A Century of the Artist’s Studio at the Whitechapel Gallery

.Artists’ studios - and the places where creative work are done - are fascinating places to me. The places where writers work can be fairly flexible and non-specific, and include everywhere from a local coffee shop to the carriage of a Tube. The list of necessary implements for a writer is fairly limited too: a pen and paper or a computer (I also always try and carry around a pair of noise-cancelling headphones). But artists need STUFF. Glorious, fascinating, fungible and textured THINGS.

I’m working on a story about an artist and I so I chose a blustery day last month to go and see the new exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. What kind of space would my artist need to work? How would she find it, or afford it? How would it be arranged? What would be necessary for her work?

Hassan’s Atelier, -2016, Hassan Sharif.

Is her studio going to be that of Hassan Sharif’s studio (pictured above)? Too messy, I think.

What about the composed formality of Dieter Roth’s workspace instead?

That is far more like her. She’s organized, ambitious, and the two Bell jars (positioned just slightly too trepidatiously at the edge of the table for my liking) speak to her way of making do and using everyday objects to serve her purpose.

When we meet her, she’s at a stage in her life where she’s stripping things away, paring back to the essential, and for that reason Paul Winstanley’s Art School 28 (2014) photographs spoke to me. They were taken at art schools in the summer months when the studios were emptied of work and artists. The spaces have been freshly whitewashed so are both empty but full of promise for the future. This is the one!

Art School 28, 2014, oil on panel, Paul Winstanley

A Century of the Artist’s Studio runs at the Whitechapel Gallery from 24 February - 5 June 2022.