Episode Eight: On Context | Gilbert & George & Dr Nicholas Cullinan
Release Date: 01/26/2024
Episode 4: Spatial Intelligence | Nairy Baghramian, Glenn Lowry & Julian Rose
Frieze Masters Podcast
‘Isn’t to exhibit to historicize?’ – Julian Rose Artist Nairy Baghramian, Director of the Museum of Modern Art Glenn Lowry and historian Julian Rose all have extensive experience of presenting art in public places and thinking about civic spaces. In the fourth episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, they come together to rethink the role and design of museums in shaping cultural exchange. Nairy Baghramian is an artist whose sculptures offer new ways to address the architectural, social and political conditions of contemporary culture; Glenn Lowry is director of...
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Episode 3: The Power of Painting | Gabriele Finaldi, Jan Dalley & Shirazeh Houshiary
Frieze Masters Podcast
‘The viewer makes the painting alive. Without the viewer, that thing doesn't exist.’ – Shirazeh Houshiary What happens to our understanding of painting when we expand the canon across eras and cultures? In the third episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, artist Shirazeh Houshiary, Director of the National Gallery Gabriele Finaldi and arts editor Jan Dalley reflect on the celebration and subversion of narrative through painting. Shirazeh Houshiary is an Iran-born, London-based artist, working in painting and sculpture; Gabriele Finaldi is Director of the National Gallery...
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Episode 2: Faces of Community | Barbara Walker, Ming Smith & Lou Stoppard
Frieze Masters Podcast
‘You have an idea and it goes off in another direction and you either pull it back or you go on the journey. I knew I wanted to make some portraits, but I also knew I didn't want to. I wanted to create some tension.’ – Barbara Walker In the second episode of the Frieze Masters Podcast, artists Barbara Walker and Ming Smith, and writer and curator Lou Stoppard discuss the evolution of portraiture and ask how it can better reflect and build community. Barbara Walker is a British artist whose work interrogates power, identity and the visibility of Black experience; Ming Smith...
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Episode 1: Good Governance | Chris Bryant MP, Jeremy Deller and Victoria Siddall
Frieze Masters Podcast
‘What do we want the UK to look like in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years in terms of culture?’ – Victoria Siddall The first episode of the 2024 Frieze Masters Podcast brings together Sir Chris Bryant MP, artist Jeremy Deller and new director of the National Portrait Gallery Victoria Siddall to talk about ‘Good Governance’. How can everyone in the UK access art? And what role should government play in the country’s creative education? Chris Bryant is the recently appointed as Minister of State at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Department for Culture, Media...
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Episode Eight: On Context | Gilbert & George & Dr Nicholas Cullinan
Frieze Masters Podcast
‘Sex, death, race and religion’ – these are the topics that the London-based artists Gilbert and George announced they wanted to cover in this talk with Dr Nicholas Cullinan of the National Portrait Gallery. On Context offers insights into the artist’s relationship to concepts: from sculpture to the city, ‘picture making’ to posterity. Gilbert and George resist many of the contexts and interpretations projected onto their practice: trying to keep their work as accessible and open as possible, reflecting their self-proclaimed belief in ‘art for all’. 'We like to let the...
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Episode Seven: On Interiors | Mandy El-Sayegh, Flavia Frigeri & Valerie Cassel Oliver
Frieze Masters Podcast
The London home of Galerie Thaddeus Ropac is a traditional eighteenth-century Mayfair townhouse, once home to the Bishop of Ely. But for artist Mandy El-Sayegh’s 2023 exhibition ‘Interiors’, its spaces were transformed into a riot of colour and pattern across paintings, textiles and furniture. In On Interiors, El-Sayegh talks to Dr Flavia Frigeri of the National Portrait Gallery, and Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, who is also the curator of the 2023 Spotlight section at Frieze Masters, about the relationship between inner and outer space: the space of the...
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Episode Six: On Space | Rachel Whiteread & Briony Fer
Frieze Masters Podcast
The year 1993 marked a watershed for the famous Turner Prize, when it was awarded for the first time to a woman. That artist was Rachel Whiteread and the work was House in East London. In On Space, Whiteread is in conversation with the art historian Briony Fer. Together, they discuss the urges and concerns that underpin Whiteread’s work, from seminal works of the 1990s to her more recent projects, such as the site-specific commission unveiled in the summer of 2023 at Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, Italy, which responds to the experience and legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. ...
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Episode Five: On Power | Thomas J Price & Dr Gus Casely-Hayford
Frieze Masters Podcast
In On Power, London-based multidisciplinary artist Thomas J Price is in conversation with Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, the inaugural Director of V&A East. Together, they reflect on how monuments created for the public realm are not just aesthetic objects but artefacts often bound up in values, ideologies and power systems. Price, in his words, wants to convey ‘the sense of another person’ and has spent the past two decades creating large-scale figurative sculptures of everyday, unidentified Black individuals, often located in public spaces: such as the commission honouring the Windrush...
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Episode Four: On Studios | Arlene Shechet & Sheena Wagstaff
Frieze Masters Podcast
In 2023, Frieze Masters fair sought to break the artist’s studio open to a new audience with a new section, Studio, curated by Sheena Wagstaff – the former Chairman of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Met and now Met’s Chair Emerita. In On Studios, Wagstaff talks with one of the Studio artists, Arlene Shechet, exploring how central the place and space of making is to her work, as well as its significance in the realm of creativity. 'It’s not a genius move, it’s just hard work. It just means that you know that you want something more, you know that you want...
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Episode Three: On Photography | Tim Walker & Jerry Stafford
Frieze Masters Podcast
On Photography asks what it means today for an artist to work with a living, breathing icon, like the actress Tilda Swinton. Tim Walker, the noted artist and photographer, is joined by his long-time collaborator, stylist Jerry Stafford, to talk about their work together with Tilda Swinton. Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, moderates the conversation. 'When I’m scared of something or someone, that scare turns into being photogenic. […] The situation becomes very heightened and I become very alert and I then I think I make better work.' – Tim Walker...
info_outline‘Sex, death, race and religion’ – these are the topics that the London-based artists Gilbert and George announced they wanted to cover in this talk with Dr Nicholas Cullinan of the National Portrait Gallery. On Context offers insights into the artist’s relationship to concepts: from sculpture to the city, ‘picture making’ to posterity. Gilbert and George resist many of the contexts and interpretations projected onto their practice: trying to keep their work as accessible and open as possible, reflecting their self-proclaimed belief in ‘art for all’.
'We like to let the pictures make themselves as much as possible. We like to think that there are other forces apart from us, being in the studio knowing what to do. […] When we go to the studio in the morning and see what we were doing the day before, it’s always impossible for us to reconstruct exactly how we arrived at it.' – Gilbert & George
Gilbert and George live and work in London and since they met in 1967, they have made over 100 museum exhibitions. In 2023, the Gilbert & George Centre opened in East London. Dr Nicholas Cullinan is Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Find images of the artwork discussed here.
About Frieze Masters Podcast
Series two of the Frieze Masters Podcast is now available, bringing you our annual programme of live talks – the Frieze Masters Talks programme – curated by the Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Dr Nicholas Cullinan. These eight conversations between leading artists, writers, museum directors and curators all reflect the ethos of the Frieze Masters fair: looking at the past with a contemporary gaze.
The Frieze Masters Talks programme and the Frieze Masters Podcast are brought to you by Frieze in collaboration with dunhill, the foremost British luxury menswear house.
This podcast is a Reduced Listening production. The producer was Silvia Malnati and sound engineer was Andy Fell.
About Frieze
Frieze is the world’s leading platform for modern and contemporary art, dedicated to artists, galleries, collectors and art lovers alike. Frieze comprises three magazines – 𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘻𝘦, Frieze Masters Magazine and Frieze Week; five international art fairs – Frieze London, Frieze Masters, Frieze New York, Frieze Los Angeles and Frieze Seoul; and No.9 Cork Street, a permanent gallery space in the heart of London.