn of events, Red switches with Adelaide in the house of mirrors when they are young, leaving the original (Adelaide) in the underworld and Red to live in the world above. This turn of events forces me to think about the nature versus nurture debates and the ways the simulacrum within the Black filmic milieu creates its own horror and self-awareness.
When Adelaide’s son, Jason, announces to his parents that there’s a family in the driveway, it is the first moment we realize that Adelaide did not simply have a horrible encounter in her youth, but that her youth continued to grow alongside the family. Adelaide and Red become both synonymous and demonstrative of the ways in which the underworld changes the moralistic and sociological personifications of an individual. Red, who plays the role of the maternal psychopath, is, in fact, simply the by-product of the conditions of the underworld. Whereas Adelaide, who immediately after the switch at the house of mirrors was able to use silence to gain empathy, had the opportunity to understand the full family structure enough that the underworld could infiltrate the real world without any threat.
Theaster Gates is an artist and professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay is available to purchase here.
Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the forthcoming V&A East in London, speaks to Tavares Strachan about his ambitious work, reflecting on the past, the politics of invisibility, and his recent exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
Photography Davey Adésida
OK, imagine that I offered you an art pass – a pass that could allow you to travel to any moment during the last century, to be there for any culturally significant event of your choosing. Dinner with Matisse, Achebe? I can take care of it. Maybe tickets for Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert, or perhaps the final Elgar Cello Concerto of Jacqueline du Pré?
How would you use it? Perhaps you would be there for Miriam Makeba’s triumphant return to South Africa after the unravelling of Apartheid, or maybe join New York’s avant-garde at the legendary 1939 opening of Frida Kahlo’s inaugural exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery? I might go to the opening of the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, when Picasso unveiled Guernica – a vast canvas that graphically captured a moment of mass murder meted out upon a quiet Basque town, forging one of the most effective anti-fascist statements ever made. As women and children gathered in the central square on market day, between 170 and 300 civilians were eviscerated, vaporised by multiple aircrafts. It is a work that can suck the breath from your lungs.
And in an adjacent pavilion at that very same fair, the Norwegian artist, Hannah Ryggen, showed textiles of similar scale that made a similarly devastating impact. Ryggen focused on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. In a series of extraordinary tapestries, she held an unforgiving mirror up to a Western world that had turned its back as a quarter of a million Ethiopian troops were slaughtered trying to defend their nation. Ryggen refused to let us forget that the world did nothing as 78,500 Ethiopian resistance fighters were killed during the occupation, as 17,800 Ethiopian women and children died in the bombing campaign, as 35,000 people lost their lives in concentration camps, as 24,000 men were executed after the war. When 300,000 civilians died in the aftermath, there was only a mild ripple of outrage, and little else. But then, there was Hannah Ryggen.
Two appalling acts and two utterly fearless creative responses to fascism. What must that have been like to witness? One of those rare, rare moments when art does not just reflect the ambient mood, it somehow becomes a prescient bellwether, it hints at things that are yet to come.
1937 might be a high bar, but I would argue that London, 2024, should be on our list too. 2024 has been a truly extraordinary year for the visual arts in London. In a year like 1937, when culture did not reflect our mood, it seemed to gallop ahead and shine a light for us to follow. Against a backdrop of global instability, of bitterly contested racialised-elections, of economic uncertainty, of populism and political polarisation – we were treated to some deeply affecting art. There was a moment over the summer in London when Yinka Shonibare’s exquisite Suspended States was at the Serpentine, The Time is Always Now had opened at the National Portrait Gallery, there was a James Baldwin season at the Barbican, Joy Labinjo bestrode the Camden Arts Centre, Zanele Muholi’s work graced Tate Modern, Ernest Cole at the Photographers Gallery, Nick Cave, Ghada Amer and Yinka Shonibare in Cork Street – and so it went on. Commercial, national, independent galleries were all celebrating artists of African descent. Not in a coordinated season, just a timely response of near ubiquitous programming: the British art establishment reflecting on long overdue questions of equity, race, identity and the legacies of empire. A moment when a whole sector simply said, we cannot continue to remain silent.
And amongst that astounding body of work spread across an unforgettable year, the practice of Tavares Strachan lingers in the mind. This is work that does that bigger thing of not just making us think, but encouraging us to dream. Strachan is an artist who understands history and emotional damage – he’s spent time not just mapping the past, but reflecting on how its shadow continues to corrupt and contaminate our world. And whilst his work is robust, disciplined, impactful – he somehow also gives us desperately needed comfort. He throws an arm around us. ‘We are in this together,’ encourages one neon text piece, while another states ‘You Belong Here’. And I believe him.
In February of 2024, the Royal Academy of Arts opened Entangled Pasts, Art, Colonialism and Change. In RA tradition, it was both a magnificent historical survey and formidable sweep of contemporary practice. But unusually for the institution, it was uncompromising in its confrontation of issues of empire, race, distorted narratives and pervasive legacies of that past. And as a greeting in the courtyard of Burlington House (a Neo-Palladian temple that houses the Royal Academy), in a spot that could be seen by anyone who walked or drove up Piccadilly, the curators sited Tavares Strachan’s The First Supper: an unforgettable reinterpretation of da Vinci’s enigmatic The Last Supper. In the The First Supper, an animated Haile Selassie sits in the space taken by da Vinci’s Christ – his disciples are Mary Seacole, Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman and other heroes and heroines of Black history – and the place of Judas is taken by Strachan himself. Life size, cast in bronze and finished in black and gilt, it is an astonishing object.
The First Supper (Galaxy Black) (2023) is a bronze sculpture by Tavares Strachan, measuring 85 1/2 × 365 5/8 × 105 1/2 in. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin, from the Glenstone Museum Collection, Potomac, Maryland. Installation view in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts. Photo by Jonty Wilde
When I ask Tavares why he chose to take the seat as Judas in this tableau, his answer surprises me. “Judas was born to be a traitor,” he says. It was his destiny – and yet, he was forever blamed for playing a preordained role in fulfilling Christ’s purpose. Christ’s message was about his own sacrifice, but Judas also had to sacrifice himself for the Christian narrative to be tenable. “What choice did Judas have?” Strachan asks. “I like thinking about him as a kind of hero. Without him, the crucifixion and Christianity do not really happen.” And that was the moment when I fell for Strachan’s work. This is art for the rest of us. This is art for those whose destiny was not to end up on the plinth; it is for those whose histories were conventionally not taught in schools or celebrated in traditional libraries. This is an arm around your shoulder – You Belong Here.
Strachan is an unusual man. Although his work is a vivid map of contemporary concerns, he is, in so many ways, of another age. He is the sort of complete artist-intellectual who would have been successful in the 16th or 17th centuries. He has worked in varied creative media from lost-wax bronze casting to drawing, from video to photography, from installation to fashion, with artworks sitting at the fascinating intersection of art, science and technology. As he beautifully puts it, “I need to think poetically about the world, but I also need to think scientifically about the world.” He is interested in how things work as much as what they mean and how they look and is keen to deconstruct our understanding of the things we take for granted.
You Belong Here (2014) is a mobile neon installation by Tavares Strachan that travelled down the Mississippi River via a barge as part of the Prospect.3 Biennale. 30 ft × 80 ft on 100-ft barge. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo by Joe Vincent Grey
But he is also an uncompromising explorer. His curiosity has taken him to the Arctic four times, he has travelled to the North Pole, journeyed to the bottom of oceans and is one of a tiny number of people who have been trained to leave the orbit of the earth and travel beyond the pull of its gravity. He even founded scientific research platform BASEC (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) to develop the technologies to further satisfy his appetite for tackling these old-new frontiers. And as you might guess with Strachan, even the equipment and accoutrements that he sourced and designed for these expeditions was utterly exquisite and covet-worthy. And so, in 2024 he began to retail his BASEC wear as a clothing line. In London, it is stocked by stores like Dover Street Market.
Perhaps, at heart, he is a figure of the 21st century – a cultural cartographer, a collector, interrogator and investigator of histories, someone who questions the systems and accepts axioms upon which we base our understanding of the world. He is unafraid to suggest beautiful alternatives and build the knowledge systems and narratives to respond to the most telling questions of identity, history and race. Strachan dedicated a decade to creating a vast leather-bound volume that shines a light on the overlooked and forgotten areas of knowledge. He called it The Encyclopedia of Invisibility. As he explains, “I think it just started off with a very simple question: if everything in the world had somewhere to go, then where were the things that didn’t have a place?” This is a kind of fascinating query, but once probed, how could you not want it to be answered? “And then I just thought, what if the project grew and grew and grew? I didn’t imagine it would get as big as it has. Now, we’re 3,000-plus pages and over 17,000-plus entries.” And, of course, it is spellbindingly beautiful.
Strachan is an indefatigable force, voraciously taking on new and complex projects that sometimes require new training and knowledge or might even incur great personal risk. But almost everything he engages with seems to deliver astonishing output. “I am always making,” Strachan says, “and I think that if I didn’t have those outlets, maybe some of that impetus to come up with stuff might manifest itself in my mental health. So, I will just keep making things up, even though there’s nothing to make up.” And perhaps that empathic, beautiful, contagious drive is why one of Strachan’s great inspirations is Matthew Henson, the earliest Black Arctic explorer. As Tavares explains, Henson was a hero, an “avid sailor and an explorer. And this was in 1909, which meant, in America, (as an African American) you’re on the brink of slavery. So embarking on these perilous endeavours set you within a treacherous framework.” Henson possessed an odd, almost supernatural drive to take on marathon-scale things. He began life as a cabin boy but is thought by many to have crossed Greenland and reached the North Pole. Understandably, Henson is one of the guests invited to join the pantheon of Black heroes in Strachan’s The First Supper scene. Henson takes a seat to the left of Haile Selassie, visually connected to the figure that is based upon Strachan at the top of the table. They both wear hoods and face in opposite directions, linked by symmetry and spirit.
Photography Davey Adésida
Whilst Tavares might need to create, in a world on fire, I think we also need Strachan. When Derek Chauvin knelt upon George Floyd’s neck, there was confidence with which he did so – the desire to ensure Floyd’s complete supplication and utter silence, even beyond the moment when George stopped asking to stand up, beyond the stage when he ceased pleading for a breath, beyond that heart-chilling moment when he called for his mother, beyond the point when George’s body let go, the knee remained. That pathological confidence was based upon a deep, hard, bedrock of prejudice that will require profound effort to challenge. Perhaps the reason that Chauvin was so assured in his actions was because he felt he was acting on our behalf. And what do we do in the face of that? Well, Strachan offers us a beautifully crafted conceptual corrective toolbox with the power to engender pride, to furnish us with missing histories and omitted context, and to perhaps make us feel a little braver in the face of the ambient craziness. “I’m just so elated to be an artist making artwork at a time when we’re saying, ‘Enough of that bullshit,’” he says. “I am making work that creates a new kind of proposal, that is reflective of the kinds of experiences that people living in a non-western reality are constantly living.”
Strachan was born in the Bahamas in 1979. “I was raised by a lot of Rastas,” he tells me, “and for us the Western world does not have the authority to steal any history. Every art form over the last 200 years has been created as the result of something being taken away. And the universe then gives these groups the tools to create new art forms.” The Bahamas is one of the most beautiful parts of the world, but as Tavares acknowledges, “I am coming from a place where there was this kind of desert, this emptiness of resource.” And anyone who has visited the Bahamas will understand what he means. The Bahamas is naturally blessed, but not a place that has a space programme or an exploration centre. Tavares was, from a young age, deeply determined to use whatever means he could to acquire the skills, tools and gain the experience that he craved.
It felt right that in this particular auspicious year of global climacteric that the Hayward Gallery would dedicate an exhibition to Strachan; three floors that included his monumental heads, galleries of terracotta, his vast encyclopaedia and delicate neon signs. There is Light Somewhere is an extraordinary mid-career statement; it traverses and deconstructs art history, with work inspired by ancient cultures, by vast empires and the migration of millions. “I think we’ve exhausted the ideology of modernism,” says Strachan. The reactions to the exhibition have been extraordinary. As Strachan tells me, “I was dumbfounded by the number of people who were in tears, because as someone making the work behind the curtain, I think to a certain extent, I’m a little bit desensitised to the kind of emotional punch that the work may deliver.” As you climb the last few stairs onto the top floor of the Hayward Gallery exhibition, the space opens up and out. And after the intense, almost domestic intimacy of smaller spaces beneath, suddenly you feel like an explorer, cresting a mountain through clouds. You wander amongst a pantheon of ceramic afroed deities, there is daylight and the rooftops and the distant London skyline. It allows for an exhalation of breath, before the wind is again sucked from your lungs by another incongruously beautiful thing. On the balcony outside the gallery, there’s a large-scale model of a ship silhouetted against the sky; a replica of the SS Yarmouth, the flagship of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line (a Black-owned shipping line that was founded after the First World War). “You know, we talk a lot about how society needs to change, right?” exclaims Tavares, before I say goodbye. “It’s not just about society itself needing to change. I think the framework by which we judge, manage and imagine society also needs to change. I think that putting the boat on the roof is just a way to offer an unexpected narrative.” That is impossible to argue with. 2024 was a year when artists spoke with great eloquence of deeply acculturated and embedded patterns of problematic thinking, but they also found ways of getting so many of us to look up and out – and perhaps to set sail for new horizons.
As machines continue to shape our world, what will become of the role of the artist? In light of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, we explore how artists continue to adapt and create sensory experiences that reflect the human condition
Photography Dan Tobin Smith
In his 1972 bestseller Ways of Seeing, John Berger explored how the invention of the camera changed the way people viewed art. His work underlined how different technologies hold the capacity to alter our perception of the world and our experience of it. This autumn, the Tate Modern presents an expansive new exhibition, Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet curated by Val Ravaglia, which lays out the landscape of innovation across optical, kinetic, programmed, and digital art that has paved the way for our present day.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the desire for regeneration in the 1950s was strong, and artistic groups such as ZERO sprang from the ashes of destruction. Founded by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, ZERO was about starting over with a focus on using new media and materials, repurposing mediums like metal and light, and using them for non-utilitarian means. In Piene’s various ‘light ballets,’ the German artist surrounds viewers in a continuous orchestration to create new sensory experiences. “We want to exhibit in the sky,” he wrote, “not in order to establish there a new art world, but rather to enter new space peacefully – that is, freely, playfully and actively, not as slaves of war technology.” Artist collectives were eager to rewrite the rules; in the Netherlands, it was the Nul Group, and in Japan, it was the Gutai, an avant-garde group daring to go beyond traditional notions of art. As Japan grappled with the modernization of electricity, Gutai member Atsuko Tanaka took this tension and played it out over her own body. In Electric Dress (1956) her face emerged from a 50kg cluster of lights suspended from the ceiling, quivering with energy, pulsating in flashes, inspired by the shimmering neon of an Osaka station pharmaceutical advert. Her body, like the landscape of her country, became unrecognizable, overwhelmed, and subsumed. For another Gutai member, Tatsuo Miyajima, his Lattice B (1990), presented a landscape over which time itself was interrogated, with an eight-metre-long wall installation of flashing LED lights providing the unseen element with a witnessable rhythm.
While technologies can provide the means of developing new visual languages, they can also appear fully formed. British artist Suzanne Treister deployed the aesthetics of early computer games and made them her own. Inspired by impatiently waiting for her boyfriend to finish playing at amusement arcades, she created Fictional Videogame Stills (1991–92) to explore larger questions about life and society: “I wasn’t particularly seduced by video games or computers at the time,” she penned in her essay, ‘Videogames and Art’, “but I felt I had to deal with them as they were not going to go away.” Similarly, Palestinian-American artist Samia Halaby was already an accomplished abstract painter when she purchased an Amiga 1000 computer in the mid-1980s and taught herself how to code, creating mesmerising abstract digital animations that would become known as her ‘kinetic paintings.’
Art often requires experimentation and invention, a curiosity that impels the discovery and creation of something new. Yet artists aren’t simply co-opting technologies; at times, they’ve also been the ones inventing them. Setting aside the likes of Da Vinci, we can look to the British-Canadian artist Brion Gysin, whose homemade mechanical device, Dreamachine no.9 (1960–76), creates captivating kaleidoscopic patterns, or the American artist Rebecca Allen, who developed cutting-edge motion-capture and 3D modeling techniques in the 1980s.
Photography Dan Tobin Smith
As technology becomes more integrated into our lives, the vital power of the artist in identifying and questioning its role has become ever more important as technology evolves. Berger’s bestseller was ruminating on ideas that had already been articulated by Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). The anxiety of AI now provides similar fodder. “People underestimate just how flexible human creativity is,” Ravaglia notes. “There is a tendency to forget that the debates on machines making artists redundant is at least as old as the invention of photography… but creativity simply adapted to the conditions of image-making in the age of mechanical reproduction, and artists will no doubt continue to find ways to articulate new languages through new technological media.”
Before photography, Berger outlines, art had always existed within a physical space, “a place, in which, or for which, the work was made,” and thus the experience of art itself had been one of ritual “set apart from the rest of life.” It is interesting to note how many artists who harness new technologies now seek to create this same transient physical experience. Rather than a painting that can be photographed and photocopied, instead the emphasis becomes on the ephemeral nature of experience itself, the irreproducible identity of time: the effect of a light dancing upon a wall; the ripples of a portrait in a digital pool; a flash of electricity. It is precisely in the evasiveness of art – the ability of technologies to recreate a sense of awe and true situated experience – where we find the raw feeling of humanity and mortality reignited. In its mechanised methodology, technology ironically cannot help but underscore how artworks are activated by their creator and later their audiences, lying dormant until a witness comes to complete them. After all, without the beating heart, that human electricity, those excitable ions that form life itself, there would be no art at all.
Anthony Daley on the language of beauty and art as a portal to the infinite
The abstract-expressionist painter Anthony Daley produces transcendent works that tip a nod to the genius of the Old Masters while, simultaneously, communicating something vital and contemporary. Since his graduation from the Chelsea College of Arts in the early 80s, he has been increasingly celebrated for his ability to create overwhelming canvases that engage the viewer in a compelling dialogue between the self and the infinite, straddling traditional painting and the dynamic language of modern art in the process.
His upcoming solo show Irreality with Varvara Roza Galleries is no exception, inviting the viewer on a deep dive into reflection upon the inner landscape of being via a wildly explosive colour palette. In this exclusive interview with PORT, the Jamaican-born artist reveals his youthful fascination with mathematics and cosmology, finding wonder in everything from a Newtonian equation to a falling leaf, and tells us why play is the ultimate expression of individual freedom.
Where did the desire to create art initially stem from?
That a very big question with a lifetime of answers, isn’t it? I mean, I’ve made art of some kind from as early as I can remember. One of my earliest memories is one of my relatives coming to show my grandmother a carving of a bird they were very proud of. I thought it didn’t look anything like any of the birds I had ever seen, and I immediately ran off into the woods to go and find some wood to carve a better bird. As a kid in Jamaica, I was always battling with all the artists in the community, as well as all the artists and thinkers in the books at my grandparents’ house, and trying to be better, or as good, as them. From a very young age, I had a fascination with all the geniuses in the world – not just painters, but philosophers and scientists – and the one that fascinated me more than anybody else was Isaac Newton. As a child, I was like a little Newton in my mind, and I was constantly making little experiments.
It’s so interesting that you were initially drawn to science…
I was also always really interested in The Book of Genesis. I remember being in church one day, and the preacher talking about God and the origin of the galaxy, and trying to twist astronomy into religion. He was showing us a picture of a spiral galaxy, and trying to tell us that somehow God made it, and I just remember thinking, there’s a triangulation of thought here, and no real truth to what he is saying. I remember going to sleep that night and just thinking that it was nonsense, and that I didn’t want to believe in God any more. In the morning, I woke up and ran down to look at the spiral in our little river in the garden, and I was really interested in the connection between the two of them – the spiral galaxy and this little whirlpool.
It sounds like you were aware of a deeper reality at a very young age, or a sense of wonder.
I became obsessed with the origin of beauty very early on, and quite obsessed with the meaning of beauty. As a child, I used to go into the bushes and look up through the leaves at the gaps in in the canopy, and the water falling through when it rained, and the little bowls of water, and tiny rainbows, and stuff like that. I used to go off by myself a lot, and I used to enjoy that. Where we lived in Jamaica until I was seven-and-a-half years old, we had a river in the back garden with great big boulders, so I used to go and sit on them and just imagine all sorts of things. It was a kind of reverie really, and I suppose what still plays out in all my work is a kind of reverie and reverence of beauty. It’s all basically to do with the origins of life.
Are you drawn to that notion ‘truth is beauty, beauty is truth’ as espoused by John Keats?
I suppose I’m trying to understand truth. I knew there was no absolute truth early on, but I loved the idea of inventing truth, inventing reality – doing experiments and getting things right. In my painting, I think that’s always been the drive. By the time I was nine years old, I was obsessed with the idea of universal beauty, and I just wanted to try to pursue it – beauty and truth, but also the scientific truth of beauty, wherever, and whatever that was. By the time I started school in Jamaica, I was already too bright for school, quite frankly, because I had educated myself. I had also decided for some reason that
I wasn’t going to get a Jamaican accent, and all those kinds of things. I don’t know how it happened, but I did make these decisions as a kid, and I just painted and read books all the time. I felt I had just found the truth in drawing.
How would you define beauty?
Well, for me, it’s about the beautiful minds of certain people – every so often individuals are born, and they just seem to have these great minds. And that is true across the board. Creativity has nothing to do with art, and it’s not just contained in art – it’s also about maths, physics, geometry, music. I love the beauty of Einstein’s equations, for example, and the way they’re connected with art. There’s always a time when there seems to almost be a surge of thinking across disciplines, and they seem to connect a collective consciousness and push things forward. I really love that. And I love the way a painting you are making has its origins from nowhere, then, as it evolves, it becomes like a collective of consciousness – it’s extraordinary, like magic.
How would you describe the relationship between an abstract artwork and the viewer?
I think it’s to do with acceptance, or maybe a sense of joining forces and becoming one. Painting does a lot of that stuff. The world can sometimes feel very closed out, on one level, for me. But, at the same time, your mind is always connected with everything you have ever read or seen or learned, so there’s a battle for supremacy of ideas going on upon the canvas. When I was younger, it was all about trying to identify beauty in all things, and then that coming through to the painting. But, at some stage in my 30s, I realised that the idea of universal beauty is a bit of a myth, and that it’s all about the individual, and about seeing the universal through the individual, and also seeing all things through one painting. That’s how I see it. When someone looks at the work, and a connection is made, it’s really quite magical. By definition, you’re making a painting that is of nothing, particularly, because it’s an abstract painting that has a kind of personal language, and a connection with the history of painting. Then, when you stick it on the wall, and somebody comes along and understands it, or creates an understanding of it, it has become kind of a portal. I love that connection with the viewer trying to define and play with reality, because there is a reality to a painting and, for me, it is the same reality that you get from looking into infinite space, or trying to explain the origins of galaxies. An abstraction is not a painting of nothing. It’s everything and nothing, and I love that paradox and contradiction. I like to think my paintings have that sense that you can venture into them – you can walk into these spaces and explore, and go into places of wonder.
Art history has long celebrated male artists while overlooking women’s contributions. The Guggenheim Bilbao’s exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s revolutionary work is a crucial step in rebalancing the narrative
In 1971, Linda Nochlin asked: “Why have there been no great women artists?” Nochlin argued that greatness has long been seen as the domain of so-called ‘geniuses’ – almost always white, male and privileged – while women were held back by structural barriers. Denied formal training and entry into male-dominated guilds, women artists were excluded from art’s major institutions and, consequently, from history itself. While the question itself is flawed, it remains strikingly relevant today, with institutions beginning to confront these historical exclusions.
Over centuries, patriarchal norms confined women to domestic roles, limiting their ability to pursue art professionally. Even when women were able to study art, they were often restricted to subjects deemed appropriate for their gender, such as portraiture or still life, rather than grand historical or monumental works. Art academies, galleries and museums – spaces where an artist’s career could flourish – were also controlled by men. Women’s work was rarely exhibited, and they were excluded from major competitions and commissions. Additionally, art criticism and scholarship were, and in many ways still are, dominated by men. These gatekeepers shaped art history by documenting and celebrating the work of male artists, while ignoring or downplaying the contributions of women.
Even when women did achieve some level of recognition during their lifetimes, their work was often neglected in archives and historical accounts. Artemisia Gentileschi was an acclaimed Baroque painter whose powerful work reflected a distinctly female perspective. Yet, her contributions were largely forgotten for centuries. And Judith Leyster, a Dutch Golden Age painter, was also overshadowed by her male contemporaries.
The rediscovery of women artists began in the late 20th century, with scholars and curators working to reclaim the lost legacies of these women. The feminist art movement of the 1960s and 70s was also crucial in highlighting the achievements of artists like Lee Krasner, who was often overshadowed by her husband, Jackson Pollock, despite her significant contributions to Abstract Expressionism. And one of the most significant rediscoveries is Hilma af Klint. Her abstract works, created years before those of Kandinsky and Mondrian, were dismissed during her lifetime due to a combination of societal norms and her own secrecy about her art. af Klint was deeply influenced by spiritualism, and she believed her work was meant for future generations, instructing that much of it remain unseen for 20 years after her death. By the time her paintings were revealed, the narrative of modern abstraction had already been written, and male artists were credited as its pioneers.
Despite her groundbreaking work, the patriarchal structures of the art world kept her contributions in the shadows. It wasn’t until much later, with the growing influence of feminist art historians, that af Klint’s work began to receive recognition. Her major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 2018, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, was a landmark in rewriting art history to include her contributions. And today, af Klint’s work continues to gain traction, with exhibitions around the world showcasing her as a pivotal figure in the development of abstract art. The most recent exhibition at the Guggenheim Bilbao, curated by Lucía Agirre and Tracey Bashkoff, presents her as a pioneer who predated many male modernists, evidenced through the most comprehensive study of af Klint’s oeuvre to date. As the museum’s director Juan Ignacio Vidarte said at the show’s press conference, the show is a “recovery” of the artist, and an effort in “placing her where she should be: as a trailblazer of modern extraction”.
The show is also revealing new insights through previously unseen letters, journals and drawings, which help decode the complex symbolism in her work. Much was influenced by her background in mathematics, cartography and her deep spiritual beliefs. “af Klint also left behind hundreds of notebooks in which she meticulously documented her work,” said Agirre. “These notebooks are like dictionaries, helping us decode the meaning behind her symbols and letters. With a background in mathematics and cartography, her works can be seen as elaborate maps of spiritual journeys. There is still much to uncover and understand about af Klint’s work, making it continually fresh and groundbreaking even after all these years.”
One such discovery is the story of how af Klint met with Rudolf Steiner in 1908, the leader of the Theosophical Society in Germany, who af Klint thought of as the most prominent spiritual leaders of the time. He was lecturing in Stockholm and af Klint invited him to see her paintings, hoping for some positive feedback. Only he didn’t understand her work, advising that ‘no one must see this for 50 years’. It’s been recorded that this is what caused af Klint to pause her practice until she returned in 1915. However, according to the new letters on display in Guggenheim Bilbao, this meeting happened two years later than previously mentioned. She in fact stopped working before then, making this point in history obsolete. “There were many reasons for this break, including the dissolution of her group The Five, her mother going blind, and moving house. While Steiner’s visit might have affected her, it wasn’t the direct cause of her pause,” said Agirre.
There are many more notable discoveries to be found throughout this exhibition. As you enter, you’re immediately met with her early automatic drawings which she made with The Five. This group of women were from spiritualist and suffragist circles – Anna Cassel, Cornelia Cederberg, Sigrid Hedman and Mathilda Nilsson – they’d practise weekly séances and would work collaboratively – “which gave women a greater voice,” said Agirre. “While some automatic drawings were done in collaboration, with other women present during séances, af Klint herself held the pencil in most cases. We believe the works are primarily hers, but collaboration certainly played a role in the process. If this were a male artist, we might not even be asking these questions.”
Next, viewers will observe the Paintings for the Temple series, which began in 1917 (or potentially later) and comprises a total of 193 paintings, drawings and sub-series informed by her relationship to the spiritual world (more on this series can be found here). Deeply influenced by Theosophy (she was a member of the Swedish Lodge of the Theosophical Society), af Klint believed that her works were guided by higher forces and that her role as an artist was to translate these spiritual messages into visual form, asserting unity, wholeness or holiness as the end goal – a search for a divine singularity that was lost when the world was created.
The exhibition then opens into a spacious part of the gallery showcasing her monumental sub-series, The Ten Largest, which is part of Paintings for the Temple. Here, 10 large-scale pieces that are more than 3-metres tall are lined up in a purposefully ordered fashion, exploring the stages of life through her symbolic use of colour coding. On the left, the series begins in shades of blue to represent childhood, before becoming more vivid and colourful in youth and adulthood, then finishing in washed-out shades of beige – the end of life. The swirling forms and floral motifs suggest growth and transformation, while the more rigid, abstract squares portray a sense of ageing and conclusivity. af Klint’s use of gendered symbolism becomes especially striking in this body of work, in which blue is used to represent femininity and yellow for masculinity. She’d also blend these colours to create green, a symbol of unity – a nod to her beliefs in Theosophy.
In another room, her The Swan series, which is also part of her Paintings for the Temple, af Klint presents a series of dualities – light and dark, masculine and feminine, body and spirit – through the symbol of the swan. Swans are used here to represent the process of uniting opposites, and the series progresses from more representational depictions of swans to increasingly abstract, geometric forms. In the end, they become one. Inequality obliterated.
Through colour and form. af Klint critiqued the societal limitations placed on women in the early 20th century and envisioned a world where these divisions could be eclipsed. She was utterly aware that her abstract, spiritually infused paintings were ahead of their time, both in the way of innovation and in their underlying messages about gender and connectivity. But are they ready now? We can still look to the question of “Why have there been no great women artists?” with great frustration, but there are certainly steps being made. By acknowledging these contributions to the canon, and by correcting the exclusion of women like af Klint, we can begin to provide a more inclusive account of art history. And as more women’s voices are included in the narrative, our understanding of art itself becomes richer, more diverse – and more truthful.
In their debut UK solo show at the Serpentine, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst explore how AI can become an active collaborator in human creativity
Portrait courtesy Herndon Dryhurst Studio
We all know that AI is reshaping creativity in ways that are both exciting and uneasy. On one hand it streamlines tasks once considered solely for the human hand – writing, composing music, creating art. On the other, artists are now competing with machines capable of mimicking their styles, while filmmakers and animators are being priced out of their jobs by tools that quickly generate images and scenes without human input. Music is also feeling the influence, with AI-driven systems composing melodies, cloning artists’ voices or engaging in traditional practices like ‘call and response’ – a vocal technique that works like a conversation, which has been used for centuries to build community, preserve stories and share information across the ages, whether in work, rituals or protests. But now, we don’t even need a singer to do the singing.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst (of Herndon Dryhurst Studio) are long-term collaborators and partners, working at the centre – or perhaps the sweet spot – of AI and human experience. Music, art and tech tends to be their bread and butter, of which they’ve developed numerous projects that tussle with the idea of who and what should be creating art, often handing that role to the machine. Herndon, for example, is known for using AI in her music and blending her voice with the algorithm; Dryhurst is a researcher and technologist interested in how tech can reshape creative practices. Together, they’ve created Spawn, an AI vocal ensemble trained on Herndon’s voice, which debuted in 2016 on her album PROTO. Another key project, Holly+, allows users to manipulate Herndon’s voice via deepfake technology.
Their latest project, The Call, expands on these themes and is being presented in their debut UK solo show at Serpentine North, running until February 2025. Developed in collaboration with Serpentine Arts Technologies, the project involves AI models trained on datasets of hymns and singing exercises from 15 UK-based community choirs. Just as call and response historically built collective experiences, AI is used to augment human creativity and as a tool for collective creation. This begs the question: what happens when machines become part of these deeply human traditions?
By making AI an active participant in the creative process, The Call opens up an entirely new conversation about authorship and agency in the age of AI. Below, Port chats with Herndon and Dryhurst about the project’s development, its collaborative nature and the ongoing conversations surrounding AI’s role in creativity.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions
Port: What are the current societal concerns with AI and how have you addressed them in this show?
Herndon and Dryhurst: People are concerned about data provenance, model ownership, IP, creative displacement and human agency. We hope to address those issues with our practice in art and AI and this show.
Why pair with music? Can you explain how the process of training AI models with choirs became an art form in itself?
We like the choir analogy to AI as group singing is an example of early human coordination technology that produces emergent effects. We see AI models similarly, collective creative accomplishments that produce results greater than the sum of their parts. It’s important to situate AI as part of a much longer historical arc of coordination and expression. It is very human. Artificial means made by humans. AI is just us, coordinated in peculiar ways.
How did it all come together, can you give some specific details around the process/creation?
We’re thinking of the creation of the data, the training of the model, and its output all as works of art. For the show, our idea was to collectively train an AI model. This is important for a couple of reasons. People will be able to interact with the model, get an interesting insight into how a model is put together, but also the people who are contributing to the model will be able to govern and have some self-determination over their data moving forward.
We spent months training a choral AI model on voices from 15 choirs based throughout the UK and creating a training protocol to accurately capture these voices throughout the tour. The audio was captured in multichannel using ambisonic mics, lavalier mics, and a four-channel surround – not only to have really great audio that we can play back in the gallery, but also for the model itself. We can then create many different mixes from all of these channels and then create more data for an even more high-fidelity model.
The songbook created can then be used by other people to train their own models. So really thinking about the full range of things necessary to train an AI model fairly and openly has been a big part of the project. The reason we describe it as a protocol is that this is something that can be picked up and taken by others.
The concept of ‘call and response’ plays a big role in this exhibition. Why did you choose this as a framework?
Singing practices such as call and response have helped to build spaces and structures for gathering, processing and transmitting information. Group singing is one of our oldest coordination technologies and we wanted to take inspiration for the show to explore what new protocols we want to nurture for the newest of our coordination technologies, AI. We are inspired by the UK’s rich choral tradition, putting out a call to invite choirs across the country to perform music from a new songbook that contains musical exercise and hymns that we specially developed for the purpose of training the AI model to synthesize the sound of a choir singing.
With audience participation being a key element, how do you think involving the public in these choral models impacts their perception of AI?
Choirs, and many religious practices, serve a convening role for people to check in with one another and discuss matters. The hope is that by showing all steps of the model creation process people become more curious about the field. The training recordings served the purpose of capturing voices for the model, but also became nice opportunities to speak about how people feel about these new developments.
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst conducting a recording session with London Contemporary Voices in London, 2024. Courtesy: Foreign Body Productions
Your work positions AI as a tool for empowerment rather than extraction. How do you see artists maintaining control and agency over their work in an AI-driven world?
We started a company with some friends to address this matter, and will have some open models this year to help people take more control over their work and identity in this new landscape. We follow the principle we invented with Holly+, where artists should encourage people to build on their work and identity, but do so by offering their own models and protocols for interacting with them. It will soon not be strange to interact with a consenting model of someone.
How do you see AI influencing or reshaping art/art making in the future?
We think AI is a bigger deal than the internet, but it is hard to make specific predictions. What we can say is that it is unlikely our media environments or habits will stay the same, and so now is a great time for artists to get involved in imagining different ways to make and share art, and themselves, with others. This is a great time for art because the future is uncertain, so there is a lot of room for artists to have ideas.
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-1998, an exhibition organised by the Barbican in collaboration with the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, explores pivotal moments in India’s socio-political history through nearly 150 artworks. Below, assistant curator Amber Li highlights five standout pieces from the show, each revealing powerful narratives of identity, resistance and change during late-20th century India
This epic painting captures a crowd moving through a busy alley, located off an important road in Mumbai where Gieve Patel worked as a doctor.
Across the painting, men and women stand or squat in small groups to talk. On the right, musicians accompany young people dancing, some dressed in colourful clothes. Celebration is side-by-side with destitution: two bandaged, leprous children beg for alms, and a woman lies naked and bleeding in the foreground. Patel’s work often depicts people on the fringes of society. The painterliness with which these figures are portrayed verges on abstraction, conveying the transience of the crowd.
Madhvi Parekh’s oil paintings provide, for her, a way back to the idyll of village life. They depict remembered landscapes from both her childhood village of Sanjaya, Gujarat, and her subsequent travels. She painted Village Opera-2 after attending an artist’s camp organised by artist G. R. Santosh in Kashmir in 1975. The copper pots she saw there inspired the black anthropomorphic figures at the centre of this work. Working first with oil paint, Parekh then used oil pastels to add small, vibrant creatures which resemble birds, fish, snakes and amphibians. The scene floats in a colourful net of dots and lines, patterns drawn from the folk crafts of Rangoli and embroidery that she had practised as a child.
Arpita Singh’s monumental painting, My Mother, records the chaos of communal violence exploding across India in the early 1990s. The artist’s mother looms dignified and stoic in the foreground, while militiamen in bottle-green uniforms enact scenes of devastation behind. Shrouded bodies line the streets and victims lie stripped on the ground.
Singh had started work on a portrait of her mother when riots erupted in Bombay (Mumbai). Unable to keep these two elements from spilling into one another, the painting represents collapsing boundaries between home and nation, private and public, and the real and the imagined.
Vivan Sundaram, House, 1994, from the series Shelter, 1994-99 Photo by Gireesh G.V. Photo courtesy The Estate of Vivan Sundaram
Vivan Sundaram – House, 1994
Vivan Sundaram was concerned throughout his career with the urgency of using art to confront political realities. After the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a 16th century mosque, by right-wing Hindu militants in 1992 and the ensuing Hindu-Muslim communal violence in the early 1990s, Sundaram, like some other artists at this time, turned towards making installations. The walls are made from handmade paper, derived from a handmade fibre called Khadi which Mahatma Gandhi promoted as an indigenous fabric which symbolised anti-colonialism. Although the walls are thin and fragile, they are also a call to resistance against violence and a commitment to peace.
Nalini Malani made this work in response to nuclear tests carried out by the Indian government in Pokhran, in the Rajasthan desert in 1998. In this installation, a woman from Pakistan and a woman from India fail to fold a sari together while footage plays of the aftermath of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The video installation builds on Toba Tek Singh, a short story by Pakistani author and playwright Saadat Hasan Manto about forced displacement during Partition, which you hear Malani reading from in the film.
The work conveys the artist’s searing anger at India’s nuclear tests, and at the absurdity and senselessness of ‘one set of people killing the other only because there is some land that you want, or there is some religion that is considered to be more superior than the other’.
The best part of the recent Wallace Collection exhibition, Portraits of Dogs: From Gainsborough to Hockney, was an entire room devoted to David Hockney and his two beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. The artist’s portraits of the duo cover the red walls: lolling over cushions, napping on each other’s velvety stomachs, legs stuck in the air at protractor angles. A video depicting the trouble Hockney went through to try and capture the dogs – setting up easels around his house to try and capture them in their natural state, cajoling them back when they ran towards him or wandered off – played nearby. In total, Hockney made 45 dog portraits, which he compiled into his 1995 exhibition, Dog Days, and which have become some of his best-loved works.
It felt fitting, then, to follow up the exhibition with a visit to George, the newly renovated private members’ club in Mayfair. Long known as particularly dog-friendly, the club has now gone one step further and introduced its own canine mascot: a dachshund named George (of course). He even serves as the model for the club’s new logo, a characterful monochrome line drawing printed on napkins and teacups. In real-life, George was found snuggled on a diminutive sofa near the entrance, nose tucked between paws, scopious body ensconced in a knitted jumper. And on the way down to the fittingly named Hound Bar, a subterranean Art Deco cocktail bar-cum-nightclub, sculptor Jill Berelowitz was commissioned to create a bronze relief of a dachshund, its doleful eyes fixed on revellers as they descend the stairs.
But a shared enthusiasm for dogs isn’t the only link George has to Hockney. In fact, the club could double up as a mini gallery for the artist. Taking a tour around the dining room and hallways of the ground-floor space, the works offer a unique insight into Hockney’s artistic journey throughout the decades, from the fragmented lithographs of the late 1970s to the impressionistic iPad drawings of the 2010s. It’s a long-standing relationship – even before the refurb, George had a myriad of works by Hockney (including some of the dachshund portraits), as well as a host by Hirst, Emin and other assorted members of the Young British Artists.
With the new works, George seems to be signalling the arrival of a more playful, dynamic atmosphere. This is a space reborn: respectful to its past, but excited for its future. The choice of the Hockney paintings reflects this. Take, for example, ‘Still Life, 2017’, a large-scale work that I found hung across from the bar. The piece marries the absurd with the domestic, as brightly coloured shapes – mountains? fountains? – are placed on and around coloured rugs. The setting is a geometric hinterland, part-house, part-swimming pool, part-gallery, and the grid-like patterns on the walls offset the chaotic riot of form and colour contained within. It’s a prime example of Hockney’s fascination with ‘reverse perspective’, where multiple viewpoints are contained within the same shape, an idea emphasised by its placement on a panelled, mirrored wall.
This experiment with structure – a deconstruction of the familiar lines of the household space – seems to exist in conversation with a different work, ‘Two Red Chairs and Table, March 1986’. Rendered only in three bold colours, blue, green and red, the painting depicts some kind of porch or veranda, the greens of the foliage framed by the grid-like lines of the structure. On the decking, there are two chairs, a table and a headless person, all laid out in a line. All of these things are drawn in red, and only the human figure is solid – stare at them too long, and they start to look like symbols, like hieroglyphs. Although the work initially seems simplistic – it contains, as the title indicates, two red chairs and a table – in classic Hockney style, it seems to confound the viewer at every opportunity, defying any kind of easy reading. It’s interesting, too, that this piece is a home-made print executed on an office colour copy machine, a move by Hockney that seems to marry together the mundane and the artistic, the regimented and the haphazard, in a union of pure creative expression.
The furniture at the centre of ‘Two Red Chairs…’ finds an equivalent with 1998’s ‘Van Gogh’s Chair (White)’, an homage to Van Gogh’s 1888 painting of the same subject. Hockney explained his love for the original: “The perspective is terrific. […] You couldn’t take a photograph like this. I’ve always loved this painting. Whenever my father came to London, he always wanted to see Van Gogh’s Chair. He thought it was marvellous.” As with ‘Still Life, 2017’, the painting incorporates a multiplicity of perspectives, a simultaneous gaze from all angles alchemised into one coherent form. The painting is hung next to ‘Tyler Dining Room, from Moving Focus’, a 1984 lithograph showing the dining room of master printer and Hockney collaborator Kenneth Tyler. At its centre is a dining table and chairs; at the edges of the work, the angles of the room begin to concertina, as if being folded inwards. It’s no wonder that the work is displayed alongside ‘Van Gogh’s Chair’. Although their depictions of furniture are wildly different – with the bone-white starkness of the latter contrasting against the luxury of the Tyler – they both prioritise an intimate, highly personal outlook, an off-kilter way of considering our familiar spaces. Hung here, over George’s dining room, they seemed designed to include me, almost to invite me into a shared understanding, as I observed them from my own seat.
Next, I’m given a tour of the 18-seater private dining room. This area provides the backdrop for Hockney’s newer iPad works, including the dazzling ‘The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 30 May’. With its riot of green, punctuated by the red of a road sign, it nods to Hockney’s earlier fascination with the raw power of bold colour. It’s flanked on both sides by the floral still lifes of the ‘My Window’ series, a trio of works capturing a fleeting moment seen from the window of Hockney’s Yorkshire home. Each of these panels depicts unfurling pink blooms, whether of flowers in a vase or of the cherry blossom on a tree outside – placed next to the large windows of the George’s private dining room, they seem to dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior.
With its paean to both all things Hockney and all things canine, George offers a contemporary update on an artistic tradition that stretches decades. And isn’t just the decor – when I met the club’s owner, Richard Caring, he pulled up a photograph of his late dog Roxy, who “was and still is the love of my life”. It’s a mixture that seems to epitomise the updated George: sweet without being sentimental, elegant without being stuffy, cultured without being snobbish.
This article is taken from Port issue 34. To continue reading, buy the issue or subscribe here
