‘Painting and its Performance’

Alexis Teplin in Conversation with Alexander Caspari

Our recent Artist Rooms (2020) exhibition had quite a wide scope. It included several different elements of your practice and initiated dialogues between your canvas paintings and large-scale textile installations, the glass sculptures and new watercolours. I believe this exhibition was the first time the collection of watercolours we exhibited had been displayed and that 2020 was when you began this particular body of work. Could you speak a little about this? Did these new works on paper affect or change your approach to painting generally?

With the watercolours, it’s a bit of a reverse process from oil painting as the light comes from underneath the pigment (the paper) rather than being placed on top of it or within the pigment itself. I wanted to see how far I could push the medium through layering while using transparency and brightness. Also how I could shift the gravity of the composition by rotating the paper while work working. I like that there is no room for error within a watercolour, if you push it too far it has to be disregarded. The watercolours have also allowed me to return to an interest in landscape, depth of field and spatial relationships within colour combinations.

I am interested in the varied methods you employ to interrogate the longstanding art historical trope of painting as performance. You mentioned that the titles of many paintings are ‘echoes’ of spoken lines from the actors in your theatrical compositions such as ‘The Lives of Women’. I believe that the costumes some of the performers wear occasionally become re-used in the creation of new paintings? All these different elements - canvases, textile architectures, stage props, painted costumes and sculptures - often exist in spaces together almost like different limbs of the same body….I was engaged in the idea of the labour by which a work or body of work comes into being and wondered if you could elaborate on this? For me, whilst powerful objects in their own right, there is something interesting about the collaborative structures by which the works are produced, their overlapping and dependency on each other.

Labour, in this context, has a multiple meaning. There is the relationship to the hand that creates individual works, the conceptual labour that creates links between histories of art, women and contemporary consciousness… then there is the community of voices and bodies that execute the exhibition.

The collaborative structures are a way to position a body of work in a personal and an ideological context. They allow one to talk about the space between ideas and interpretation and the particularity or specificity of the multiple voices that exist within a single artwork. Sometimes these voices are historical and sometimes they are present in the room through the actors and sometimes they are present through their materiality.

I am interested in using art history as a material. I think that the way in which one sees their own ideology clearly is in the relationship to other positions. Art history and cultural reference points tend to allow one to examine one’s own position in the world and be challenged by its contradictions and its absurdity.

In a way, all of the works create an overall painting composition, a single work or painting in the space. I don't consider the sculptures stage props but instead a three-dimensional suggestion of a still life that the actors interact with to cement their relationship to a history of painting.

Your new sculptures with blown glass, porcelain palm fronds and terracotta fruit are engaging and multi-layered objects. Immediately they offer an alternate contemporary vision to your abstract works on canvas. They seem to playfully reference the painterly tradition of the still life from Cezanne to Morandi. I wondered if you could talk more about these works? I was especially interested in your ideas around ‘positions of decadence’ and their relationship to materiality which you have referred to previously. 

Initially, in the new sculptures, I began by looking at the relationship between domestic studio objects and their appearance in still life painting of the early 20th century. I wanted to use a translation of pictorial language, starting with the physicality of the objects themselves in (Matisse and Morandi) becoming painted images and then to turn them back into glass and ceramic sculptures. The sculptures could then be manipulated by the physical gesture of the actors while still inferring history, the language of domesticity and cultural decadence.

The palm fronds and ‘fruit’ were a nod to the position of the orientalist gaze, as well as a separate reference to a personal history, California. In a way, I wanted to turn reference points into physical material objects. The language of the materials became formalised, pink porcelain palm fronds and terra cotta peaches. This enabled one to imagine the physicality and touch of the sculpture by its description.I know you have been working with painted textiles and costumes for a significant period. Could you discuss how this working method began and how it has developed over time? I was particularly interested in the history of some of the fabrics you select and work into. They have an incredible presence and seem to be charged with their history of production and the imprint of bodies that have touched them. I am also intrigued by the significance of the gaps and spaces you leave within many of these compositions. Sometimes it seems as if the frayed edges and points of unfurling are as vital as the assemblages in themselves? When I look at your work I often think of the famous Rosalind Krauss essay about the trope of the modernist painted grid… I believe she describes it as a holey ‘net’ trawling through the twentieth century picking up different histories and leaving others behind.

I was interested in how a textile could signify a particular body. The metis linens which I use are vintage or antique fabrics. They are sometimes handwoven, so there is evidence of the materiality of making within the fabric. They reference canvas being half linen and half cotton but in this case they also often come from beds and I was interested in using the sense that they are imprinted with bodies. It is not dissimilar with the Spitalfields silks or embroidered Italian fabrics I use. They are remnants of other lives, and a signifier of a crumbling decadence within the works. They seem to fall apart as the viewer clings to them. The holes within the compositions start as a compositional strategy, a way to create an open form within the painting. They also play with the idea of transparency and seeing through or behind the work. Again, they relate to a speed of looking where the stitching can become mark making and suggest the impression of the hand forming the work. I really like that the idea that they relate to the holey net of modernism or even the fragmentation of material hierarchies and cultural signifiers, the fading and failing of cultural decadence.

Could you speak to the importance of colour selection? Where does it sit for you on the spectrum between the symbolic and intuitive? What is it about the particular tones and combinations of colours that is important to you? I imagine that every colour has the potential to speak to a particular history of painting, to gesture towards a different mood or movement.

Colour selection is most closely related to what the colour visually does, yellow hovering, purple opposing it to create weight and how that can be used specifically to create a sensation related to speed and movement or depth of field. I look at a lot at late 19th and early 20th century painting so this does influence the work to a certain degree, vermillion is used as Whistler’s red and cobalt for Matisse, but it is really about what certain pigments do and how the play off each other as much as what they signify.

You recently created a largescale mural ‘Nasturtiums or Hollyhocks’ for The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Could you discuss this work and your murals generally? I know you have previously installed murals in other institutional contexts such as The Bluecoat. These works suggest an exciting intersection between painting, architecture and performance which are all central to your practice.

For ‘Nasturtiums or Hollyhocks’ I was interested in creating a contradiction with the proposition that the removal of the artist's hand (in the work of Frank Stella in particular) is a pure modernist gesture. This was done in a playful way, through a combination of stripes, geometry and depictions of a decorative motif to create an intersection between architectural intervention and gestural mark making.

The murals are a way to clearly define the relationship between painting and installation. The scale creates an immersive landscape for the audience to become participants within, while the artist's hand becomes visible within the paint's surface with colours mixed and prepared with pigment and binder consistent with smaller scale works.

Alexis Teplin

Alexis Teplin lives and works in London. Teplin’s work begins within the history of two-dimensional painting and expands to include performance, video and sculpture. Her work explores the nature of painting through its relationship to historical quotation, labour, cultural politics and positions of decadence. She received her M.F.A. from Art Centre College of Design, Los Angeles in 2001 and was the Starr Fellow at the Royal Academy Schools in 2002.

Recent solo exhibitions include; ‘It’s My Pleasure to Participate,’ Bluecoat, Liverpool (2019), Painted Costumes, New Art Centre, Roche Court, East Winterslow (2019), ‘Keats Favorite,’ Aqubar, London (2018), ‘Drag, Push HOOT,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow (2016), HE and HO for O,’ Rise Projects, Silvie Fleming Collection, London (2016), ‘La Grotto Rosa,’ Cardrde, Bologna (2014), ‘San Marino Calling,’ Museo D’Arte Modena e Contemporanea, San Marino (2014), ‘He, Ho, HA, hmmm.,’ Mary Mary, Glasgow (2013) and ‘sss T !!,’ Hayward Project Space, London (2013). Recent Group Exhibitions include; ‘Nasturtiums and Hollyhocks’ mural for the Summer Exhibition The Royal Academy, London, 2021; Drawing Biennale, Drawing Room London (2021); Artist Rooms, Encounter Contemporary, London (2020), ‘Bauhaus 100,’ Camberwell School of the Arts (2019), ‘The Most Real Thing, contemporary textiles and sculpture,’ New Art Centre, Roche Court, East Winterslow (2018), ‘Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation),’ Whitechapel Open, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018), ‘Bedswerver,’ Flat Two, London (2018), ‘Stretch Release,’ Durst Brit and Mayhew, The Hague (2017), ‘Arch (The Politics of Fragmentation),’ Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2016), ‘20th Anniversary Exhibition,’ Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2016). Teplin’s work has been featured in notable publications such as Frieze Magazine, Artforum and The New York Times. Teplin currently teaches painting at RCA London and Fine Art at Kingston University. Her work can be found in important institutional and private collections internationally.