We meet artist Chris Levine, a British contemporary artist renowned for his pioneering work with light and lasers. His innovative approach transcends traditional mediums, integrating technology and spirituality to create immersive art installations that challenge and expand human perception.

Levine's multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, photography, performance, fashion, music, and design. He employs lasers and sound frequencies to craft environments that engage viewers on both sensory and contemplative levels. This synthesis of technology and art positions Levine's work within a broader historical context, aligning with movements that seek to transcend the physical and delve into the metaphysical.

A seminal piece in Levine's portfolio is "Lightness of Being" (2004), a holographic portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. This work has been lauded for its spiritual depth and technical mastery, with the National Portrait Gallery describing it as "the most evocative image of a royal by any artist." The portrait captures the ethereal quality of light and presence, reflecting Levine's ability to merge artistic expression with technological innovation.

Beyond portraiture, Levine has engaged in numerous projects that bridge various artistic disciplines. In 2012, the artist partnered with Anohni and the Johnsons for their "Swanlight" performance at Radio City Music Hall, commissioned by the MoMA, New York, integrating laser with musical performance and creating a multisensory experience. 

Levine’s site-specific large scale installations have pushed the boundaries of light art, taking diverse settings from the historic Durham Cathedral to the contemporary landscape of Hobart, Tasmania. Aligned with the traditions of public art inspiring communities, Levine’s works make immersive art accessible to broader audiences. 

In 2021, Levine's exhibition at Houghton Hall, 528 Hz Love Frequency, featured "Molecule of Light," a monumental 25-meter-high sculpture that transformed the landscape and cemented his innovative approach to light art. This installation not only showcased the artist’s technical prowess but also his ability to harmonize art with architectural space, creating a dialogue between the artwork and its environment.

Through his multidisciplinary practice, Levine continues to explore the infinite possibilities of light in art, contributing to the ongoing dialogue on the intersection of technology, spirituality, and visual expression. His work stands as a testament to the transformative power of art, inviting viewers to experience the world through a lens of heightened awareness.

Follow @ChrisLevine on Instagram

Visit: https://chrislevine.com/

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Best known for his figurative paintings and pastels, which evoke a luminous, dreamlike reality, TM Davy conjures intimate worlds where figures glow with an almost metaphysical presence, transcending the purely visual. Light and form take on an ethereal quality, reflecting emotions, memories, and the quiet subtleties of human experience. Every brushstroke, every shift of light, seems imbued with a deeper resonance — suggesting that the figures portrayed are not mere representations but vessels of something otherworldly, carrying with them the weight of untold stories and silent truths.

Blending careful realism with archetypal symbolism, Davy’s work explores love as a sphere of magic and protection — a space where human connection is not just physical, but transcendent; where bonds are forged in realms of the spiritual and the unseen. His figures often seem suspended in a state of grace, bathed in light that is both gentle and intense, creating an atmosphere of reverence and awe. His work suggests that love, in its purest form, is both a force of transformation and a quiet shield — invisible, radiant, and profound.

Grounded in the belief that all of art history informs the present, Davy’s technique is marked by a virtuosic layering of colour and a masterful use of light and shadow. His attention to texture and hue draws deeply from classical tradition, while his handling of paint — confident, gestural, at times joyously loose — is unmistakably contemporary. With a lineage that stretches from Reynolds to Turner, Davy takes us to a threshold where intimacy, mystery, and the inner self converge. He stands at the intersection of classical technique and modern sensibility, drawing on the rich tradition of portraiture to create images that feel at once ancient and immediate. Through his luminous compositions, he invites us to pause and reflect — to step into a space where the boundaries between the real and the imagined dissolve, and where the soul’s journey is lit by love, presence, and the quiet mysteries of being.

Over the past few months, Davy has been living and working in Margate, creating an exhibition deeply attuned to its elemental surroundings. Rooted in the present moment, yet echoing timeless myth, the works are shaped by the sea, the chalk cliffs, and the ancient caves that punctuate the coast. These landscapes are not just scenery but portals, inhabited by archetypal beings — Satyrs, Mermaids, White Horses — who rise from seafoam and shadow, conjured from deep cultural memory as much as from the terrain itself. The show is at once an homage to place and a meditation on the mythic — a bridge between the ancient and the now.

Davy has the rare ability to render his subjects and scenes with an acute physical presence — they feel almost touchable, real — all the while keeping us fully aware that these are just paintings. He revels in paint’s materiality, with areas of sumptuous brushwork, loose rhythms, and a heightened palette that amplifies the intensity and luminosity of the image. His approach knowingly risks oversentimentality in the pursuit of a higher realm of expression: an emotional frequency that calls us to remain in the present, to feel fully, and to glimpse — even momentarily — the shared magic of human connection.

Follow @TMDavy on Instagram.

TM Davy's Tine Mara runs from 27th April until 22nd June 2025.

Preview is Saturday 26th April 6-8pm, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate, UK.

Visit @CarlFreedmanGallery and https://carlfreedman.com/exhibition/tm-davy/

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Delaine Le Bas works in a transdisciplinary way: she combines visual, performative and literary practices to create an artistic oeuvre that encompasses all areas of life. In her works she deals with many facets, political as well as private and emotional, which involve belonging to the Rom*nja people, their history and rich cultural heritage.

Within her work, Delaine Le Bas transforms her surroundings into monumental immersive environments filled with painted fabrics, theatrical costumes and sculptures. Her art draws on the rich cultural history of the Roma people and mythologies, focusing on themes of death, loss and renewal.

Le Bas reflects on her identity, grief and the intertwining of art and life as she says: 'My whole life is just one whole thing. I don't think it's divided off, really.... What I'm like and what I dress like, and then what I do. It's like one big piece of work.'

English-Romani artist Delaine Le Bas lives and works across the UK and Europe. Born in 1965 in Worthing, she graduated from Central St Martin’s and her work explores themes of nationhood, land, belonging, and gender through various media such as embroidery, painting, collage, sculpture, installation, and performance. Describing the intertwined nature of her identity and her work, Le Bas has stated “…as a Romani, my viewpoint has always been that of the outsider and this position of the 'other' is reflected in the materials and messages within my work. We live in a culture of mixed values and garbled messages. My works are crafted from the disregarded and disparate objects of the car boot sale and the charity shops."

Le Bas has played a significant role in the building of a Roma/Traveller contemporary art movement and aesthetic. Her work has been featured in the 52nd and 58th Venice Biennales and the Gwangju Biennale in 2012. She co-curated the first Roma Biennale, 'Come out Now!', in Berlin in 2018. She was Delaine Le Bas was nominated for the 2024 Turner Prize, with an exhibition at Tate Britain, and is currently artist-in-residence at The White House, Dagenham; a contemporary and community art space operated by Create London. https://www.whitehouseart.org/delaine-le-bas

Stranger in Silver Walking on Air by DELAINE LE BAS, is a new solo exhibition running until 27th September 2025, at The White House, Dagenham: https://createlondon.org/event/atchin-tan-by-delaine-le-bas/

Step into an immersive exhibition that transforms The White House on the Becontree Estate into a dreamlike space of shifting, layered imagery with textile, sculptural objects, glasswork and interactive installations.

From 31st May - 2nd August 2025, Newcastle Contemporary Art proudly presents  +Fabricating My Own Myth – Red Threads & Silver Needles, a solo exhibition by artist Delaine Le Bas, who continues her exploration of linguistics, mythology, and Gypsy Roma Traveller narratives through the tactile power of textiles, language, and storytelling: https://www.visitnca.com/exhibitions/delaine-le-bas

Follow @DeDeLeBas

Visit: https://www.delainelebas.com

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We meet Gary Kemp, one of the UK’s most successful songwriters of the past 40 years. As guitarist and founding member of the most influential and iconic band of the 80s, Spandau Ballet, he was responsible for writing the words and music for 23 hit singles and albums, including modern day standards like True and Gold. We discuss his passion for the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris, collecting, and living with, Edward William Godwin furniture, the 70s and 80s creative scene in London, and why art and design is so important to his life.

Gary’s songs have had an extraordinary combined total of over 500 weeks in the charts and are hits all over the world. They’ve generated over 25 million record sales and the songs were part of the soundtrack to the 80s. Last year, he received the BMI Icon Award at the 2023 BMI London Awards for his contributions to popular culture and music. He joined an elite group that includes The Bee Gees, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Ray Davies, Peter Gabriel, Queen, Sting, and Van Morrison.

Kemp’s songs have proven truly timeless. The ubiquitous hit single True has logged over 5 million air plays in North America alone, and his songs have featured in an incredible 100 feature films over the years including Sixteen Candles, The Wedding Singer, Charlie’s Angels, Pixels and Crazy Stupid Love as well as countless TV programs including The Simpsons, Spin City, Gilmore Girls (all three times each) Euphoria, Modern Family and, Ugly Betty plus many, many more.

In 2012, he was presented with the Ivor Novello's prestigious Outstanding Song Collection award. Gary has also won numerous awards and accolades for his work in Spandau Ballet, including an MTV award, a Brit and a Q award.

In recent years, Gary has become synonymous with the Rockonteurs podcast which he hosts with fellow musician Guy Pratt, interviewing music legends and becoming the most listened to music podcast in the UK. Gary is a Trustee of the Theatres Trust with a passion for keeping theatres at the heart of communities.

Gary grew up in Islington (born October 16, 1959) and attended local grammar school Dame Alice Owens and Anna Scher’s Children’s Theatre drama club, becoming a child actor in film and TV before concentrating on playing guitar and songwriting and forming Spandau Ballet . In the 90s, Gary decided to return to acting, starring in numerous films including hugely successful British crime thriller, The Krays and Hollywood blockbuster, The Bodyguard. He has continued to feature regularly on stage and in film and TV.

Follow @GaryJKemp

Visit https://www.garykemp.com to learn more about his new album This Destination, out now.

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We meet BAFTA winning producer Susie Hall to discuss the work of late artist David Robilliard and the Documentary she made with Talk Art’s very own Russell Tovey. 

Recorded live at TKE Studios, Margate, special thanks to Elissa Cray and all at the Tracey Emin Foundation.

Artist David Robilliard changed Russell Tovey’s life. It was Robilliard who inspired Tovey’s love of art, his free attitude towards sex, as well as his own sexuality. He is one of the most important people in Tovey’s life, despite the fact that they never met (sadly Robilliard died of AIDS before Tovey hit double digits). In this WePresent film Tovey embarks on a highly personal and intimate journey to discover who the artist truly was through the people Robilliard drank with, worked with, slept with and laughed with.

Though Russell Tovey and David Robilliard never met, Robilliard has remained a totemic presence in Tovey’s life, a source of strength, companionship and constant inspiration. In the emotional short documentary film “Life Is Excellent”, Tovey launches into a mission to track down and meet Robilliard’s friends, lovers and colleagues in an attempt to deepen his understanding of who Robilliard was and what his true legacy has become. Some of these people have never spoken publicly about him before.

Although Tovey thinks he knows a lot about Robilliard, the journey throws up revelations, challenging the vision Tovey has constructed of his hero. As is often the case when trying to understand people after they’ve gone, the question of “who was this person”, becomes not quite an answer but a testament to how beautiful, complex and contradictory each of us is.

Robilliard, like so many working artists taken before their time, has remained shrouded in semi-obscurity since his death in 1988 from AIDS. Tovey is rightly concerned about the risk of him being forgotten forever. “It could’ve been me, if I’d been born ten years earlier. And I feel like I’m part of a lucky generation,” explains Tovey of the loss of artists to AIDS in the film. “I feel a responsibility to make sure people know who David Robilliard is because we should put people back into history that disappeared.”

Now, through all these touching interviews, performance pieces of Robilliard’s work by the likes of Bimini Bon Boulash, Harry Trevaldwyn and Self Esteem and displays of his artworks, WePresent is proud to help ensure that David Robilliard and his artistic vision is memorialized.

Stream Life is Excellent documentary for free via WePresent https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/life-is-excellent-russell-tovey-david-robilliard and YouTube: https://youtu.be/U7_ic49H2gg

Follow @SusieHall_23

Thank you to WePresent and Damian Bradfield.

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We meet the inimitable, spectacular, all-star David Hoyle!!!! We explore Hoyle’s prolific output from the stage to the screen to the canvas. Performance as art, art as performance! Cabaret maverick and gender defying revolutionary, the much loved David Hoyle continues to educate, enlighten and entertain in equal measure. A true national treasure.

A chance to immerse yourself in Hoyle’s world, get to know the Manchester artist as we discuss his work that includes paintings, slogan works and of course, riotous, avant-garde live performance.

As a cabaret star, actor and visual artist, Hoyle’s infamous alter-ego ‘The Divine David’ transported him from radical alternative settings in the '80s to the studios of Channel 4 in the '90s. For the last four decades, Hoyle has queered the boundaries between live art, performance, theatre and cabaret – conquering nightlife around the world and working extensively in film and TV.

His recent retrospective Please Feel Free to Ignore My Work at Manchester's Aviva Studios powerfully shared the key themes that run through Hoyle’s output: gender, mental health, AIDS, revolution, decadence and the effects of capitalism. Tracing his career from the '80s to the present day, this body of work asks how and why we value our art and artists. Ever the outsider, David Hoyle opens the door to his outrageous and moving world. Come on in, we’ll pop the kettle on.

Follow @DavidHoyleUniversal

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New @TalkArt podcast! We meet artist @AnneRothenstein whose enigmatic paintings are frequently characterised by a dreamlike quality. Mysterious figures often populate her flattened landscapes and interiors.

The artist draws inspiration from found imagery, personal experience and memory, working instinctively to communicate atmosphere and psychological tension. Rothenstein’s scenes are rendered with sinuous lines and a distinctive palette built up of thin washes of oil. Often painting directly on wood panel, the artist allows grain to blend with figure and landscape.

Speaking of her artistic process, Rothenstein says, “My reasons, or intentions, when making a particular painting are quite mysterious to me. The spark is always lit from an existing image, a photograph or another painting, and I often don’t discover why that image leaped out at me or what it is I’m exploring until the work is finished. Sometimes I never find out. It is almost entirely intuitive. Finding a rhythm, searching for balance, alert to missteps, to what is happening, to changes of direction. I am telling myself a story much of the time and asking questions. Who is this, where is this place, what is going on? This is what I think of as the noise of a painting. And of course, what I am trying to reach is the silence … There is a wonderful Philip Guston quote: “if you’re really painting YOU walk out.” That is what I mean by reaching the silence.” 

Rothenstein is self-taught and lives and works in London. Born in 1949, the daughter of the late Michael Rothenstein and Duffy Ayres, she grew up in a lively and distinguished community of artists in the Essex village of Great Bardfield. Following a foundation course at Camberwell School of Art in the mid-1960s, Rothenstein worked as an actress for over a decade before gradually returning to painting.  

Rothenstein’s recent solo exhibitions include Charleston, Sussex (2024) and Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York (2024). Other solo shows include Stephen Friedman Gallery, London (2022) and Beaux Arts Gallery, London (2021). A two-person exhibition by Rothenstein and Irina Zatulovskaya took place at Pushkin House, London in 2018.

🔗 Follow @AnneRothenstein

🖼️ Visit #AnneRothenstein’s solo show which runs until 12th April 2025 at @StephenFriedmanGallery, 5-6 Cork Street, London.

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We meet poet, artist and filmmaker Julianknxx. We explore themes within his work of inheritance, loss and belonging as he crosses the boundaries between written word, music and visual art.

Sierra Leonian artist Julianknxx uses his personal history as a prism to deconstruct dominant perspectives on African art, history, and culture. Rich with symbolism, his work conveys the Black experience of defining and redefining the self, rejecting labels to form new collective narratives.

Offering song and music as forms of resistance, the exhibition invokes new understandings of what it means to be caught between, and to be of, multiple places. Choirs and musicians from cities across Europe give voice to a single refrain: ‘We are what’s left of us’, transforming the Curve into a collaborative space of communication. As the philosopher Édouard Glissant has written: ‘you can change with the Other while being yourself, you are not one, you are multiple, and you are yourself.’

Julianknxx’s work merges his poetic practice with films and performance; he engages in a form of existential inquiry that at once seeks to find ways of expressing the ineffable realities of human experiences while examining the structures through which we live. In casting his own practice as a ‘living archive’ or an ‘history from below’, Julianknxx draws on West African traditions of oral history to reframe how we construct both local and global perspectives. He does this through a body of work that challenges fixed ideas of identity and unravels linear Western historical and socio-political narratives, attempting to reconcile how it feels to exist primarily in liminal spaces.

Follow @JulianKnxx

Visit #JulianKnxx’s two new exhibitions @BuroStedelijk, Amsterdam until 24th April and @CAMGulbenkian, Lisbon until 2nd June 2025.

Listen to Talk Art: @Spotify or @ApplePodcasts

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We meet bestselling writer Shon Faye to discuss her new book Love In Exile and artists she admires: Nan Goldin, The Bloomsbury Group, Bernini, Michelangelo, Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education and performers including Tom Rasmussen, Madonna and David Hoyle.

Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every aspect and corner of her life. It was a fear that would erupt in destructive, counterfeit versions of the real love she craved: addictions and short-lived romances that were either euphoric and fantastical, or excruciatingly painful and unhinged, often both. Faye’s experience of the world as a trans woman, who grew up visibly queer, exacerbated her fears. But, as she confronted her damaging ideas about love and lovelessness, she came to realize that this sense of exclusion is symptomatic of a much larger problem in our culture.

Love, she argues, is as much a collective question as a personal one. Yet our collective ideals of love have developed in a society which is itself profoundly sick and loveless; in which consumer capitalism sells us ever new, engrossing fantasies of becoming more loved or lovable. In this highly politicized terrain, boundaries are purposefully drawn to keep some in and to keep others out. Those who exist outside them are ignored, denigrated, exiled.

In Love in Exile, Shon Faye shows love is much greater than the narrow ideals we have been taught to crave so desperately that we are willing to bend and break ourselves to fit them. Wise, funny, unsparing, and suffused with a radical clarity, this is a book of and for our times: for seeing and knowing love, in whatever form it takes, is the meaning of life itself.

Shon Faye is author of the acclaimed bestseller The Transgender Issue. Her work has been published in, among others, the Guardian, Independent, British Vogue and VICE. Born in Bristol, she now lives in London.

As Frieze magazine recently wrote: Shon Faye is one of the most celebrated non-fiction authors in the UK, rising to fame for her discerning prose on culture, relationships and class. Her first book, The Transgender Issue (2021), a provocative treatise on gender identity debates in the UK, was part of her rise to fame. Not only did Faye offer a detailed survey of queer history, but she also indicated why trans-liberation is connected to liberation for all. Her new book of essays, Love in Exile (2025), explores the existential and social challenges of courtship and heartache. Rather than focus solely on the discrimination that many transgender people face, however, the text is a literary memoir that interrogates how ancient and present-day writers conceptualize and dissect love. As a Vogue contributor with her advice column ‘Dear Shon’ (2022–ongoing), host of the podcast Call Me Mother (2021–ongoing) and author of Dazed & Confused Magazine’s ‘Future of Sex’ series (2022–ongoing), she addresses the topic of romance with honesty and poise.

Follow @Shon.Faye on Instagram

Buy Love in Exile, published by Pengiun.

You can also follow @TalkArt for images of all artworks discussed in today's episode. Thanks for listening!

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We meet painter Vanessa Raw to discuss her solo show at the Rubell Museum Miami, where she was the 2024 Artist-in-Residence.

Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In marks her first exhibition in the United States, as well as her first institutional show. In these newly commissioned, large-scale works, Raw’s distinctive layered brushwork and expressive use of colour depict a dream-like, all-female world—an earthly paradise where the natural world is benevolent and sentient, and where female desire is central. A former triathlete, Raw’s practiced mastery of her own body transfers to her work on canvas. Her figures are tranquil and at ease but have agency. They revel in the company of each other and in the landscape that is lush and soft and ripe with colour—paradise found.

In 2022 Raw took a radical new direction with her work, shifting from traditional portraiture tropes to paint imagined, same-sex, intimate scenes of women in confected landscapes. Surrounded by flowers and trees, sometimes accompanied by fauna too, these suspended moments of blissful intense connections show naked, energised bodies part-merged with each other and the landscapes they are in.

Using a heighten palette Raw conveys the intensity of the moment, as well positioning the paintings in the realm of the imaginary. Likewise, the dream-like fluidity of some areas of mark making suggest an altered state of consciousness, a deep human connectivity occurring simultaneously on a physical and spiritual plane. Photographs taken on her daily runs through local nature areas, an activity undertaken with therapeutical escapist intention, are used as source material for her background landscapes binding their confection to meaningful actualities, pulling into the paintings the remembered feeling of oneness with nature.

Raw works in a semi-naturalistic style, with an intense focus on the textures of the human form. Her large scale paintings are an eclectic variety of tonal compositions, vibrant and stimulating. Some of her more explicit pieces show the human body engaged in sexual acts or reaching the point of orgasm, whilst others in a more subtle manner showcase the innate sexuality of the feminine form.

Born in 1984 in Hexham, England, Raw lives and works in Margate, UK.

Vanessa Raw: This is How the Light Gets In is now open in Miami at Rubell Museum.

Visit: https://rubellmuseum.org/2024-vanessa-raw

Follow @VanessaRaw_ and @RubellMuseum

Vanessa Raw is represented by Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate.

Special thanks to the Don, Mera and Jason Rubell, and Juan Roselione-Valadez at the Rubell Museum, Carl Freedman @CarlFreedmanGallery and Elissa Cray @TKEStudios.

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