Every new work is a game of hazarding, I am thinking to myself as I stare at the painting on the easel in Ryan Mosley’s studio at Persistence Works in Sheffield. Beneath those huge skylights, you could call it a studio scene straight out of central casting: stacks of paint-smeared plastic buckets; packets of latex … Continue reading The Game of Hazarding – an encounter with the painter Ryan Mosley →

The horse-shoe-shaped interior of the Royal Academy’s new lecture theatre feels a bit grimly clinical as if it were the old operating theatre that it almost appears to be. How much blood-letting are we about to witness? The audience of two hundred - 80% of which is female - looms over the two speakers, expectant. … Continue reading Snow White with Duster →

There is to be lunch, on the stroke of noon, at Neo Rauch's third-floor studio in the Spinnerei, and we are minutes late. We hurry up many flights of concrete stairs, past walls of painted brick whose bareness is interrupted only by the occasional defiant shout of graffiti. Having passed through the giant metal door … Continue reading The Strange Antiquity of Modernity: the Seriously Fantastical World of the painter Neo Rauch →