The hardback copy of ‘Confined Artists – Free Spririts: Portraints and Interviews from Lockdown 2020’. Photo by Maryam Eisler

During the lockdown of 2020, Maryam Eisler brought together 164 of the world’s most influential artists, interviewing and photographing them over video calls to create a unique series of portraits and accompanying insights. As we anticipate the physical launch of Confined Artists – Free Spirits: Portraits & Interviews from Lockdown 2020, Trudy Ross speaks to Maryam about looking back on her unique creative journey from a post-pandemic perspective

It was April 2020, and Maryam Eisler was feeling restless. With her usual schedule of travelling round the world, exploring and creating curtailed, she sat at home pondering a life without movement. Thus, in a rare circumstance of  stasis, a one-of-a-kind project was born.

The result? 164 conversations, 164 unique portraits, and their assemblage as a wider piece of art. An exploration into the minds and hearts of artists across the globe during one of the most significant historical events in many of our lifetimes. As she says herself, it is: “a collective stamp of a moment in time. It is a memory, a capsule of a moment in history.” She managed to capture an important frame in the history of the modern art world.

Ron Arad seeing his work Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me? for the first time at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2020. Photo by Ron Arad and Associates Limited

The project’s first form was a digital exhibition on the LUX website shortly after its completion, which garnered so much traction that it actually crashed the LUX website when it went live. Now there is a new launch happening this week, a physical one, for a hardback book entitled: Confined Artists – Free Spirits: Portraits and Interviews from Lockdown 2020. Shaped like a tall rectangle to imitate a smartphone, each slick copy brings Maryam’s virtual interviews and Facetime-facilitated photography beyond the screen and into the physical world.

Over three years later, with the pandemic behind us – indeed, almost forgotten about by many in society – I spoke to Maryam about her time spent on this original project and the inspiration behind it.

“Artists are always very symbolic of their time,” she says. “Their ways of thinking and philosophies are often very much a reflection of the historical time that they live in, and this manifests in their artworks. I was intrigued to see how that particular community was dealing with the COVID issue from a psychological perspective, an emotional perspective, and also from a logistical perspective of production.”

Artist Ron Arad, one of the interviewees, spoke to LUX about the practicalities of production these strange times; “I did a lot during lockdown, including buying cars online, an old red Mercedes, and then flattening it online by giving instructions over Zoom to a team in Holland. I saw that piece for the first time on the walls of the Royal Academy […] It is very strange to know a piece intimately and work on it intensely, but to have never touched it.”

Originally, Maryam set her sights on thirty artists in total, but after receiving a resounding yes from everyone she reached out to – very rare in the world of overstretched artists in demand – she decided to keep going. And going. And going.

Es Devlin. Photo by Maryam Eisler

It became a routine for her, she tells me: “I had my desk set up in the kitchen, I had my roster, my Rolodex, and I would spend one day interviewing and one day organising.” Each conversation enriched her mind and gave her new perspectives on unprecedented times.

Beyond this, it was a creative exercise; she had a creative vision for each portrait, and aimed to allow each artist’s personality and areas of focus to shine through. When I ask her about some of her favourites, she says: “Off the cuff, I can remember Es Devlin; she put herself in front of a refractory mirror so you could see her face several times, which is very in line with her aesthetic and ethos. Charlotte Colbert uses eyes a lot on her work – indeed, eyes were a symbol that recurred throughout the project – so she had this massive eye that she put in front of another, so she had this distorted hawking out eye, an inanimate object, versus her regular blue eyes. With Edmund de Waal I remember clearly saying hold the camera a little bit more that way just a little bit more, so I could see the geometric designs and patterns in the studio ceiling. We had of course a lot of artists in front of their works which was one more straightforward but still telling approach. Melanie Dunea is one of my favourite portraits; she is holding a magnifying glass in front of one eye so, again, she has one eye protruding.”

Edmund de Waal by Maryam Eisler

“When you go through it you can see some artists’ attitudes in their portraits reflected in their words. Some are incredibly peaceful, and you can see the sense of serenity and peace in their face. In others you can see fear, and potentially anger. There was a real degree of playfulness from others. Philip Colbert, with his lobster alter ego and his mask, for instance.”

The project not only allowed interested readers to gain insight into the lives of artists in extraordinary times – it also touched the artists themselves profoundly. Shirin Neshat comments that: “Maryam came knocking at artists’ doors with lightness, sense of humour and ease when everyone felt utterly isolated and lost. Her zoom’s conversations felt comforting and a reminder of artists’ need for a community especially in times of crisis.”

Shirin Neshat by Maryam Eisler

Further still, the project touches on the fraught political landscape of the moment. Maryam highlighted the importance of chronology when putting the book together: “ as you read through, there is not only an art-historical progression, there is a political progression. Towards the end of the project in June is when the Black Lives Matter movement was beginning. The last profile of the book is about breathing – not in connection with the virus, but in connection with George Floyd.”

Mickalene Thomas takes the final, impactful slot in this book of over 150 famous artists, speaking to Maryam on 30th June, 2020. She calls upon the world to “say her damn name”, cementing in print the names of tens of black women who lost their lives at the hands of police enforcement – just a fraction of the total black lives lost this way.

Thomas’ words leave an imprint in the mind of the reader, and the project itself leaves an imprint on the timeline of the modern art world.

Find out more: www.maryameisler.com

Togetherness, 2022, by Leilah Babirye, at the PAF’s ‘Black Atlantic’ exhibition, 2022

As the art world gets moving for Asia’s first major fair of 2023, the new Art SG in Singapore, we asked some movers, shakers and collectors which artists and curators around the world are catching their eye for 2023. Read on for the verdicts from Mickalene Thomas, Steve Lazarides, Phillip Colbert and many others

Mickalene Thomas, artist
Based: New York
Nominates: Leilah Babirye
I first encountered Leilah Babirye’s work in 2019, a year after she received asylum in the US from Uganda, when a friend introduced me to her sculptures. I immediately felt a profound, intense connection to her work. The composition of materials deeply resonated with me, particularly how she juxtaposes found objects with ceramics, metal and wood, and shapes the surfaces and imbues the materials with such a regal, ethereal, spiritual essence. Her sculptures transform seemingly disparate media into a powerful representation of her vision for empowering hybridity, queerness and trans selfhood. She shows with Gordon Robichaux and Stephen Friedman Gallery.

stephenfriedman.com/artists/66-leilah-babirye

Steve Lazarides, artist
Based: London
Nominates: Tim & Barry
They are not exactly emerging, but Tim & Barry are definitely change-makers. They documented the birth of grime in an incredibly unexpected way, and it’s not often I say this but their work is exceptional. I love their visuals, and the way they work across multimedia. They basically set up Boiler Room before Boiler Room did.

Just Jam Omar Souleyman, 2014, by Tim & Barry

linktr.ee/TimandBarryTV

Philip Colbert, artist
Based: London
Nominates: Elsa Rouy
I am very excited about the work of Elsa Rouy, who shows with Guts Gallery. Her paintings have a dark, subversive edge with an undeniable femininity, and they are really punchy. Charlotte [Colbert] loves her, too – we actually bought some of Rouy’s works from one of her first shows.

I Could Always Crack a Joke, 2021, by Elsa Rouy

elsarouy.com

Alia Al-Senussi, cultural strategist and advisor in
arts and culture
Based: London and Riyadh
Nominates: Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud
Prince Badr is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s first minister of culture and leads on various initiatives related to the implementation of Saudi Vision 2030. His curiosity, engagement and willingness to promote culture at the forefront of Saudi society and economy are unprecedented. His vision is clear and he is unstoppable with his energy and enthusiasm. I see his culture work as revolutionary, something that will impact generations to come.

Dark Suns, Bright Waves by Claudia Comte at Desert X AlUla 2022, for whose Royal Commission Prince Badr is governor

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

moc.gov/sa/en

Maria Sukkar, collector and member of the International Council at Tate
Based: London and Lebanon
Nominates: Alex Petalas
Alex Petalas is a young, energetic, Swiss-born Greek art aficionado. In 2018, he opened the Perimeter, a beautiful mews house in Bloomsbury converted into an exhibition space where vistors can view part of his contemporary-art collection. He has also been involved in Tate Young Patrons for a long time and for three years was co-chair. Petalas is already starting to make waves in the art world by synthesising the roles of collector, public gallerist and curator all in one.

A view of Alex Petalas’s London gallery, The Perimeter, showing Sicily Morning, 2018, by Wolfgang Tillmans

theperimeter.co.uk

Sophie Neuendorf, vice president, Artnet
Based: Madrid and Berlin
Nominates: Anthony Vaccarello
In 2022 six major Paris museums, including the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, have celebrated Anthony Vaccarello, the Saint Laurent creative director and patron of the arts. Continuing the legacy and ethos of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Vaccarello launched an exhibition space at Saint Laurent Rive Droite. With Paris exhibitions and global pop-up shows (including Sho Shibuya during ABMB), Vaccarello is developing Rive Droite into a destination for collectors worldwide.

Inside the Saint Laurent Rive Droite Paris boutique

ysl.com

Azu Nwagbogu, founder, African Artists’ Foundation and director, LagosPhoto Festival
Based: Lagos and London
Nominates: Moufouli Bello
In February 2022 one of the smallest countries in West Africa, Benin, hosted the exhibition ‘Benin Art from Yesterday to Today, from Restitution to Revelation’. It marked the Musée du Quai Branly’s return to Benin of art that had been pillaged from the former Dahomey Kingdom in 1892, and celebrations were mediated through an exhibition of works by contemporary Beninese artists. Standout was Moufouli Bello’s Tassi Hangbe, a large painting that chronicled the journey of restitution, but also gave it an agency in the present and for time to come. Bello is also a film-maker and environmental activist, an art-world thinker and star for the future.

Beautiful Silly Flowers, 2021, by Moufouli Bello

houseofafricanart.com/moufouli-bello

Darius Sanai,
Editor-in-Chief, LUX
Based: London and Switzerland
Nominates: Jacopo Pagin
I fell for Jacopo Pagin at Frieze LA in 2022. I had missed the private
view because of a clash with Frieze events, and when I dropped round to the Make Room gallery, which is behind a car park in West Hollywood, a day later, all the works had sold. That in itself is not a guarantor of quality, but what you immediately see in Pagin’s works is his technical accuracy and training, combined with what appears to be quite a mathematical imagination. There is something unmistakably Italian about his style – he is a young Italian artist living in Brussels – but it sweeps across the eras: a touch of Fontana, memories of Leonardo da Vinci and his own intricate and occasionally nightmarish neo-surrealist dreamscapes. I am keeping an eye on him, or is that three eyes?

My Destiny in Fiction, 2022, by Jacopo Pagin

jacopopagin.com

Read more: Why the German art auction market is booming

Vanessa Guo, co-founder and partner, Galerie Marguo
Based: Paris
Nominates: Rebecca Ness
Since graduating from Yale School of Art in 2019, Rebecca Ness has risen in the global contemporary-art scene. She excels in storytelling and monumentalising the mundane, painstakingly rendering fleeting impressions and her everyday world in oil – a notoriously slow and laborious medium. Her signature lexicon is subjective, realistic yet cartoonish and vibrant. Her work is collected by top institutions including the ICA Miami and the Long Museum, Shanghai.

Herman Counts the Trees, 2021, by Rebecca Ness

rebeccalness.com

Racquel Chevremont, collector and curator
Based: New York
Nominates: Vivian Crockett
I am very excited about Vivian Crockett becoming curator of contemporary art at New York’s New Museum, and bringing to it her focus on contemporary art of African and Latinx diasporas and the Americas at the intersections of race, gender and queer theory – everything I am most passionate about. We are lucky to have her back in NYC, further pushing the museum’s thriving curatorial history and proving that presenting exhibitions that push the many artistic voices overlooked and under-represented by most major institutional programmes not only brings more diverse audiences but can be deemed commercially successful.

Four Brown Chairs, 2020, by Jammie Holmes, from the ‘To Be Determined’ exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art 2020, curated by Vivian Crockett

viviancrockett.com

Lorin Gu, founder, Recharge Foundation
Based: New York
Nominates: Anna Weyant
Anna Weyant is a fierce force in a new generation of female artists and an emblem of Gen-Z’s desire to reinvent the art-history canon. Referencing influences from 17th-century Dutch painting to Pop, she features young female characters in tragicomic scenes and updates ideas on the female gaze. Weyant has lived and studied in Canada, the US and China, and considers the unifying qualities and experiences that women encounter in the world. Her portrayals of the underlying rebellious intent of young women show them fighting societal norms and exercising independence from the patriarchy. Weyant’s 2023 solo show at the Gagosian marks her as the youngest artist to be given an exhibition by the art powerhouse.

Slumber, 2020, by Anna Weyant

gagosian.com/artist/anna-weyant

This article first appeared in the Autumn/Winter 2022/23 issue of LUX

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.

Artist Philip Colbert in his studio

London-based contemporary artist Philip Colbert works within the self-defined movement of ‘Neo Pop Surrealism’. His distinctive, wildly vibrant aesthetic speaks of a hyperactive age swollen with imagery, media and symbols. His oil paintings are chaotic, visual overloads, creating imaginary surrealist dreams of swirling Colgate toothpaste roads, falling currency signs and laugh-crying face emojis.

Follow LUX on Instagram: the.official.lux.magazine

The exhibition “Hunt Paintings” presented by Unit London at the Saatchi Gallery pop-up in Los Angeles, coinciding with this month’s Frieze art fair, brings together a diverse range of artworks, including large-scale paintings, sculptures, and a virtual reality experience which transports viewers into ‘Lobster Land’. The title makes reference to the old master hunt scenes, depicted in works by artists such as Reubens. Reflecting on the violence of these scenes, Colbert’s collages teeter on the edge of nightmare, reflecting on the darker side of pop culture that lies beneath the sheen, slogans and humour.

‘The Year of the Lobster’, a collaborative work with art auctioneer Simon de Pury, is the most striking satire and an exhibition highlight. The surreal video is an art auction come pop song come music video, ridiculing the art world, consumerist society, advertising and modern day paranoias as de Pury calls out brand names and slogans, continually asking the viewer: “You do like that lobster, don’t you?”

Installation shot of ‘Hunt Paintings’ by Philip Colbert at Saatchi Gallery, Los Angeles

“Philip Colbert – Hunt Paintings” runs until 11 March 2019 at the Saatchi Gallery pop-up, 8070 Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles. For more information visit: theunitldn.com/whats-on

Check out the next issue of LUX magazine, on sale from May 1 for a fabulous collaboration with Philip and Charlotte Colbert.