Love letters to the artists who made us

Whether you’re single, cuffed or in the firery pits of situationship hell, get sentimental with us this Valentine’s day, where we’ve asked friends of Plaster to share some words from the heart about the artists they love the most: Belkis Ayón, Jenny Saville, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

Hannah Watson, curator and publisher

Dear Belkis Ayón,

I only discovered your work recently and it left me floored and wanting to know more. Darkness, beauty, power, sadness, silence – together it was an overwhelming coup de foudre, an encounter with art I don’t often feel. Your haunting figures have no mouths, but still say so much. You leave us just their eyes to explore, but they give nothing away, it is the absent mouth, the suppressed voice. Your large monochrome forms are painstakingly drawn, carved into humble cardboard and then printed with the blackest of inks. Your protagonist is Sikán, who in Abakuá legend was punished by death for finding the sacred and secret voice that only men were allowed to possess. There is so much of you in Sikán, and it resonated with me as I’m sure it does for all women. I’m intrigued that even as an atheist the religious is imbued in your work, from the myths to the compositions. I saw how your Last Supper turned a familiar scene on its head with your female cast of figures, life-size, and bold in black and white. I admire your steadfast dedication to printmaking, using simple materials and elevating them to a level of virtuoso. Getting lost in the deep, deep blacks, there is also so much detail, the snake, the fish, the scales, all intricately carved, it is a transformative technique, elevated into glorious forms. Watching you at work, I can see the labour and love that went into preparing each stage of your prints, and the ambition to make them so big and bold. For me, your work has such a unique identity, you possess a rare and truly original voice. Colour was not for you, you were right. In black and white real life is stripped away to reveal so much more. You saw the unfairness in life, the suppression of a woman, and your legacy lives on in your powerful female mythologies that are all your own.

Love,

Hannah

Harriet Lloyd-Smith, managing editor of Plaster

Dear Jenny Saville,

15 years ago, I won your monograph for an art prize at school. It’s now battered from years of frenzied leafing and its pages are stuck together with blobs of umbers, ochres and siennas; evidence of many futile attempts to imitate your sorcery of turning paint into flesh.

Your work understands the irritation of occupying a body; the vulnerability of flesh against a sterile, merciless world. I think your magic is not what you put on canvas, it’s what you train to climb off it and under the skin of all those who see it, and many will at your big National Portrait Gallery show this summer. Your subjects look worn out by living, growing, loving, dying and fucking as scaffolded sacks of meat – finally, someone showed it how it is. You taught me that people-pleasers rarely make good art.

I will never afford a piece of your work, I don’t want to imitate it, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write about it to a satisfactory degree. And that’s all fine, because being with your paintings not something I want to share anyway. They do that to you: make you feel like the only girl in the room.

Love,

Harriet

Oswaldo Nicoletti, founder of Nicoletti Contemporary

Dear Bernd and Hilla Becher,

Forever. Forever, I love you.

For your love of austerity.
For your love of emptiness.
For your love of overlooked beauty, of melancholy.
Forever black and white.

Forever your love for Hilla.
Forever your love for Bernt.
Forever Becher.

Forever, I repeat. Forever.

Love,

Oswaldo