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Talk Art
Jonathan Baldock
We meet leading artist Jonathan Baldock who works across multiple platforms including sculpture, installation and performance. With work often taking on a biographical form, Jonathan Baldock addresses the trauma, stress, sensuality, mortality and spirituality around our relationship to the body and the space it inhabits.
Baldock’s work is saturated with humour and wit, as well as an uncanny, macabre quality that channels his longstanding interest in myth and folklore. He has an ongoing focus on the contrast between the material qualities of ceramic and fabric in his work. Concerned with removing the functional aspects of the materials he uses, Baldock instead works in a performative way through his sculptural assemblages, bringing the viewer, the object and the space they simultaneously occupy into question as a theatrical or ritualistic act.
Jonathan Baldock was born in 1980 in Kent, UK. He lives and works in London. He graduated from Winchester School of Art with a BA in Painting (2000-2003), followed by the Royal College of Art, London with an MA in Painting (2003-2005).
In 2021 Baldock had solo exhibitions at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, Spain and at Accelerator, Stockholm, Sweden. He participated in group shows in 2021 including ‘Threadbare’ at Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; ‘Human Conditions of Clay’ at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Wales and ‘Right About Now’ at No.9 Cork Street, London. Baldock’s work was included in the inaugural Towner International biennial at Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, UK in October 2020.
Baldock’s first solo exhibition with Stephen Friedman Gallery opened in September 2019 and presented a series of ceramic masks featuring bright colours and outlandish expressions. This show coincided with the presentation of a large-scale, interactive sculpture by Baldock at Fitzrovia Chapel, London during Frieze week. In the spring of 2019, Baldock’s solo exhibition ‘Facecrime’ opened at Camden Arts Centre, London following a Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship. The exhibition travelled to Tramway, Glasgow in August 2019 and Bluecoat, Liverpool in March 2020.
Follow @Jonathan_Baldock on Instagram. Visit Stephen Friedman Gallery for more details: https://www.stephenfriedman.com/artists/25-jonathan-baldock/
Plus Jonathan's own website: https://jonathan-baldock.com/
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1. Introducing Talk Art
39:25Welcome to Talk Art! Actor Russell Tovey and gallerist Robert Diament discuss how they first became friends a decade ago, plus more recent adventures at Frieze Art Fair, the Turner Prize, South London Gallery and other exhibition highlights in London, as well as Robert's gallery relocating to the seaside town of Margate, Kent.2. Sir Michael Craig-Martin CBE
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