In the Studio (and Around Berlin) with Alex Gibbs

I recently visited artist, Alex Gibbs in Berlin for a studio visit, a tour of local exhibitions and lunch on the terrace of Borchardt. Over Riesling and Schnitzel, we discuss all important matters such as one’s connection to home, artistic heroes and what we saw in town: Wolfgang Tillman’s solo at Galerie Buchholz and the Neue Nationalgalerie’s latest displays before parting ways at the former bunker turned private collection: Boros Collection.

Cedric Bardawil: You moved from London to Berlin in 2020, has life here influenced your work?

Alex Gibbs: Moving to Berlin was the start of my girlfriend's and my life as parents. I haven’t been to a single Techno party, but I have been to a thousand play parks. It is somewhat of an antithetical lifestyle to what many flock to Berlin for and that doesn't displease me. We are in the domestic phase, and naturally that is a place of rich inspiration: the nest and its ethereal mundanity.

CB: Could you speak a bit about your new body of work? How it started, where it sits in your oeuvre, the various references, what it’s about and its significance to you?

AG: For the last four years I have had a small studio in our apartment. I step from one room to the next. I sleep, I step, I paint. I kindergarten, I step, I paint. All the paintings of these years have been about this: The geography and the architecture of the domestic; an elevation of the overlooked. In the past I had sought subject matter from the internet, hermetically sealed in the studio, and made paintings that really could have been made anywhere. Ambiguity over autobiography. Now, however, I want to make paintings that could only have been made because of being in this place and of being here now. Certain pieces of furniture, local landmarks etc. Painting from lived experience. That feels like the most meaningful way of digesting the world for me currently.  

CB: Where does the title of your forthcoming exhibition with Anthony Banks, entitled ‘Arcadian Minds’ come from?

AG: Anthony Banks, my partner in crime and friend of Drake's, and I both hail from rural pastures. He, the floodplains of Gloucestershire; and me, the rolling hills of East Lothian. And both of us left these provinces in favour of the big city. So, we wanted something that alluded to this. Of one's connection to their home, of the idolisation of that place and how it might permeate into how they see the world and, indeed, how they make paintings. You can take the lad out the country, but...

CB: It's quite unusual, or should I say special that you have such a close bond with a fellow painter. Sharing studios, canvases, painterly tools, even gallerists. It's been 10 years since you started at the Royal College of Art together, how would you say you have influenced one and other over the years? And how do you feel your paintings pair up?

AG: A quote that I like coming back to is Philip Guston talking at The Yale Summer School in 1972: “But I think Baudelaire said, ‘Second to the pleasure of surprising yourself is the aristocratic pleasure of surprising your friends... I mean, we all have one or two people. Van Gogh had Theo. It doesn’t matter. It can be one or a million. But you need one or two. That’s who you paint for. And when they come in the studio, there’s a certain look in the eye... that look is what you want”.

And Anthony is one of those people for me. 

I don’t think we ever really talk about the subjects in our paintings. Just the painting process itself. And often non verbally. There is a shared appreciation for the material qualities on the canvas: How a certain colour sits with another, a brash gesture or a drip. One will point, the other will grunt in agreement. It need not be said.  

His ‘erasure by addition’ mentality is one particular aspect of his process that wore off on me fairly early on. A freeing up of sorts, to just keep adding. Fat, lean. Who cares? I am still likely more uptight than him, but that was one notable step in freeing my ass.

To close, I will say this. There is a slurry that dwells at the bottom of a paint pot; a grey mud that accrues across a painter’s studio paraphernalia. It is the mean colour of all that they use. The colour at the very core of their being. Anthony’s is a green grey. Mine is a purple grey. Although we have similarities in our constitutions, I draw attention to this as I feel in its mundanity it nicely defines the two distinct voices. Which will hopefully sit rather harmoniously together on a wall. 

CB: How important are the titles of your paintings?

AG: I used to think they were very important. And I certainly still like the idea of titles; the possibilities of them. I like how words sit next to one another, and I continue to write them down in my notebook when they come to mind. A life in list form. But in recent memory I have struggled a bit in then pairing them with paintings. They act as an emotional full stop in the painting process. So, when you get it right, it’s done. But if not, it’s not. And the painting is then left in limbo. Which hurts. 

CB: Several years ago, I remember you once speaking about freshness as a sought after quality in painting, that overpainting is to be avoided. Do you still feel this way, and when do you decide a work is finished? 

AB: Freshness is yes, a most sought-after quality. But overpainting is totally allowed. I don’t think I would have said it is to be avoided. But it can scare me. I wish there was this cathartic end to every painting where you lift your brush off the canvas, heavenly light fills the room, and you drop to your knees “it is done!”. But actually, what most often happens is I start to get overpowered by compulsion the closer the painting gets to being finished. I start becoming fixated on certain areas that annoy me and then a battle ensues in surmounting the cloudy mind. Only when I flip it back around after not looking at it for a month or so might I then go "yeah, okay, it's done". So, they mostly all start in catharsis and end in frustration. 

CB: Who are your artistic (or other) heroes that you bring into your practice? 

AG: Hmm. Heroes… I do have heroes, I’m sure. Certainly musical ones. And painting ones. But I don’t ever consciously choose to bring them in. But if you dab a brush on a canvas for long enough they tend to make themselves known. For instance, I have this one recent painting of a cupboard in our kitchen that just has this incredibly Bonnard like patch in the bottom left hand corner. Not intentionally of course. But there it is, glaringly, and rather pleasingly so.

Naturally, I love his paintings. Particularly taking into account the role his house played in them. He would make a mark, walk along the corridor to the bathroom, have a look at his wife in the bath, then walk back along the corridor and make another mark. They were paintings done from memory, a short walk’s memory and he would change his mind on the way. Picasso criticised them as “a potpourri of indecision”, and as a clinically indecisive person myself, I feel great kinship with that.  

CB: When we were at Wolfgang Tillmans’ new exhibition ‘Summer Storm Rain Drops Freeze Frame’ his photographs made me think of your approach to painting – an eye for communicating the beauty of everyday moments that are often missed or overlooked. And similarly, there’s something of Konrad Klapheck’s ‘machine paintings’ in your still lives: giving inanimate objects a sense of significance, or even power… how important is it for you to make your viewer look at something in a different light?

AG: There is a certain pull in me towards subjects that might be perceived as rather quiet, or unfashionable, or just boring. It’s a disarming device of sorts. In previous years that might have been done with depictions of crying animals, or masturbating men. Same idea. Then colour, or whatever other painterly tool, sends it off in another direction. Reframing, repositioning, elevating. Yes, playing with expectations. Why one should want to invoke such a reaction is the money question. And the one I continue to meditate on.

CB: As well as painting, you’ve recorded a lot of music over the years and released a vinyl LP on my label. In the past we’ve discussed various musical influences: Jonathan Richman, Frank Zappa and more recently your curiosity about composer, Gerald Finzi, who inspired you to produce series of a ‘plein air’ paintings over several years. In this series of works there’s a fascination about Finzi's life, which is conveyed in your depiction of a place he once lived and the landscape that surrounded him.

How much of this series was about the journey, the pilgrimage, and how much was about exploring a curiosity? What are you hoping to convey to your audience when these paintings are finally exhibited?

AG: It is in equal parts about curiosity and pilgrimage, of quenching and satisfying. This project, that for many years was secret, is perhaps the thing I have done that I am most proud of. I would take the train out of London on winter Saturday mornings in the dark, and no one knew where I was. That is a lovely feeling, sat with a flask of coffee on a grassy knoll in Hampshire. It wasn’t sullied by the eyes of others, by instagram. And it remained like that for years. There is no intention to educate an audience, or revaluate his life’s work through a contemporary lens! I have no hopes, or intentions. I am just presenting what happened. This personal endeavour of mine.

The greatest hope I can wish to achieve is that someone listens to my essay (on the subject of these trips, that I recorded a narration of), while they sit on a bus. And for one hour they get lost in it. 

CB: On another note, because you're wearing some nice pieces including beautiful shell Cordovan tassel loafers that are your own. Could we discuss your interest in menswear – how important is a well-made item of clothing, or pair of leather shoes to your wardrobe? Are they reserved for special occasions, or do you wear them on your daily duties around town? 

AG: Well, as I may have mentioned. My interest in footwear, or more specifically leather shoes was entirely influenced by you (!) and needing to find a pair to wear to your wedding. Before then I was a one pair of shoes man. But since then, the hunt for fine leather footwear has been quite a significant part of my life. I am an obsessive. And this is something to obsess about. Most evenings after doing the washing up I will lay myself down on the sofa and look through all the shoe listings across Germany that day. At the weekends I then drag our son round the flea markets. He doesn't mind too much though, as he has his own treasures that he is looking for. I have amassed a small collection of shoes now and I’ll just wear them anywhere. Doing the Kindergarten pick-up in my George Cleverley Oxfords, or hitting the play park in my woven buffalo calf Ludwig Reiter loafers. A most exciting recent purchase was a pair of bespoke two-tone Derbys by Materna out of Vienna. Ooh yes. 

They make me feel good lining them up on the little shelf I made for them, and they make me feel good wearing them. It is part of some kind of ordering of one's life. Of growing up. I want to have a wardrobe of well-made clothes. Where each thing I am proud to own. I’m doing okay on the shoe front, next is trousers.

Alex Gibbs’ duo show with Anthony Banks entitled ‘Arcadian Minds’ runs from 4 to 26 October 2024 at Cedric Bardawil, 1-3 Old Compton Street, London W1D 5JB, and will be followed by Alex’s solo exhibition ‘Finzi’ from 30 October to 9 November 2024 at the same location.