It is a chamber of the mind, a room of one’s own, a hothouse or a prison. It is an attic or an empty shop, a suburban lockup or a concrete cubicle in a disused acid factory that still takes coins for the meter and is a million miles from the white cube factory designed by architects where assistants manufacture blue-chip art for the rich. Yet they are all known, because of who goes there, and what they make, which may be something or a paralysed nothing whatsoever, as artists’ studios.
A show with this theme opens at the Whitechapel Gallery next week. And it turns out be a riveting experience, achieved with great wisdom and drama by Iwona Blazwick and her team. A Century of the Artist’s Studio goes in and out of this magical place in such inventive ways. There are spectacular reconstructions of actual studios – Matisse’s bedroom in the south of France, hung with magnificent embroideries; Kurt Schwitters’s Dada studio, all wild wooden stalactites – but the show also moves through global space, crossing five continents from the secret studios of Iran to the tiny kiosk in Manila where the father of Filipino art, Roberto Chabet, made conceptual sculptures.
