Alvaro Barrington and Róisín Tapponi reshape culture for today
The artist and writer discuss the layered references that inform their work, from a High Line commission woven through with childhood memory to a satirical debut novel on London's art world.
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Alvaro Barrington’s High Line commission braids together childhood recollection and migration with the mythology of belonging, while Róisín Tapponi’s debut novel casts a satirical eye across London’s gloss and surfaces. Neither artist moves backward. “I think we’re both really interested in moving art forward,” Barrington explains, “and making it feel like it’s something that happens today, but it also could sit next to art from 200 years ago or 500 years ago.”
The second annual Creators & Collectors issue of Sotheby’s Magazine draws together the cultural figures reshaping our creative landscape, those who raid references and remake them for their own moment. Tapponi and Barrington embody this impulse entirely: they carry their influences lightly, drawing from memory, place and inherited visual language, yet neither allows the past to anchor their practice. Instead, they work to position what they make within conversation with older forms, older voices, older gestures, allowing contemporary urgency to sit comfortably against the weight of what came before.
The full story appears in Sotheby’s Magazine, with photography by Anton Gottlob and writing by James Haldane. The piece explores how both figure within a broader current of makers refusing false binaries between innovation and lineage, between the contemporary moment and the depth of artistic conversation that precedes it.
Imagery courtesy of Sotheby's (@sothebys).
