Culture A’s hospitality projects include London’s new wellness hotel Inhabit, which will open this summer. Image courtesy of Inhabit Hotels

Anne T. Rogers is the founder of Amsterdam-based art consultancy  Culture A, which curates collections and experiences for a range of clients from hotels to luxury retail and residential. Here, she speaks to Candice Tucker about visual storytelling, AI-generated art and how to curate a collection at home

Anne T. Rogers

1. What inspired you to create Culture A?

I’m a trained art historian and experience strategist. After years of working in curating, interior design, and retail design, I saw the opportunity to position art as an experience as well as an investment. I started Culture A to curate and produce art as something that transforms a public space. Art is an important design differentiator, particularly for clients such as hotel owners, property developers, and retail brands. We find the best art suitable for investment, visual storytelling, or pure aesthetics.

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2. Why do you think there’s been such a dramatic rise in experience culture?

It’s an interesting time where we’re focusing on the benefits of community, but not at the risk of the individual. Self-love, self-care, wellness: these are all hot topics right now. I think the rise of experience culture is tied to this. Generally speaking, we like to be a part of something that feels bigger than ourselves, but also have the space to find our own interpretation and act upon that feeling. Experience culture is about encouraging engagement and acting on it. For me, art is visual storytelling, and visual storytelling is a key component to experience design. Looking at art encourages discussion, individual interpretation, and personal connection. How many other consumer goods spark such freedom of expression?

An artwork by Amsterdam-based artist Camille Rousseau for Inhabit London. Image courtesy of Culture A

3. Where does your curation process begin for a hospitality project?

I adopt the mindset of a guest, dig into the brand story, and ask: how can the art experience enhance the customer journey? For hospitality projects, I approach curating through the lens of experience design versus museum design. It allows me to consider diverse audiences and how to best integrate art into the context of a brand. For example, when curating the art collection for Inhabit, a new London hotel focused on wellness, I really wanted to illuminate the brand’s vision for health and wellbeing. To start, we did a deep dive into research around wellness, urban oasis, colour psychology, and nature in London. We then developed curatorial themes in relation to Inhabit’s ethos and sourced our pieces accordingly.

Read more: Alia Al-Senussi on art as a catalyst for change

4. Could you share any tips on how to curate and frame art in your home?

Build a collection slowly and one that reflects your tastes and interests. Frame it professionally to avoid damage and maintain the investment. Don’t ignore key vantage points in your home. Where does the eye instinctively go when you scan the space? Hang art in those areas and study how each work relates to the other in the context of the space. This could be done thematically, by scale, by colour, or a mix of all three.

An art scarf designed by designer Lisa King. Image courtesy of Culture A

5. What artistic and design trends do you foresee emerging this year?

A growing demand for slow and considered art and design. People will ask themselves, “What do I really need and what do I really enjoy?” It’s a time to re-configure and refresh the spaces already lived in. As for design presentations and sourcing, virtual viewing rooms are certainly on the rise. I recently completed a project that was largely approved because of how successful the artwork looked in our virtual reality demo. Right now, we’re also experimenting a lot with AI-generated art driven by a brand’s heritage and image archive.

6. Which contemporary artists are you currently keeping your eye on?

Landon Metz, Matt Gagnon, Sarah Crowner, Kapwani Kiwanga, Martine Gutierrez, Miya Ando, Loie Hollowell, Douglas Mandry, Tyler Mitchell, Nicolas Party, Anne Hardy, Hugo McCloud, Emily Kiacz, and Wyatt Khan. Also, anyone working with AI technology to generate art and design.

Find out more: culture-a.com

Triumph of Death (1562), Pietr Bruegl the Elder

In the second edition of her monthly column for LUX, artnet’s Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Sophie Neuendorf looks back on the emergence of the Renaissance following the Black Plague, and towards a more positive and creative future

We can all agree that this year has been one of the toughest we’ve experienced during our life time. It certainly was for me. The consequences of an unprecedented global pandemic have been, and still are horrifying and in many ways, unbelievable. But, the question is: how will generations to come analyse and learn from this particular moment in time?

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Let’s look back at another pandemic, which was arguably much worse: the Black Plague, which struck Asia and Europe during the mid-1300s. It arrived in Europe during October 1347, when 12 ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Most sailors aboard those ships were dead, and those still alive were dangerously ill.

Over the next five years, the Black Death – a terrifyingly efficient disease – would kill more than 20 million people in Europe, about a third of the population. At the time, no-one knew exactly how the disease was transmitted, or how to prevent and treat it. A grim sequence of events unfolded for which, in the middle of the 14th century, there was no rational explanation.

Self Portrait after Spanish Influenza (1919), Edvard Munch

Today, however, we know that the Black Death attacks the lymphatic system, causing swelling in the lymph nodes. Left untreated, it can spread to the blood or lungs and is highly contagious.

Following the Black Plague, a preventative method was developed in Italy, which we saw repeated this year: quarantine. In order to slow the spread of the disease, returning sailors were mandated to stay on their ships for 40 days ‘quarantine’, relying on isolation to slow the spread of the disease.

Read more: Life coach Simon Hodges’ tips on breaking free from destructive behaviour

Following the end of the Black Plague, a new era unfolded in Europe, known as the Renaissance (or rebirth). The impact of the Black Death had been profound, resulting in wide-ranging social, economic, cultural, and religious changes. These changes, directly and indirectly, led to the emergence of the Renaissance, which was one of the greatest epochs for art, architecture, and literature in human history.

The Birth of Venus (1484), Sandro Botticelli

After a period of pessimism, introspection and recovery, a time of enlightenment and renewal began. The arts especially flourished, as artists documented this time of change and upheaval. Through their creativity, artists wrestled with questions such as the fragility of life, religion, spiritualism, and the pleasures of living. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, and Albrecht Dürer dominated what’s known now as the humanistic high Renaissance period. The prevailing theme was the seizing of life, driven by positive change, knowledge and nature.

Read more: Richard Mille’s collaboration with Benjamin Millepied & Thomas Roussel

How will we respond to the pandemic we’re facing now? Will the development of a vaccine result in a period of introspection, creativity, and change? Will we – having faced an invisible, deadly enemy – emerge more tolerant, grateful, and accepting of change?

La Primavera (1477), Sandro Botticelli

A near-death experience usually results in a renewed zest for life, happiness and gratitude. Within the art world, many of the archaic norms have already been replaced during the course of the year. As artistic expression and culture define us, not only as individual nations, but in terms of humanity, we should ensure that this moment in history is not a missed opportunity.

Covid-19 has forced us to profoundly rethink the way we live, the values we have, and world we’ll leave for our children. Covid-19 has also forced us to trust in digitalisation and to rethink the way we experience and trade art. For context, while the art market declined by 58% in the first half of this year, online art sales increased by nearly 500% during the same period. There has been a flurry of creativity and inspiration, from artists doubling down in their studios to document the zeitgeist, to museum and galleries embracing VR and making their inventory accessible online. Let us embrace these changes and welcome an opportunity for a more transparent, accessible, and tolerant art world.

Browse artnet’s current auctions via artnet.com/auctions

London Art Studies offers mini art online art history classes for members

London Art Studies is the world’s first online arts education subscription website, offering mini video lectures and courses on artworks, artists and movements. Ahead of the site’s launch of a new section dedicated to children and teenagers, we speak to the founder Kate Gordon about creating effective short-form content and the future of the art world.

Kate Gordon. Photo by Ki Price

1. How did you progress from your early role in production to launching an educational art platform?

I took a very roundabout journey into television, starting at Sotheby’s, moving to Carlton Television where I worked on a variety of shows, and then ended up making art programmes for CNN. When the CNN show was cancelled, I was offered a job back at Sotheby’s as Head of Public Programmes for their educational arm. I found I loved combining brilliant teaching with a more popular approach; it was the early days of what now might be called “edu-tainment” and I set up London Art Studies in 2012. A couple of years after that, a friend mentioned that people around the world would want to see our classes and that was the lightbulb moment. It took 2 years to film the beginning of our content library, and we finally went online with our own educational platform in 2018. I didn’t realise until after we launched that I was carrying on a family tradition: my grandmother was a theatre producer, my father a TV producer, and I now produce short-form content for the internet.

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2. Most of the online videos are under five minutes long with many focusing on one specific artwork – why did you decide on this format?

Despite having more technology around us than ever, we’re all that much busier, aren’t we? It’s fairly easy to watch a 3 or 5 minute film, and learn something which stays with you. I also felt that going back to basics for some of the films made sense: everyone knows that the Mona Lisa is the world’s most famous painting, but does anyone really know why? Our short films aim to answer these questions, whether you’re about to visit an art gallery, standing in front of a particular artwork, or simply curious to learn more. We currently offer 12 different series: whether you’re now “virtually travelling” and want to find out what to see in a particular European city, or what really what made Picasso so brilliant, there’s a series to discover. We wanted also to explore the links between art and jewellery, and were lucky to launch our latest series with master jewellers Christian Hemmerle and James de Givenchy.

3. What drives LAS’ content programme?

Our subscribers are terrific, and often suggest series ideas, but it’s often simply a phrase (such as Dangerous Women) or a book concept. One of our most popular series “The Art Market” came about through Georgina Adam’s best-selling book. It’s something the team usually wants to learn more about, or indeed, to teach. There’s a lot of content out there, and we have to make sure that our films are not only relevant but useful. We received our first award only 5 months after launch, for excellence in education, and our most recent award – the Webby – is the digital equivalent of an Oscar. Our approach is often light-hearted, such as our 30 second Instagram post on how to pronounce van Gogh (for example) but the content is serious.

4. Can you tell us about the concept of The Academy and your decision to launch this summer?

We had always planned to launch a site for children/young people, but the lockdown speeded up our plans to do so. We had so many parents email us, saying they were watching the videos with their children, that we realised we had to bring forward our plans to help with home schooling. We’re aiming at ages 7-17, and have been fortunate in finding a new group of teenage presenters, whose enthusiasm for art is easy to see onscreen; I’m learning more from our teenage presenters than I ever thought possible. We’re also aligning content with the A level syllabus, in the hope of exams in 2021. It will also be a useful resource for those off to university to study art history, who haven’t actually taken the A level. People now consume on average 70 minutes a day of filmed content online; it should – and can be – both educational and enjoyable.

Read more: ionic cars are transforming classic cars for an electric future

5. How do you think the global lockdown will impact the future structures of the art world?

I think there’ll be great changes structurally for the time being; we’ll no longer be able to simply wander into a gallery without an appointment, or join a crush to see the latest blockbuster. I think museums and institutions are already moving to a hybrid model, with a larger global audience online. I think institutions will engage with local communities that much more, now that tourism numbers will probably decrease. I hope, and suspect, there’ll be more collaboration within the sector as a whole, and perhaps a slightly more agile approach when considering potential new pathways. Lastly, I believe the art world will make a conscious decision to reflect more of our diverse society and encourage the talents of those who have been traditionally overlooked.

6. Which period of art do you find most interesting and why?

I’m the eternal student, and it’s a great bonus for me that I can continue to learn as I work. I tend to think in terms of themes (the nude, the Baroque etc.) and we’re now editing a series called “Best of British” which explores everything from satire to seduction in British art. I find understanding contemporary art the hardest field for me, but am comforted by the fact that all art was contemporary, once, and that people have struggled for centuries with it. If pushed, I particularly enjoy seeing the links between art of the past and today; it’s how our series “Reflections: Then & Now” came about. We link works by Kerry James Marshall with Manet, and Cindy Sherman’s creations to Caravaggio. I enjoy referencing the past, alongside the art made today.

Find out more: londonartstudies.com

Untitled (2019) by Henrik Aa. Uldalen

Jean-David Malat is part of a new wave of art dealers. Clients include Bono, Kate Moss and Lily Allen, you can buy his art on Instagram, and you’re as likely to run into fashion types as the art crowd at one of his parties. Torri Mundell discovers what makes him tick so fast

From his glitzy Mayfair gallery, Jean-David Malat, a tall, suave Frenchman, discovers and promotes new artists from around the world using social media, a fast-paced schedule of shows and events, and an air of inclusivity. Malat hunts for contemporary artists from ‘outside the box’ to represent from all corners of the world, uses Instagram and innovative events to generate interest, sales and loyalty outside the conventional art crowd, and welcomes new buyers venturing into his gallery. Coming from a fashion background, Malat has been a Mayfair gallerist, first with another gallery, now, since last year, his own, for more than a decade but still palpably mixes the two worlds.

LUX: What do your artists have in common?
Jean-David Malat: The first thing is the relationship that I have with each of them. In the art world, this is important. I believe in them, I collect them personally, and I push them and support them through a network of collectors. And all of them share a kind of energy. At our summer show, we exhibited a mix of our artists, including Li Tianbing, Santiago Parra and Conrad Jon Godly, all of whom are very different artists but who all share this energy.

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LUX: Your approach to marketing is very different to the norm in the gallery world.
Jean-David Malat: Instagram is a really successful, really important strategy for the gallery. We sell
through social media. Many of our clients are following us on Instagram so we can post a photograph of a piece and they will call or WhatsApp us directly and say, “I like this one”. The gallery now has more than 30K followers. It’s good for the artists, too.

LUX: Has this changed the art audience?
Jean-David Malat: Yes, a lot. I think Instagram is more democratic. It is easier to show the world what you do and what you’re exhibiting. I would say more than half of our buyers may never have set foot in a gallery before. We have a strong website that offers a virtual tour, where you can zoom right into the artworks. And if a potential buyer likes a piece, we can create a virtual room to show how it will look. It works well – we do business in Iceland, China, Singapore…

LUX: Will this replace the gallery experience?
Jean-David Malat: Seeing art face to face is still important. People want to see it physically. And the gallery is open to everyone. It’s important to share the space with art students, with art lovers.

Untitled (2019) by Santiago Parra

LUX: How do know you’ve come across an artist you want to represent?
Jean-David Malat: I trust my instinct. When I took on Santiago Parra, not as many people believed in him but now he’s very successful. But we take our time before we sign an artist. The gallery is a whole team. We discuss by committee which artists we can help and how. Henrik Uldalen is the only artist I have discovered on Instagram – it’s a great platform for art, but Instagram is not doing my job for me. I still do a lot of travelling.

LUX: What are you looking for in an artist?
Jean-David Malat: I need something that talks to me. The first time I saw Henrik’s work [in 2015], I could see that his work is very emotional. When you look at the portraits, they make you think – and feel. I was intrigued and I went to visit him in his studio in East London. We kept in touch and eventually I started to represent him. Everywhere we go, it sells. At his 2018 exhibition, some people came to the show five times. Some of them cried in front of his paintings. I’ve been in the art world for many years and haven’t often seen emotion like that.

Read more: Pedro Rodriguez of Sierra Blanca Estates on Málaga’s luxury future

LUX: Can you say more about your relationship with your artists?
Jean-David Malat: You need to support them. You need to give them attention, solo exhibitions, press and more. We spend time together, we have meals together and travel together. When you are part of JD Malat, you are part of a family. Sometimes, we just need to give our artists some direction in size and subject. You try to guide them, mix commercial with non-commercial advice.

LUX: How did you come across Zümrütoğlu?
Jean-David Malat: He’s a Turkish artist I discovered at an art fair in Istanbul. I loved his work straight away and I approached him a few months later because I couldn’t forget him. He is one of my
strongest artists. His work is very political and not easy. It’s dark, not decorative, and it was a challenge to show his work in London. But we sold to a museum and to some powerful collectors, and David Bellingham from Sotheby’s Institute wrote a lovely essay about his work.

Angel of history-III (2019) by Zümrütoğlu

LUX: Have you known Katrin Fridriks long?
Jean-David Malat: For many years – she was one of the first artists I collected. Her work is a bit different; it’s about power, colour, explosion. We had a beautiful show together in March which was very well received and we are doing a new collaboration with Jack Barclay Bentley.

LUX: You’re not against setting up commercial relationships with your artists?
Jean-David Malat: It’s important to have them, but of course we are very careful. We have many offers for collaborations – especially for trainers! – but you need to be picky. I have seen many
disasters between artists and brands. Katrin was perfect for this project because her work is all about natural energy, so there was an elegant connection between her and the brand. She spent months getting it right. It was never going to be simply an image transferred onto a car.

Mirage #38 (2019) by Masayoshi Nojo

LUX: How was your move from the secondary to the primary market?
Jean-David Malat: The primary market is much more exciting. I love having direct contact with my artists. And it is always more interesting to sell artists who you support. I haven’t given up on the secondary market – I still get requests from collectors who know me and prefer to go through me for my knowledge and experience.

LUX: Have you encountered any snobbery towards your gallery from the establishment?
Jean-David Malat: Yes, there’s a lot of snobbery in this industry, but I don’t look or pay attention to it and I don’t really care. I just think I am here today in Davies Street and I work passionately with the artists whose work I love. I think that in all industries, there are people who don’t want you to succeed or believe you can. People in the art industry can be arrogant. But we have a different approach to our public – we welcome everyone to the gallery, and I meet them all.

Find out more: jdmalat.com

Inside OMM designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates. Photo by Batuhan Keskiner

This September will see the opening of Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM), a major new art museum in Eskişehir, Turkey. Designed by architects Kengo Kuma and Associates, the museum is the brainchild of art collector Erol Tabanca, whose collection will provide the permanent exhibition, and his daughter Idil Tabanca who sits at the helm as Creative Director. We speak to Idil about her multidisciplinary approach, creating an international cultural destination and the challenge of bringing contemporary art to new audiences.

Idil Tabanca. Photo by Emily Hope

LUX: You were one of the founding editors of the successful New York-based art and fashion magazine Bullett – do you see yourself primarily as a journalist?
Idil Tabanca: No, not at all. I studied digital media because I always thought I was going to go into film. I wanted to do set design, production design, that kind of thing. Growing up that was my dream. I just wanted to make stuff. After I graduated, I worked in film for a couple of years on various projects in the US and then I was called in to do production design for a film in New York and that’s where I met the people I ended up setting up the magazine with. We just fell into, it was very organic and we didn’t have any money so we became our own publishers because we had all this great content that we wanted to put out. There are so many stories which aren’t at all luxurious like we would get our friends to dress up as catering staff for the cover shoot of some Oscar winning actor. We didn’t have the money to hire actual caterers but we wanted to keep up the appearance. It was like the con that didn’t end.

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LUX: And you’ve gone from that to being the Creative Director of OMM.
Idil Tabanca: Well yes, and this is a very different project because for starters, it’s my family’s foundation. My father [Erol Tabanca] started collecting art about thirty years ago. It started out just as a pure love for art and the pleasure he got from it, there was no strategy involved. He was buying what he wanted to buy. As time progressed, he filled up his house and then his entire office, he didn’t have enough room for the art and he also wanted to share the works that he found so inspiring so he started the foundation. That was around the time I was closing the magazine because the internet happened. It happened to the world. So many magazines were closing. The museum is a great opportunity because if I was at another institution like this, it would’ve taken me a really long time to be here. I felt like there could be an opportunity for me to have a voice, to have a say for the young people that needed this kind of a platform back in Turkey.

I feel like there’s huge potential in Turkey for artists, but not necessarily any organisations and platforms. The exciting part of the project for me is that I can actually give young people that opportunity.

Erol & Idil Tabanca pictured outside the museum. Photo by Gökhan Polat

LUX: Have you always shared your father’s passion for art?
Idil Tabanca: It was part of the magazine: we covered art, fashion, culture and cinema. I have always been interested in video and photography because of my studies, but I don’t have this amazing knowledge of art history or anything like that. It wasn’t part of my education so I’m learning that part now. Even just getting familiar with the art collection is a huge amount of work. I feel like I’ve got a good sense of aesthetics, but I’m learning the rest. I’m exposing myself to a lot of art, I read a lot, go to a lot of exhibitions.

Read more: London to Cornwall in a luxury Mercedes-Benz camper van

LUX: Can you tell us more about your concept for the museum?
Idil Tabanca: We’re from Eskişehir as a family and people from Eskişehir are very proud because it’s like a secular, intellectual, very young and fun town in Turkey. It’s very unique. They say it’s like a European city in Turkey. People are very open minded and because of that, there’s a huge potential for young people. There are also three art universities. My father has always felt that he wanted to give back to that community in some way.

We chose Kengo Kuma, whose work is so iconic, to make the museum iconic. Bilbao was an industrial city before the Guggenheim came and now it’s known as an art destination; I think Eskişehir has that same potential. For a long time in Turkey because of the regime and what’s happened there, there hasn’t been a lot of exciting developments. We also don’t have a huge museum culture. I don’t have any memories of going to museums with my family. I love that we might be able to change that for some people, and to change the place. Having a museum like this, starts an exchange, it becomes a bridge between cultures. For example, we have Kengo Kuma’s work  and we have Japanese artists who are showing. We want different cultures to be able to merge in the space.

Photo by Batuham Keskiner

Photo by Batuhan Keskiner

LUX: We hear that the museum is also going to have a strong connection with fashion, is that right?
Idil Tabanca: Yes, I want every aspect of the museum to be like an art work in its own right and I’ve got Turkish fashion designer Dilara Findikoglu to design the uniforms for the museum staff. She’s blown up recently and dresses people like Madonna. I think that she’ll be the creative director of somewhere like Alexander McQueen very soon. But the reason for collaborating with her was, firstly, to challenge people. She is completely embraced internationally and keeps winning fashion awards, but in Turkey I feel like it’s part of our culture to be suspicious of anything that’s actually good and we do that to artists too. We don’t appreciate them at home as much as you do in Western culture. In Turkey, there’s no sense of protecting the things that are valuable and that’s the same with ruins even, you’re just allowed to walk all over the place. So I want to work with and give value to artists and designers from our communities that are doing really well outside of the country. That’s the reason we’re putting together a homecoming show to start a dialogue about who we are as a culture and why we don’t appreciate these people or talk abut them. We have local celebrities, but they’re not the people who are making a difference in the world.

‘Sleeping Girl’ by Hans op de Beeck is one of the artworks in the permanent collection. Photo by Kayhan Kaygusuz

LUX: And how will the exhibition programme work?
Idil Tabanca: We have the permanent collection, which will constantly change and be curated by different people and then we’ll have travelling shows and events. Exhibitions by other artists who have nothing to do with the permanent collection. For example, we’re bringing work by Marshmallow Laser Feast (who recently had a VR experience at the Saatchi gallery) to the opening. They’re really interesting because they use technology to bring people back to nature – I’m really excited to collaborate with them. Also the other part which will be so exciting for me is that we’ll get people coming to the museum who haven’t been exposed to anything, we’re going to get such a raw audience.

One of the selected works from the opening exhibition: Uyuyan Adam (2010) by Ramazan Bayrakoğlu. Image by Ozan Cakmak

LUX: What are local attitudes towards contemporary art? Is there much of an existing art scene?
Idil Tabanca: Yes, there is definitely an art scene. There’s a tiny wooden museum, glass blowing is huge and there are lots of little shops that make ceramics. There’s part of the town which is all these old houses, which look like they would have hundreds of years a go. There’s a wax museum, which is hilarious because no-one looks like they’re supposed to, but it receives 11,000 visitors on the weekend, which demonstrates the lack of cultural activities. But yes, we’re in talks with the art universities. We want to have residency artists that come in from abroad and to give them access to the facilities. We’re also going to organise discussions and education programmes. There’s the only animation studio in Turkey there so there’s definitely a lot of potential.

Read more: Savoir Beds’ MD Alistair Hughes on the value of craftsmanship

LUX: Are there any contemporary Turkish artists that you’re particularly excited about at the moment?
Idil Tabanca: Nilbar Güreş’ work is phenomenal. She’s based in Vienna. Another one of my favourite Turkish artists is Sukran Moral. She’s definitely someone I’d love to bring [to the museum] sometime in the future. She’s pretty established and is currently based in Italy.  She’s fantastic. Also Fatma Bucak is another young Turkish artist that I’d like to bring to the museum. She has some wonderful videos.

‘Aylin’ (2014) by Sinan Demirtaş will also feature in the opening exhibition. Image by Kayhan Kaygusuz

LUX: How much of a consideration is sustainability?
Idil Tabanca: The building is made from sustainable forests, and we are trying to make it all as sustainable as possible, but in a place where that dialogue hasn’t started yet, it’s going to be tougher for us. So we have this task of talking to people and explaining to them why it’s important, why we’re not giving out plastic bags for example. I think it’s the responsibility of institution like ours to be a leader on these kinds of things.

LUX: Lastly, for first time visitors to Eskişehir, what are your hot tips for things to do and see?
Idil Tabanca: Oh my god, there’s so much to do! There’s a really good thermal spa. Then there’s also this fake Disneyland that I think is fascinating. You go and Snow White has her wig on sideways, it’s just a very weird place. The old part of town too where they have all these really cute houses and artists with their own little studios and shops selling handmade things. The area is called Odunpazarı, and it’s so beautiful. The museum is right in the middle of everything so the best way is to just walk around and discover the area.

OMM will officially open in September 2019, for more information visit: omm.art

Philip and Charlotte Colbert in their fried-egg suits designed by Philip

In a warehouse in east London, Philip and Charlotte Colbert are creating a world of Pop art and sculpture that is putting them on the global map. Darius Sanai speaks to the dynamic enfants terribles of the London art scene while Maryam Eisler photographs them

At the back of a warehouse in east London, Philip Colbert sticks his head out of a doorway. “Come in,” he says, smiling, while simultaneously holding a conversation with his phone on one ear. “No, it needs to be there tonight. Right,” he says, into the phone. His tone is soft, firm, a gentle Scottish accent is present but inconspicuous, almost shy.

Inside, workers are cutting and daubing in an area full of canvasses and paint, and behind a rail of pop-coloured clothes, four more people are on their phones, sitting at desks. Through a space in the wall is another artist’s studio, this one tidier, less colourful, more precise, hung with sculptures of curved forms and creatures.

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Welcome to the world of Philip and Charlotte (through in the other studio) Colbert, the enfants terribles of the London art scene. Philip has been called all sorts of things, including a worthy successor to Andy Warhol; in his zany coloured suits he is a mainstay of the party (and social media) scene and with his classical education (philosophy, St Andrew’s University) combined with his cheeky-to-outrageous art he is one of the capital’s most desirable dinner party guests.

Colbert has created everything from lobsters sold in his (now closed) Paris namesake store to partnerships with Peanuts and Rolex; he has bucket loads of celebrity followers (Cara, Sienna, Gaga) and he’s big in China.

Charlotte with some of her flocked ceramics

But as his latest works show, he is also a proper artist. His ‘Hunt’ paintings, shown recently by the Saatchi Galleries in both London and LA, around each city’s Frieze art fair, are a kind of Raft of the Medusa for contemporary society, riffing on themes around social media’s banal power, swatches from his favoured artists [Dalí, Lichtenstein, Hockney], and providing a poignant commentary on the chaos of contemporary society. They are also vibrant, colourful (as pop art should be) and, frankly, rather beautiful. He thinks of himself as a “neo-pop surrealist”, though a case could be made for him being more pop-impressionist: out of the microcosms of his creations there emerges a whole image of something quite different.

Read more: 6 artists creating new experiential spaces

His wife Charlotte, meanwhile, has created her own artistic world, one which shocks and smiles at the same time. Youthful, photogenic, and with enough wit not to take themselves entirely seriously, the Colberts may just be among the most interesting artists to emerge from Britain in the last decade. And you feel their whole future may just be ahead of them.

Philip Colbert

LUX: How would you describe yourself ?
Philip Colbert: I’m someone who’s trying to create a world. I started out creating a sort of art brand, with artworks and furniture and was, in a way, trying to expand what the idea of art was beyond painting. But recently I’ve come back to painting in a big way and I think fundamentally my journey is about just trying to make my own sort of artistic world. The lobster alter-ego is really an articulation of my artistic persona.

LUX: Why a lobster?
Philip Colbert: I’ve always been into symbols. The lobster was a symbol of surrealism for a lot of surrealist poets and Dalí as well. I like the idea of bringing it to life and taking it on a journey.

Philip Colbert with his iconic lobster alter-ego

LUX: What is art about, for you?
Philip Colbert: The simple essence of art is human freedom, and pushing the creativity that we have. And if you push freedom forward and create more, you push reality and create more freedom for art. There’s something I like about taking the idea of art and trying to inject it with new energy and a new sense of possibility.

LUX: Should artworks be beautiful?
Philip Colbert: It’s an important part of communicating, to understand visual language. A cornerstone of my art is to try and be very positive and use primary colours and really radiate a sort of energy from my works. Even though they may still have a sort of darker undertone, I still like to give them the essence of a sunflower.

‘Untitled II’ (2018) from Philip Colbert’s ‘Hunt Paintings’ series

LUX: Can you talk about ‘The Hunt’ series and how your work has developed?
Philip Colbert: ‘The Hunt’ paintings are important for me. I have been engaging with the idea of contemporary culture and the mass saturation of images and the internet. At the same time I’m still having a conversation with painting. The Old Masters are such a powerful part of art history and I like the idea of making my contemporary Pop culture paintings to be informed by and in conversation with them.

Read more: 6 questions with art collector Kelly Ying

LUX: Symbols from painters – how do you choose them?
Philip Colbert: Well, I was really drawn to elevated images, such as in history painting, with heroic battle depictions by artists such as Rubens. I wanted to underpin the violence of contemporary culture and use the analogy of a more traditional battle scene, to structure it like an Instagram feed. We consume so much today, and we see so much, we’re aware of so many amazingly escapist ideas juxtaposed with a lot of darker elements, like global warming or political instability. A lot of artists have been exploring abstraction or exploring obsession, but I wanted to capture more of this play of light and dark. I thought that the analogy of the battle scene was a good way to explore these tensions.

Philip at work on ‘Screw Hunt II’ (2018)

LUX: Have you felt pushed back by contemporary art establishments?
Philip Colbert: I think of myself as an outsider in a way, because I studied philosophy and really just developed my own practice. I’m not looking for validation from anyone. I feel that in the art world, people are sometimes groomed to want to please, but I’m much more interested in just connecting to people on a real and direct level.

LUX: Are you here to sell art or create art?
Philip Colbert: One hundred per cent to create art. The sales side of it is obviously an essential part of being able to grow because it allows one to do more, but I’m not deliberately engineering my works to be purely reflective of the market, which is not necessarily a bad thing either – Warhol was very good at mirroring what he felt the system wanted. My paintings are complex and intense and highly saturated, so are not the easiest to sell via Instagram, for example.

LUX: Talk about your use of social media.
Philip Colbert: If I think of my paintings as a reflection of my interaction with contemporary culture, social media are a significant element within that. There are some different strands of my work. I’m really developing a lot of these big history paintings, but also I’ve developed ‘Lobster Land’, a virtual reality world, which is the digital world where my lobster character lives. And in Lobster Land there’s a Lobster Bank, Lobster Coin, there’s a museum. I’m building my own reality there, which is one way of engaging with contemporary technology.

‘Hunt Triptych’ (2018) from the ‘Hunt Paintings’ series

LUX: How did you get started in China?
Philip Colbert: It happened very organically. When I had my first exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, curators from China came along and they featured some of my paintings in a group show in China. That was maybe June last year. It was amazing – I saw a crazy energy in China when I was there. So many people came to the show. It has simply evolved from there.

LUX: What are your influences?
Philip Colbert: There’s very much a ‘celebration of appropriation’ in these paintings. I was putting myself at the centre of the piece –you get the idea, it’s like my character is the narrator of the painting but then there’s art history effectively having a sort of ‘battle dialogue’ with this voice. This sort of dialogue is present in an artist’s mind when they’re creating an artwork. There’s the idea of place and time in the relationships to other philosophies and ideas within art, so by putting them into a battle sequence, it represents my own philosophy battling with other ideas and also being able to present a much bigger holistic idea, to create an orchestrated, ‘multi-philosophied’ painting. I’ve referenced loads of things deliberately. Léger was, for me, a very important proto-Pop thinker/painter, and his work was influential on people like Lichtenstein, who often even referred to Léger in the bottom corners of his paintings. My paintings are an evolution of Pop art – I have those references while I’m still playing with abstraction and different varieties of painting styles within a single painting.

LUX: This sounds more like it’s from inside someone’s mind rather than culture?
Philip Colbert: Yeah, I think of the paintings as like mind-maps in a way. I was really interested in ideas of art, so that’s why I like to use preconceived ideas because for me they are language. I could create my own characters but I wanted to use branded ideas that people could understand. So, when people look at the paintings, they will immediately understand ‘That’s Van Gogh’, or ‘that’s a Gucci handbag’. It’s using things that are already loaded with meaning.

Philip and Charlotte Colbert

LUX: Is it strange not coming from a family of artists?
Philip Colbert: No, I don’t think so. Some people’s parents are artists and they follow suit and are inspired by a world they’ve already been presented with. For me, I was always just connected with art and so it was always the language I was immediately connected with. As you know, I went into making clothing first, but I wasn’t making clothing to be a fashion designer, I was making clothing and thinking about artwork. I was more interested in this idea of ‘wearable art’ and trying to use the idea of a brand as a vehicle for art.

Read more: Maryam Eisler in conversation with Kenny Scharf

LUX: What plans do you have for the future?
Philip Colbert: Well, I have an exhibition in Shanghai at the end of June, then I have two shows in Hong Kong, a show in a museum in South Korea, and then another in Moscow in September in a multi-media art museum.

LUX: Do you and Charlotte collaborate?
Philip Colbert: Well, we’re married, so we inevitably interact and have an influence on each other’s work. We have quite a different aesthetic and even though we’re both interested in a lot of the same things, our end picture is very different, which is nice. But I think we both understand each other’s DNA, so we can help each other.

Charlotte Colbert with ‘Self Portrait in Lucian Freud’s studio’ (2018) from her ‘Screen Portrait’ series

Charlotte Colbert

LUX: Tell us about your photography.
Charlotte Colbert: I have done a couple of series. I started in 2013 with ‘A Day at Home’. It correlated the madness of the writer and the madness of the housewife in this domestic space that was both a prison and open to the landscapes of the imagination. It sort of chronicled the porousness of the world around the woman in a decrepit house in East London. We kept shooting as the place was being demolished, so we were getting layers of that story-telling within the building itself. Then I worked on ‘Ordinary Madness’ [2016], which was about our relationship to the digital age. The idea was that we expected aliens to come from outer space and somehow conquer us. But, little by little, we are becoming the cyborg, and technology is being absorbed into our bodies and changing the fabric of our being until we’ve become a new sort of human.

LUX: The video sculptures, ‘Screen Portraits’, are they bronzes?
Charlotte Colbert: No, they’re made of Corten steel. The first one was done for the Korea Institute. I came across this beautiful but heart-breaking story of a South Korean woman, Lee Soon-Kyu, who was 79 when I met her. She was pregnant when the Korean War started in 1950, but was separated from her husband who ended up in the north. She was able to meet him many years later, and went to North Korea with her son, who was then 65, to see him for the last time. It seemed fitting to do her portrait at this moment in her life, after she’d been in this Cold War kind of narrative for decades. She had to stay very still with just one light on her face. The filming of the sculpture was an extraordinary moment.

LUX: The one with a nuclear explosion, tell us about that.
Charlotte Colbert: That’s a piece called Disassociation. It’s a self-portrait. The eyes and the face are very much at peace and the head contains the nuclear explosion. I made it when I was seven months pregnant, at a time when you feel disconnected from the world around you. But I feel that in some ways it’s like an extreme version of everyone’s relationship to the world.

LUX: Neighbouring studios with Philip – how does that work?
Charlotte Colbert: Funnily enough, we’ve done loads of stuff together and I think in some way, we do look at each other’s works and comment on them, but our worlds definitely haven’t fused. I feel like both of us have pushed the identities really as defined against each other.

LUX: The studio, it seems very serene.
Charlotte Colbert: It’s amazing but there’s a lot of interesting characters around, and the building’s quite fun and it’s got all these layers of history. I think at one point it was a kennels, so there were dogs, now there’s more little mice. It’s a really amazing location – we’re so lucky.

Find out more: philipcolbert.com and charlottecolbert.com

This article was originally published in the Summer 19 Issue.

LA photographer Trevor Hernandez, known as @gangculture on Instagram, took all of the images included in this article. He was commissioned in 2018 by Frieze LA to photograph the Paramount Pictures Studios and surrounding Los Angeles landscape

In early 2019, Frieze invited surrealist photographer Trevor Hernandez to point his Instagram-focused lens, @gangculture, at its Los Angeles fair. He is one of a new generation of artists who, using social media, are building on and subverting the traditional tenets of surrealism. Katrina Kufer investigates

DEUTSCHE BANK WEALTH MANAGEMENT x LUX

“When I think of surrealist photography I usually think of the term with a capital ‘S’ that refers to a specific movement in the early 20th century, which is nearly 100 years ago!” remarks Rebecca Morse, curator in the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The visual characteristics of surrealist photography were defined by pivotal figures such as Man Ray, Dora Maar, Hans Bellmer and René Magritte in the 1920s and 30s who, reacting against the medium’s widespread intent to document reality, focused on image manipulation to create chance and dream-like compositions. While today’s version of surrealism is still marked by a sense of displacement, it is subtler and less engineered by the artists, who instead choose subjects that still respond to how reality – now largely presented via social media – is represented. Surrealism’s stylistic diversity can be fantastical or literal, clear or abstract, staged or organic and may prove difficult to code visually, but that hasn’t stopped photography being lauded as “the great unknown, undervalued aspect of surrealist practice” by art critic Rosalind Krauss. Surrealism’s oscillating, paradoxical nature, in tackling how evolving technologies and modes of seeing impact experienced realities, is what renders the movement, which underwent a revamp in the 1970s and 80s, so fresh and relevant.

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Krauss’s seminal 1985 essay ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism’ argues against the belief, based on surrealism’s foundation of reorganizing perceptions of reality, that surrealism and photography could not coexist. However, as Krauss writes, “Surrealist photography exploits the very special connection to reality with which all photography is endowed. Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real.” It is with this relationship between photography and reality in mind that today’s artists have translated surrealism and taken it into the digital realm.

Instagram: @gangculture

Instagram: @gangculture

Photography subverts reality through the idea of the uncanny – that is, transforming the recognizable into something unfamiliar through unexpected contexts, strange juxtapositions and spatial collapse. The view through the lenses of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Lee Friedlander and Garry Winogrand is a less analog and more nuanced one, closer to an askew déjà vu rather than German photographer Herbert List’s fotografia metafisica style from the early 1930s, which envisioned dream-like states. Where surrealist photographers in the early 20th century were manipulating the image through solarization, montage, multiple exposure and distortion, artists now prefer to seek out moments that disrupt space naturally: “Think of Friedlander’s photographs of his shadowy head on the back of a woman’s fur jacket, or Winogrand’s hilarious image of a woman who looks strangely like the rhinoceros she is standing next to at the zoo,” says Morse. “Many individuals who work in this way are street photographers who use small hand-held cameras.” LA-based Mike Slack, Barak Zemer or Trevor Hernandez exemplify current photographers who are bringing this approach into the 21st century. In fact, Hernandez, who often uses his iPhone to capture LA’s urban landscape with a conceptual, sculptural edge under Instagram handle @gangculture, collaborated with Frieze LA in 2019 for a commissioned series. “Surrealist photography tends to create a specific narrative through heavily orchestrated scenes employing tricks and manipulation. This is quite different from my process,” he explains. “The objects need to exist in a state of discovery for me to consider capturing an image.”

Read more: In conversation with artist ruby onyinyechi amanze

But even before the internet, artists were turning away from technical processes and towards cities to provide the necessary theatricality. Practitioners such as John Gutmann, Anthony Hernandez (whose work will be seen in the main exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale) and Helen Levitt embraced street photography, and, as Morse explains, their tactics resonate through today’s generation, with Trevor Hernandez making the point that the development of technology has further benefited photography by democratizing the camera via the smartphone.

By showcasing their observations digitally rather than through exhibits or print, today’s artists deviate from surrealism’s formal tenets, but add layers of curiosity provoked by the internet’s intervention in the act and idea of seeing. It also sees a generation returning to a different surrealist cornerstone: the elimination of logical thought or process in favor of instinct. This revitalized movement has taken hold particularly in LA, and while the city hasn’t bred as many street photographers as New York for example, its unique energy allows for “strange juxtapositions that only occur in LA,” remarks Morse. Trevor Hernandez capitalizes on precisely this: the inherent artistic potential of the city’s banal and desolate charm. “LA has a diverse group of artists scattered throughout the city. The isolation and independence created by decentralized living could be expressed in some of the images from my campaign,” he says. “I’m interested in surveying or decoding the landscape for a certain essence and the specific ingredients to that equation are constantly evolving.”

Instagram: @gangculture

The directness of snapshot to social media sidesteps artistic machinations to present
ultra-reality. However, the result is then skewed by, for example, Instagram’s reputation for showcasing manufactured realities. Cindy Sherman’s practice exemplifies this: she has adopted the social media platforms to investigate self-portraiture through the uncanny. Trevor Hernandez’s images, meanwhile, document unmodified moments, but the very act of selecting a scene and framing the image reconfigures the viewer’s perspective. Sitting where the real and unreal meet, the result is a deep dive into hyper-surrealism.

Contemporary surrealist photographers, by engaging with this dynamic, maximize the medium’s privileged capacity to explore the uncanny and transform reality not just through how the image is made, but how it’s shared. Surrealism’s revamp and shift towards urban landscape photography has injected new energy into image-making, and for those artists who deal with the digital world as well, such as Trevor Hernandez, audiences have immediate access to the surreal in real time.

Follow Trevor Hernandez on Instagram: @gangculture

This article originally appeared in the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management x LUX special supplement inside the Summer 19 Issue.

The exterior of Deutsche Bank’s PalaisPopulaire, the new Berlin home for its art collection. Opposite: Lohe (1994) by NeoRauch, included in the exhibition ‘The World on Paper’

Spearheaded by the recent opening of Deutsche Bank’s ambitious PalaisPopulaire, new developments are rapidly placing Berlin at the centre of the contemporary art world. Catherine Hickley reports on an extraordinary cultural transformation including the new public home of the German bank’s celebrated art collection and the vast new Humboldt Forum

Thorsten Strauß, Global Head of Art, Culture & Sports at Deutsche Bank

A vibrant, edgy subculture, a liberal reputation and an understated, dilapidated flair have all contributed to Berlin’s status as the world’s most important centre for contemporary art production after New York. The German capital is home to more than 8,000 artists, with big names such as Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson and Alicja Kwade among those who have set up studios there. In fact, more than half of the city’s five million visitors a year say they come for art and culture, and there’s certainly plenty to keep them busy, with world-class art collections, three opera houses, legendary night-clubs such as Berghain, a globally renowned film festival, an orchestra many consider to be the best in the world, dozens of theatres and a lively gallery scene. And slowly, years of building work and construction are making way for a historic centre that visitors and Berliners alike can enjoy.

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Nearly 30 years after the Berlin Wall came down, the city is also shedding its reputation as a capital of the ‘alternative’ (in everything from culture to business) to become a leader in its own right. The German government’s Exzellenzstrategie, announced in 2018, will pump huge sums over decades into the city’s universities and learning institutions. Britain’s departure from the European Union will create an even more powerful political momentum directed towards the city of Alexanderplatz and the Brandenburg Gate. A new international airport, now scheduled to open in 2021 (after years of very un-German delays), will bring world-class international links to the city, and lift its position from the second division of international airline destinations.

Deutsche Bank’s exhibition ‘The World on Paper’ at the PalaisPopulaire, 2018, with works by Ellen Gallagher and Ugo Rondinone 

The opening of the PalaisPopulaire on the prestigious Unter den Linden boulevard in the heart of the city in September 2018 is an important landmark in the cultural ascendancy of the city to the highest global level. The new museum and cultural space are owned by Deutsche Bank, which has a vast corporate collection comprising 55,000 works; a total of 133 artists from 34 countries are represented, with an emphasis on works on paper produced after 1945. Much of the collection adorns the walls of the bank’s offices – but the bank has never had space to display it all, and some of the works have never or only rarely been shown. Artists include luminaries such as Gerhard Richter, Joan Mitchell, Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, James Rosenquist, Joseph Beuys, Anish Kapoor and Bridget Riley.

Svenja von Reichenbach, Head of PalaisPopulaire Deutsche Bank AG

These artists are all included in the debut exhibition, ‘The World on Paper’, which opened in September with works from the Deutsche Bank collection. But the PalaisPopulaire aims to be more than just a home for one of the largest corporate art collections in the world. The team behind it is hoping to add fuel to Berlin’s creative fire with a future-oriented arts and sports hub hosting talks, concerts, readings, workshops for children, young people and adults, a restaurant and a shop. “This is not a private house for a small select group, it is open to all Berliners and to guests from all over the world,” says Svenja von Reichenbach, the director of the PalaisPopulaire. “We want it to be a lively place. We don’t want to be a dusty old institution. We view ourselves as an open house that thrives on momentum from its visitors.”

Read more: Bicester Village launches a colourful new spring campaign

Before opening the PalaisPopulaire, the bank had the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle nearby on Unter den Linden, which it operated with the Guggenheim Museum until 2013. The PalaisPopulaire represents a threefold increase in exhibition space and will allow the corporate collection to be on permanent public display for the first time. “Deutsche Bank has a rich history of supporting and engaging with contemporary art, particularly in Berlin,” comments Victoria Siddall, the director of the Frieze art fairs. “Their collection is extraordinary and wide-ranging, so I am really happy they are opening this up to the public, alongside a fantastically diverse programme of events which will engage new audiences with art and culture.”

Untitled (2003) by Raqib Shaw, included in the exhibition ‘The World on Paper’;

That intent has informed Deutsche Bank’s revamp of the historic Prinzessinnenpalais, which Reichenbach describes as “a very exciting and challenging building that incorporates the whole history of Berlin”. Originally built in the mid eighteenth century, it was originally the home of Prussian princesses – including one who married the Russian czar. The palace was seized in the November Revolution of 1918 and suffered severe damage in World War II.

After the war, it was demolished, then rebuilt by the East German authorities, according to a design by Richard Paulick, who also oversaw the reconstruction of the neighbouring Staatsoper Unter den Linden. Paulick rebuilt the original Rococo façade but combined it with a modern interior made of steel and concrete. The Prinzessinnenpalais reopened in 1963 as the Opera Café. With a bar, wine tavern, grill restaurant and occasional disco, it developed into a hub for the East German progressive arts scene, and featured as a filmset in one of East Germany’s most successful movies, The Legend of Paul and Paula, from 1973. After German reunification, it became a café in the Rococo style known as the Opernpalais – its interior complete with painted marbled columns, fake stucco and thick floral carpets. The café, renowned for its sumptuous cakes, has now given way to a modern restaurant with an emphasis on healthy eating (though the cakes are still there, and still made by the same supplier). The chintzy 1990s décor is gone – instead, the Berlin architecture firm Kuehn Malvezzi has opted for a sleek, minimalist look for the PalaisPopulaire.

The PalaisPopulaire opening was timed to coincide with Berlin Art Week in September 2018

“Paulick created the Operncafe as a Berlin living room, a central space in the city with a view of the Neue Wache,” the guardhouse designed by the 19th-century Prussian architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, says Wilfried Kuehn at Kuehn Malvezzi. “As a GDR architect, he was interested in the complexity of history. He was not a pure modernist, but one who referred heavily to history. From the outside, this architecture doesn’t betray what it is on the inside. It is a modern reinforced concrete structure in a Rococo wrapping, which provides a theatrical backdrop for the city.” From today’s perspective, “it is problematic to create a modern interior and then on the outside, give the appearance that it is a Rococo building, without making these contrasts apparent,” Kuehn adds. “We decided to make these contrasts visible by exposing the structure inside.”

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What Kuehn Malvezzi has done is return the interior to its modernist roots. The exposed concrete pillars and steel pipes, white walls and terrazzo floors lend a clean and austere aesthetic. “Nothing was left of Paulick’s décor on the inside, it was all gone,” Kuehn says. “There are few surviving photos and documents, so there is no record of the original, which meant that reconstructing Paulick’s interior would have been futile.” In fact, the palace at number five on Unter den Linden was completely gutted when Deutsche Bank took it over. “The classic Rococo façade is under heritage protection, but the interior isn’t, and that was very important to us as we wanted to put it to a completely new use,” Reichenbach says. “We wanted to be able to shape the rooms according to our needs. It was important to speak a very modern language inside, so that the visitors have the immediate feeling that they are in a modern institution, because our programme is focussed on the contemporary and the future.” An example of flexibility is an atelier on the top floor, which Kuehn says is designed to serve as an art workshop for children as well as a space for talks and lectures. Its windows offer views of the Prussian grandeur surrounding the Palais – the opera house, the Neue Wache, the rebuilt royal palace and two imposing red-brick churches.

The PalaisPopulaire

Reichenbach says Deutsche Bank chose Kuehn Malvezzi as its architect because of the company’s track record in designing spaces for art – the firm’s previous projects include the building that houses the Friedrich Christian Flick Collection at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum of contemporary art in Berlin, and the privately owned Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf. Designing space for art comes with challenges – especially if a client’s emphasis is on openness and accessibility, Kuehn says.

“In a museum, art is unfortunately very hermetic, for several reasons,” he says. “Firstly because of security. Then the climate – it has to be protected. Third, you have to have a ticket area so you can’t give access from all sides of the building. Fourth, you have to give a pathway through the exhibition halls. If you were to have an open, permeable building, you wouldn’t meet these requirements. That’s why you need to generate permeability in the other spaces around the exhibition proper and create strong relations between these two contrasting spaces of a museum.” The firm achieved this sense of ‘permeability’ by creating access to the building from two sides and closing off the former entrance onto Unter den Linden to make a safe, enclosed space for art. A ramp leading up to the Palais from Bebelplatz gives a modern accent to the Rococo façade.

Works shown in ‘The World of Paper’ exhibition, included ‘Untitled’ (1995) by Katharina Grosse

In addition to its exhibition schedule – a permanent show of its own collection that will change every 11 months and a temporary show that will change three times a year – the Palais will also host DJ sets, concerts, and discussions with athletes, actors, writers and musicians. Yanna Schneider, a former taekwondo world champion, will give coaching to school children. One of PalaisPopulaire’s partners is Ben Scheffler, a 30-year-old expert in parkour, or freerunning, an athletic discipline that originated in gritty Parisian suburbs and entails leaping and climbing through an urban landscape. Scheffler will offer workshops for young people.

In the German cultural landscape, which is 90% funded by the state, the PalaisPopulaire stands out as a private arts venture, while the construction projects surrounding show how much public investment is currently being funnelled into Berlin’s cultural life and infrastructure. The State Opera house next door reopened in 2017 after a seven-year revamp; on Museum Island, the vast Humboldt Forum is to open in the Berlin Palace in 2019 and the Pergamon Museum is undergoing a major revamp. In addition, a new underground line connecting the main station to Alexanderplatz is set to open in 2020 – one of its stations will be just by the opera house and PalaisPopulaire. It’s an exciting time to be in Berlin.

For more information visit: db-palais-populaire.com

Humboldt Forum

One of the jewels in the crown of Berlin’s central urban redevelopment is the gigantic Humboldt Forum, just a stone’s throw from the new PalaisPopulaire. At a cost of €595 million (483 million of which is funded by the German government, with the rest from the city of Berlin and private donations) it has been described as “the visiting card of the nation” and “Germany’s most ambitious cultural project” by German culture minister Monika Grütters. Scheduled to open in 2019, like the Palais, the project involves the reconstruction and regeneration of an iconic Berlin landmark (in this case, a former Prussian royal palace) by the Italian architect Franco Stella.

Named after the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt and his polymath brother Wilhelm, when complete, it will offer a staggering 40,000 square metres of exhibition space, including Berlin’s non-European ethnological collections and Asian art collections, a permanent city history exhibition, several spaces for temporary exhibitions and the Humboldt Laboratory run by the university. With the aim of staging approximately 1,000 events annually for an audience of about three million visitors a year, it also promises to be free to the public.

This article was originally published in the Winter 19 Issue.

Five Château Mouton Rothschild vintages will be included in the “Versailles Celebration Cases”

Throughout Spring 2019, Sotheby’s will auction 75-limited edition cases from Château Mouton Rothschild to help fund restoration projects at the Palace of Versailles

Renowned French wine producer Château Mouton Rothschild  is auctioning 75 collector’s cases each featuring five vintages with labels designed by contemporary artists who have also exhibited at the Palace of Versailles, including Giuseppe Penone, Bernar Venet, Anish Kapoor, Jeff Koons and Lee Ufan. Aptly titled the “Versailles Celebration Cases”, funds raised will go towards supporting the ongoing restoration projects at the Palace.

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Château de Versailles. Photo by Thomas Garnier, Courtesy Château de Versailles

The auction will begin in Sotheby’s Hong Kong on 1 April, followed by London on 17 April and concluding in New York on 4 May. Successful bidders will also win an invitation to a private tasting at Château Mouton Rothschild, as well as two tickets to the Versailles Celebration Gala Dinner at the Palace of Versailles in September where ex-cellar vintages of Château Mouton Rothschild will be served.

Discover Château Mouton Rothschild’s full list of collaborating artists and labels: https://www.chateau-mouton-rothschild.com/label-art/discover-the-artwork

‘Shabdiz’, 2017. Natural pigments and 24ct gold on handmade hemp paper. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

British-Iranian artist Hana Louise Shahnavaz spent 6 years studying the art of traditional Persian painting in Iran under the tutorage of master painter Safoura Asadian before moving back to London to continue her studies at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts. In a week dominated by the ultra-contemporary and beyond abstract at Frieze London, we speak to a young living artist increasingly admired for her painstaking creation of materials – she mixes her own paints, from Persian soils – and her intricate artworks which possess a poetic, almost mystical quality as if merging ancient myth and the current zeitgeist for the authentic

1. Why is Iran so important in informing your art?

Hana Louise Shahnavaz

Iran has been, still is, and always will be absolutely vital to my artwork. I’m really inspired by Persian miniatures, Persian stories and Persian poetry, and for me it is really important to explore the roots and origin of these Persian art forms that influence and guide my own art so much. The obvious starting point of this exploration would be by visiting and honouring the location, which is in most part what we know as modern day Iran. I learnt to paint in Iran, having moved there post uni and ended up staying for around 6 years completely immersing myself in the arts. I therefore owe Iran a lot for the nurture it gave me and all it taught me.

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It is very important for me to physically be in Iran and stand in the earth and really feel the energy in its pure form – this is after all, where it all began. I’m a real big believer in breaking things down and going back to simplicity; start simple and then let things grow organically. Don’t skip steps but instead take time to build the foundation. A solid foundation is everything. Admittedly it’s something I didn’t fully understand to begin with – I wanted to immediately fly ahead and paint without stopping and breathing and observing. Then I began to appreciate the beauty and importance in going back and just looking to see where all this has come from. I started to ask questions and really think about how they used to do things in the golden years of old Persia. How did they used to paint? How did they view colour? How did they make their materials? I took time to look at the wall paintings in Isfahan, the old miniatures in the royal manuscripts, and all the paintings in the palaces. I find it really important to look and compare all the different Persian paintings by various Masters throughout time. Which ones attract me? Without analysing, just instinctively – what gets me? Then, after getting a feel as to what draws me in, I start to think and ask myself ‘why?’ This is one of the main ways in which Iran informs my art.

‘Map of Hormoz’, 2017. Earth on handmade hemp paper. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

Secondly, Iran is such a fascinating country. There is an amazing history of Persian art and poetry and you can feel it still vibrating in the earth, within the people. It is still very much alive today – it is timeless, a true living tradition. This is shown also by the many wonderful contemporary artists coming out of Iran today. There is a lot of art going on within Iran and one of the first things I will do when I visit now is to go to an art gallery and see what’s new. It’s actually really exciting to follow what is happening within the Iranian art scene – you can never quite predict what will emerge. But also, when I am in Iran it is not just about looking at art. Just breathing in the air, looking at colours, observing the natural colours that occur in Iran’s earth, in Iran’s terrain, the textures, the feel of the air, is all just as important. It really affects me. I’m a really visual person and all my work is inspired by things I’ve visually seen and felt. I use all my senses and think that is really important in art. Maybe it’s something that is being lost throughout time as we are getting very conceptual and art is becoming very much about what the artist thinks, feels and believes so when you skip all these things about observing, looking, feeling, touching, smelling, tasting and go immediately to ‘what I want to say’ a lot is lost, and so it’s really vital for me to look and am constantly observe my surroundings. I especially like to notice what flowers grow next to each other in the wild as these show certain colour combinations that naturally occur – colour combinations that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought may go together. I like to look at the trees to see how the different shades of green sing together. Iran is a fantastic palette of colour and texture to inspire!

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Another really important thing Iran brings for me is the stories. I absolutely adore Persian stories. I think they are magical and beautiful and truly believe beautiful stories and beautiful paintings are important. What I find fascinating about Persian stories, which I actually think mirrors Iran as a country, is that there are many layers to them; Iran is a very complex country, culture, people, history. In the Persian stories there is the story you take at face value, which is very visual. When Persians write the poetry you can visualise it like a painting due to the detailed, beautiful ways in which the language is used. This visual language plays a huge role in my art, from guiding my creative design all the way to the intricate use of colour. Then there will be the meaning behind the story – and wow they are full of many layers of meanings! There will be the moral of the story, the lesson it is trying to teach, that could have some value in day to day life for most people. Then there is a philosophical, contemplative meaning, and deeper still there are Sufi/spiritual types of meanings embedded into the stories that are meant to guide the soul. Basically the stories have something for every one, and this is exactly what I hope to achieve in my paintings. Iran is a very poetic and visual country with a huge story-telling culture. You can see this when talking to Iranians – they all just talk with such detailed, beautiful poetic visuals. The way stories are told is just full of life and magic. All of this is constantly feeding into my art.

2. You take your materials very seriously, often making them yourself. Why?

Materials for me are everything. I can’t separate the materials from the end painting. It’s half and half and I will always call my art a collaboration between myself and the Earth. There are many reasons why materials are important, the first being quality. The more you understand materials and go back to the root of them, the more you can make true quality art. Due to the commercialisation of art we have lost real luxury art, because if you are going to make this kind of art you can’t make a lot of it. Therefore my exhibitions are always half about the earth and process/journey and half the actual paintings. I actually think this is really beautiful because it’s not just about making the materials also. It really feeds into the whole creative aspect of the painting, so it feeds into my visuals. For example, when I make my own paint I don’t just buy pigment from a shop that has been synthesised in the lab and thats what it is and always be every time you go and buy it. I actually like to go and forage for natural materials, earth, semi precious stones, plants myself that I can make paint from. I also like to do pigment swaps and collaborations with some other amazing foragers out there in the world who also find really special and unique earth materials. So what this does is it brings a certain unpredictability to the work. I’m never quite certain what colour will appear on my palette each time.

‘Hormoz earth’, Earth collected from Hormoz Island, Iran. 2018. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

Also I’m never quite sure what the end paint will be like when I make it from a mineral or earth – it’s always different when you make it into paint as it never looks exactly like you see it when it’s in its rock form. It will always be a surprise and will always be a bit different. These differences will always end up gently guiding me in new directions I may not have taken if I didn’t make my own paint. If I had tubes of paint already prepared for me, I think psychologically in my mind I could probably very much plan a painting, and even if I told myself not to plan there would still always an element of planning  to it, as I would always know exactly what colour I will be getting. I love to take that ability to plan away from myself, which is what happens when I make my own materials. This will of course change the whole feel of the painting, which is really exciting for me.

Also due to these pigment swaps I have been blessed to work with some very rare pigments. These bring a wide range of energies to the artwork and I always like to ask the forager the story behind the material. If we don’t understand where things come from then we can’t understand the true nature of those things. If I truly know the story and origin of the material then I can connect much deeper to it and its energy, and then get excited by it, which in turn opens the doors of creativity. The biggest and most important thing in art is creativity and I think pure creativity doesn’t come from the ego. It comes from something much purer and the artist is a vessel for that. It is nature that allows this to happen for me and the connection to the essence of the material I am using, and honouring it and respecting it. It’s why I also don’t take more than I need, and enjoy the fact that each painting will always be slightly different in the materials used, which again makes it more interesting and unique. It is definitely a fun way to paint!

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Also the more I work with the earth the more I have a profound connection to it and a deeper gratitude. To witness what this earth can give us is such a blessing. This then makes me want to protect the earth and really thank her for what she has generously given and to not be greedy with it. If anything can have that effect on us, to actually want to protect the earth we walk on, the earth that we come from, then I think that’s a wonderful thing! I feel that as we are made from earth and come from nature itself, we can connect very deeply and quickly with something that is also made from nature as opposed to something that has no root or connection to us. I therefore think using earth materials facilitates the connection to the painting.

Another reason why I don’t want to use ready made or synthetic paints is the visuals. These will never be the same as hand ground paint made from semi precious stones sparkling in the sun, 24ct gold shining likes its on fire and translucent plant pigments where the light just bounces through the delicate layers.

‘Galloping into the golden skies’, Handmade and hand-ground pigments, foraged natural pigments, 24ct gold on handmade hemp paper, 2018. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

Finally I also love to work for my art – I really enjoy the process. I like the active part of it. It is an honour to go through the alchemical process of it all as it really is embarking on a mental, physical and spiritual journey with the transformation of the earth into paint. It’s a beautiful journey and I wouldn’t want to miss it! I love the journey just as much as I love painting. I also love being able to tailor make my recipes in a way that suits the way I paint. If you buy paint or any art material you have to make sure you create art in a way that agrees with the material, whereas I do the opposite. I make paint in a way it can agree with the way I want to paint. Again this really fuels creativity. As we are moving with the times art needs to be able to grow and develop naturally, and so for an artist to be able to remove as many limits as they can I think that really facilitates the organic growth of art, and allows the artist to move in any way they wish or feel they would like to go, rather than be stunted. It’s about being in harmony with the material and working together to achieve a shared mutual goal rather than working against each other. Everything about this art is about being in harmony and that just provides peace, which in turn filtrates into the art.

3. What are your views about colour, and has colour been neglected as artists’ materials become industrialised?

Yes, I do think the industrialisation of artists’ paints has changed the way we think about colour. It has stopped us thinking about colour, to an extent that is. The colours are pre-made – they are already ground, already mixed, the recipes are decided for us. Each of these elements does have an effect on the final paint. So yes, the artist may mix a particular blue with yellow to get a shade of green, but so much has been decided for them already and any one else get that exact shade.

Also, when something is in a tube, for example ‘ultramarine blue’, the artist can’t really form a true connection with it as they can’t truly understand what ‘ultramarine blue’ is. Where does it come from? What is it? How is it formed? Everything has already been decided for us so how can the artist have that connection with the origin of the colour? So how can we truly understand its colour?  Because to understand the colour we really need to understand how it came about and why it is the way it is. So when you don’t have this connection you are just using it as a means to an end. You are using it for the painting and not enjoying it truly for itself. You are not there with it during its transformation, during its alchemical journey.

‘The secret garden.’ Handmade and hand-ground pigments, foraged natural pigments, 24ct gold on handmade hemp paper, 2018. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

This is how the industrialisation of materials has totally led to colour being neglected whereas in the past it was revered and honoured. These days everything is so fast-moving. We are in the fast-food, fast technology era where it is a lot about producing. The same has happened in art, where easy access to ready-made art materials has helped facilitate this mass produced nature, and as a result things like colour have become neglected. Due to the amount of paint I make and really working closely with my materials my eyes are getting really in tune to colour. I’m starting to see many blues within a blue pigment and many different greens within a green. So I feel like I’m really seeing colour for the first time and really witnessing what the world is offering. The more we use pre-made paint then the less we are going to be able to become in tune with that.

4. Do you have any artists who are your inspirations?

Yes I have many! I tend to get inspired by artists who excite me and who make me buzz and joyful. The first artists I would say really inspire me constantly are Persian miniaturists from around the 15th century during the Timurid dynasty of the Persian empire. I absolutely love the way they used to paint – it seemed freer and wilder than the later more ostentatious schools of miniature painting. It was also the time they used the best minerals, paper and gold in their manuscripts so it is always such an inspiration to look through them in person and touch the paper and actually see the vibrancy of the paint still glimmering like a jewel. I spend a lot of time in museums and the British library just to be close to these precious manuscripts. I also take a lot of inspiration from the wall paintings within the palaces around Iran.

Another artist I love is Reza Derakshani who is inspired by Persian miniatures and imagery and paints in an abstract expressionist style of painting. I was absolutely blown away the first time I saw his work in person – it was the colour, textures and story-telling magic that totally captured me. His paintings are always beautiful and this just draws you in. I never get tired of seeing his work and absolutely love his colour palette, which is always the first thing I will notice when viewing art.

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Probably the most important inspiration in my art career has been my own teacher and mentor in Iran, Safoura Asadian. She taught me how to paint, and she taught me everything about colour – not via rules and systems but by intuition and organic connection. She is a very intuitive painter with her colour palette and by watching her paint over many years and by being by her side, the way she uses colour has seeped into me. The way she brings joy to her art and also how it is a spiritual practice for her also shines through her painting. Her paintings truly uplift the soul and I have never met anyone so creative as her. Just looking at her work makes me want to pick up a brush and paint. This means a lot, that if someone does something that makes you want to immediately create art then that is certainly the biggest form of inspiration you could wish for.

Cornwall based artist Kate Walters is also a big inspiration. She really honours nature and paints intuitively, from the heart. I’ve had the blessing to work with her and she really opened up some doors within me and helped me to be free and play in art, to not think so much and just go with the flow and connect hand to heart.

‘Khosrow’, 2017. Natural pigments and 24ct gold on handmade hemp paper. Hana Louise Shahnavaz

5. Is fame important?

For me personally fame isn’t important because what I am doing is with the Earth and I’m just going along with the flow and doing what I enjoy and am at peace with. I think fame to some extent involves having to consider what may be fashionable or in demand in that particular time, and I find it quite dangerous to think about what’s fashionable if it may go against what brings joy to your heart. This may lead the artist away from what they love, which for me is a sad thing so I don’t concern myself at all with that part of the art world. I wouldn’t want to change what I do or be steered away from my collaboration with nature and story-telling magic. Of course it is the biggest blessing to have artworks enjoyed by many people and to know they are bringing joy into peoples’ homes, but I hope for this to happen organically and with no force. I wouldn’t want this to be the driving force behind why I paint. The driving force must always remain rooted in Nature.

6. What would you like to do next?

I’m really excited to announce that my next solo exhibition will be upcoming in January 2019 so watch that space – I’m very excited! Then in spring 2020 I will be having a huge exhibition with a wonderful artist Yasmin Hayat where we will be bringing a lot of magic and crazy earth colour to life, full of stories and adventures. I have a lot of foraging trips planned as I would like to explore a wider range of earth pigments from all over the world. It’s exciting to think about what new colours will arrive on my painting palette for my future paintings. I definitely want to meet some of the amazing foragers from many different countries that I have been collaborating with and doing pigment swaps with – to see them in person and go frolicking in the mountains with discovering new rocks and new colours. I would like to explore the world and definitely dive deeper into foraging. I’m especially excited to look for more special and rare materials with exciting stories to tell.

Another thing I am excited to do is to continue honing my recipes for my materials as it is like cooking – recipes are never ‘done’. This is the great thing, there is so much we can do with it and it is the beginning for me. I have a lot to learn and discover so want to dedicate a lot of time now to diving even deeper into my materials. I’m also in the process of exploring some lost painting methods and recipes in Iran. Hopefully I can figure out some of the golden alchemy these fantastic painters of the past used and then bring that lost or hidden knowledge into my own art. It’s going to be a really explorative and exciting year!

To view more artwork by Hana Louise Shahnavaz visit: https://startartfair.com/2018-solo-hana-louise-shahnavaz or follow her on Instagram @hanaalchemyart