A conversation between Eleanor Nairne, Curator at the Barbican, Werner Pichler, Co-Founder of the Rosemarie Castoro Estate, and Rachel Stella, a Paris-based writer currently working on a monograph devoted to the artist. On the occasion of Rosemarie Castoro's first solo exhibition in the UK, they will discuss the place in art history of this rigorously modern artist who refused all conventional labels, claiming that she was not a Minimalist but a 'maximust'. A master of metamorphosis, Castoro's approach is consistently embodied and informed by her background in dance, yet also intensely cerebral, as documented in her journals, drawings and plans.
Eleanor Nairne is Curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. She has worked on a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications, including Lee Krasner: Living Colour (2019-20) Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017) and Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016). Prior to this, she was Curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate. She is a regular contributor to publications including the London Review of Books and frieze, and is a former Jerwood Writer in Residence.
Werner Pichler is Co-Founder of the Rosemarie Castoro Estate. He first met the artist in New York in the 1980s, where he moved from Austria to pursue a career in theatre, studying dance with Merce Cunningham and performing with the Metropolitan Opera. Since 1998, he has worked as a freelance stage director and producer, with productions in Germany, Poland, Austria and Sweden. He has been a guest professor at the University for Performing Arts and Music in Vienna since 2003.
Rachel Stella is a writer and translator. She has produced several films on art including To Hell with the Birds: Looking with Ellsworth Kelly and Rebekah and Grandpa Frank look at Kleist. Her catalogue essays and academic publications mostly concern transatlantic intellectual exchange, printmaking and the Supports/Surfaces movement. She defends hard-line modernism and is a member in good standing of the Amis de Benjamin Péret.
