00:00 I'm here with Xavier Ellis from Charlie Smith in London.
00:04 Charlie Smith London, yes.
00:05 Charlie Smith London, nice to meet you.
00:06 Nice to meet you.
00:07 How are you?
00:08 Good, thank you.
00:09 Yeah, enjoying my time in Berlin.
00:11 And you're the first time at Art Fair Berlin?
00:14 First time at Art Fair, first time at Preview, yes.
00:17 Third time in Berlin itself, so.
00:21 And the painters, the artists are international?
00:26 They're mostly London based, I mean we focus on mostly British artists and those that tend to be based in London.
00:33 Again, we look outside of that, we don't have to commit ourselves just to London based artists, as we don't commit ourselves just to painters, but primarily London based painters, yes.
00:46 And the age of the artists?
00:48 Age between, for example, with this show we have here is between 22 up to about 31 years old generally.
00:57 And we have one artist that's 40, so generally younger artists.
01:01 We look at emerging artists, particularly those coming out of college, I mean I would say emerging to mid-career artists.
01:09 So despite these being fairly young, we could say, being mostly in their 20s, they do have a lot of shows behind them, they have good bibliographies and they're in some quite prominent collections.
01:21 And when you say London based, how do you choose the artists?
01:26 They are coming to the gallery?
01:28 It's a mixture, I mean I go to all the graduate shows, so that's really where I meet a lot of artists.
01:35 But then again, like anywhere, it's about going to shows, it's about networking, it's about going to artist studios, meeting artists, friends of other artists, etc.
01:45 So it really varies, but I'm very keen on looking at the young recent graduates, that's where I meet a lot of artists.
01:55 And you said before it's the first time that you take part here at the Art Fair Preview.
02:01 That's right, yeah.
02:02 And you mentioned the next steps like Scope, and for the next year, what are your plans?
02:08 Well I think we'd look at doing something around the Armoury.
02:13 When we get to Fries, it's going to be Scope or Zoo, we have London Art Fair in January, possibly Basel in the summer as well.
02:23 And I'd also like to look around at FIAC and show off.
02:28 So we have today the second day of the Art Fair, we had already the opening.
02:33 What was special or was something special at the opening here in Berlin?
02:38 Well it was certainly busy and I'm happy with the people that we met.
02:42 We met a lot of collectors, we met a lot of curators and a lot of gallerists.
02:46 So I mean it's very good when we come over to Germany, in particular to Berlin, to meet European collectors and gallerists.
02:55 It's very good exposure for that.
02:57 So the community is more or less European collectors you would say?
03:01 I think so, I would say mostly German, fundamentally European with some American and some British as well in fact.
03:10 And we had a very good response to the artists generally, so it's always pleasing when we have a response to a selection of artists rather than it being focused on one or two.
03:20 So we're very happy with that.
03:22 This is Tessa Farmer, the piece is called Snake Ship.
03:27 Tessa is in her mid-twenties and graduated from John Ruskin, Oxford University.
03:33 She took her MA there as well as her BA and she's now based in London.
03:37 This is quite characteristic of her work, what we have here are handmade skeletal characters.
03:45 These are made from plant roots and tree roots and then of course she adds insect wings and other elements to them.
03:53 Then the insects themselves, they're either found or collected.
03:57 In fact one of them is around 50 years old.
04:00 The central piece is a snake skeleton and then attached to that is a rabbit skull.
04:07 So what we have here is a battle, it's basically an invented species.
04:13 So Tessa sees these as malevolent fairy type characters.
04:20 They come from the earth and battle with insects in the natural world.
04:25 So we have them attacking, we have them collecting, we have insects as prisoners within cages in the snake skeleton there.
04:34 Generally she always makes them in this, what I call a mobile format.
04:42 More recently she's been working with floor based elements but this is to be developed within the work.
04:49 She's in prominent collections, Charles Saatchi has two of these pieces as well as quite a few private collections in the UK and Europe as well.
05:00 So this is Tessa.
05:04 This artist is Gavin Nolan, he's again based in London, he studied at Royal Academy and he's in his late 20s.
05:16 This is a self portrait, Gavin specialises in portraiture and predominantly self portraiture.
05:22 He really is interested in the line and the relationship between beauty and the grotesque.
05:31 So we have this kind of deathly palette but also it refers perhaps to glamour and advertising.
05:41 He looks at portraiture throughout art history and incorporates a lot of it as influences within his work.
05:49 There's an element within his painting of role play, so he'll dress himself up and characterise himself.
05:58 He's really very interested in the horror, in the grotesque sense of humanity I guess.
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