At Artist Praxis, we hear from one artist’s creative process, learning all about their most recent finished project.
We discuss everything artists work with, from materials to thoughts, from dreams to gestures, from feelings to tools.
Matthew Burrows MBE (born 1971) is a contemporary British painter and founder of Artist Support Pledge, a global movement in support of artists and makers. Matthew lives and works in the UK and is represented by Vigo Gallery London.
In 2020, for his work creating Artist Support Pledge, Matthew Burrows was made an MBE in The Queen’s birthday honors list, received the Prime Minister’s Points of Light award, was named Apollo’s ‘Art Personality of the Year,’ and was listed among the ArtReview Power 100 and number one in the Artlyst Alt Power 100 2021.
Artwork details:
Sternō III 2022 Acrylic on jute 200 x 200 cm
Artist Praxis is a podcast dedicated to illuminating the artistic process as a transformative and dialogical practice embedded in community.
In weekly artist-led explorations, creatives across disciplines and from around the globe make meaning of their art-making. We share elevating and enlightening conversations on an artist’s newest piece, enabling open-ended investigations on all aspects of its creation.
Project by Debora Faccion Grodzki and Sarah Arriagada. Original music, mixing and editing by André Ravi.
Sarah Arriagada and I closed Artist Praxis in 2023 with an exhibition titled Tightly Knit, Loose Fit. The exhibition included 38 artists who were interviewed in the podcast. Please read the details below.
Photographs by Bess Adler
Tightly Knit, Loose Fit is an exhibition exploring the dynamics of language and artmaking as interconnected aspects of praxis. According to Paulo Freire, praxis describes the perpetual process of making something in the world and making meaning of it. This concept is fundamental to the mission of the Artist Praxis podcast, founded by the exhibition’s curators, Debora Faccion Grodzki and Sarah Arriagada, and central to the conversations they conducted there with each exhibiting artist. The exhibition title, “Tightly Knit, Loose Fit,” infers that the podcast interviews and artworks come together in this public event to connect thoughts, practices, and materials in a manner that resembles creative actions such as stringing, piecing, and weaving.
Tightly Knit, Loose Fit includes 38 artists from diverse backgrounds and artistic practices. Though based in the United States, Brazil, Cambodia, Germany, Scotland, England, and France, a majority of the exhibiting artists have their immediate roots elsewhere: in Russia, China, Ireland, Serbia, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Türkiye, Vietnam, Slovakia, Ukraine, the African diaspora, and the First Nations of these lands. Adding to the multicultural, multilingual, and multipersonal conversations in the podcast, the exhibition honors the sovereignty of human creativity by bringing together artworks that show the gaps and pitfalls of language, the space in between the embodied and the materialized, and the pauses and discordances in artistic practices.
With the option to use the podcast episodes as audio guides, exhibition visitors become participants in the unfolding of praxis. This multisensory experience shines a light not only on the works on display but also on what it means to make art today and on the human dynamics involved in making sense of creativity as a global community.
The exhibition occurred at Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run non-profit gallery in New York City, from August 12 to 27, 2023.
Ortega y Gasset Projects, The Old American Can Factory, 363 Third Ave., Brooklyn, New York 11215.
Photographs by Bess Adler
See the complete list of Artists and artworks here.