In this episode of The Art Bystander, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar enters a conversation with Michèle Lamy and Scarlett Rouge.

Michèle Lamy is often introduced in relation to Rick Owens, but that has always felt like an incomplete way of understanding her.

Born in France’s Jura region in 1944, into a family shaped by the Resistance, Lamy studied law in Lyon, attended the philosophy lectures of Gilles Deleuze and worked as a criminal defence lawyer while also performing striptease and cabaret.

In 1979, she moved to Los Angeles without having visited the city. There she established her clothing line, created Café des Artistes and Les Deux Cafés, and treated hospitality as a form of theatre.

Around 1990, she hired a pattern cutter named Rick Owens. Their working relationship became a partnership in life, and by 2003 they had moved to Paris and were building Owenscorp together. Lamy’s work has since moved through furniture, jewellery, music, film, performance and boxing. She has variously described herself as a storyteller, performer and entrepreneur, resisting any single professional title.

Joining her is her daughter, Scarlett Rouge, an interdisciplinary artist raised between California and France. The daughter of Lamy and experimental filmmaker Richard Newton, and Owens’s stepdaughter, Rouge trained in photography at CalArts before developing a practice across painting, installation, sculpture, video, textiles and performance.

Her work draws on myth, symbolic language, Jungian thought and ritual, asking how art might reconnect spirit and matter. Mother and daughter have also performed together in LAVASCAR alongside Nico Vascellari.

In this episode, we speak about resistance and freedom, Los Angeles, family and artistic inheritance, collaboration, ritual, commerce and the making of spaces in which outsiders can belong.

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In today's episode Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar meets with design legend Michele De Lucchi.

Born an identical twin, he grew up being treated, as he remembers it, almost as half of the same child. At 18, the brothers chose different disciplines, different cities and different appearances. His brother shaved; Michele grew the beard that has stayed with him ever since.

“When you design something, you have to create an identity.”

It is a wonderfully disarming beginning to a conversation with someone whose career runs through more than five decades of Italian architecture and design: Alchimia, Memphis, Olivetti, the Tolomeo lamp, major buildings, interiors, furniture, drawing, painting and sculpture. Yet I became less interested in making him recite that history than in understanding the person who has continued to question what design is for.

De Lucchi speaks about objects as carriers of memory. His father appeared able to “listen” to a glass, a watch or a building and understand who made it, where and when. Function was never the whole story. Materials could hold a narrative; architecture could shape the life unfolding inside it.

When I told him that his work makes me happy, he answered that it was the most beautiful compliment I could give him.

“We don’t need pessimistic architects and designers because we don’t need a pessimistic future.”

That may be the key to Michele De Lucchi. Radicalism, for him, is not a colour palette or a historical style. It is the courage to resist convention, grasp the energy of one’s own time and give form to a future worth entering.

In the full episode, we travel from 1970s Florence to Olivetti and the beginnings of Memphis, but also into far more personal territory: his twin brother, Ettore Sottsass, a journey around the world, fashion, serendipity, meditation, AI and the unknown. Some stories are far better heard in his own voice, and I will not give them away here.

Several of his designs will also appear in Radical Rooms, the exhibition I am curating for Mankovsky Gallery in Stockholm this August, bringing radical Italian design into conversation with contemporary painting.

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In this episode of The Art Bystander Podcast, I speak with Jérôme Pantalacci, founder and director of Art-o-rama in Marseille.

At the end of August, I will travel to Marseille for Art-o-rama, a fair that has developed one of the most distinctive identities on the European art calendar. Founded by Jérôme in 2007, Art-o-rama has become known for its concentrated scale, its commitment to emerging galleries and artists, and its willingness to give space to presentations that are more experimental, specific and ambitious than the conventional art-fair booth.

Held at La Friche la Belle de Mai, a former tobacco factory transformed into a major cultural complex, the fair is deeply connected to Marseille itself. The city’s position between Europe, North Africa and the wider Mediterranean gives it a cultural intensity that feels markedly different from the established art capitals. Marseille is layered, contradictory, international and resistant to easy definition, and Art-o-rama has grown from that context rather than attempting to impose a standardised global model upon it.

In our conversation, Jérôme and I discuss how the fair began, what it means to build an international contemporary-art platform outside the traditional centres of market power, and how Art-o-rama has maintained its independence and curatorial character as it has grown.

We also speak about the challenges facing younger galleries, the changing expectations placed on art fairs, the importance of discovery, and the tension between experimentation and commercial reality. What does a smaller fair make possible that a larger one cannot? How can a fair remain relevant without becoming predictable? And what can Marseille teach us about the future geography of the art world?

As I prepare to visit Art-o-rama later this month, this conversation offers an introduction not only to the fair, but to the ideas, relationships and local conditions that have shaped it over almost two decades.

This is a conversation about Marseille, independence, risk, discovery and the future of the contemporary art fair.

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For this summer episode, I’m joined by The Art Daddy for their first-ever interview.

The Art Daddy is a New York City-based art and culture reporter, critic, educator and artist who has spent more than a decade covering the contemporary art world.

Their writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, ELLE, ARTnews, Artnet News and many other publications, and they have taught and lectured at universities across the United States.

They studied performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and minored in Women’s Studies. That background remains central to The Art Daddy, which they see not simply as a media platform, but as an extension of their artistic practice.

Across Substack and Instagram, The Art Daddy combines reporting and criticism with gossip, satire and cultural analysis. Often described as the TMZ of the art world, the platform looks beyond official narratives to examine the personalities, hierarchies and power structures shaping contemporary art.

I am, of course, a middle-aged white man working within the art world, precisely the demographic that frequently appears in Art Daddy’s criticism. This gave us a particularly open, self-aware and entertaining starting point.

We talk about the art market, generational shifts in taste and power, the problem with middle-aged men, and the often invisible labour dynamics sustaining the art world. We also get into the individuals, behaviours and hypocrisies that frustrate The Art Daddy most, and much more.

It is candid, intelligent and very funny. Perfectly relaxed summer listening, but certainly not without bite.

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In this episode, our host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Miramar Al-Nayyar, the Iraqi artist whose UK solo debut opens today (July 3, 2026) at Saatchi Yates in London. Miramar is the inaugural winner of the Saatchi Yates Fellowship Prize, selected from more than 5,000 submissions worldwide. She is 29, based between Amman and Abu Dhabi, and paints with a maturity that shows in her command of atmosphere, silence, and inner force.

Her exhibition brings together paintings shaped by the vastness of the Middle Eastern desert: rock formations, flowers, solitude, and the slow intelligence of nature. Made between Lebanon and Jordan against a backdrop of conflict and unrest, these are not abstract landscapes. They are meditations on endurance, on what can still bloom under pressure.

At the centre of the exhibition is the desert rose: a formation at once geological and floral, mineral and symbolic. In Miramar's hands it becomes visionary, a flower of the mind that emerges from silence, heat, distance, and memory. Her surfaces hold that tension between barrenness and abundance, fragility and force, the physical world and the invisible one. The work draws from desert landscapes and natural movement, but also from meditation, seclusion, and the ornamental rhythms of classical Islamic geometry. The paintings unfold like inner architectures: psychedelic, atmospheric, embodied. Her process is intuitive and physical, gesture as a way of listening. She paints less to depict nature than to receive it.

What stayed with me was the spiritual depth of our conversation. We spoke about art as a form of surrender, about solitude as a creative condition, about the desert as both real landscape and inner state, about how images arrive from somewhere beyond language.

Something in the way Miramar speaks about nature, intuition, prayer, and the unseen resonated with me. It reminded me that painting, at its most powerful, is not only visual. It can be a vessel for transformation, a way of making contact with what is buried, what is sacred, and what is still becoming. We speak about the desert rose, movement, memory, meditation, conflict, hope, and what it means for a young Iraqi artist to bring this personal, spiritually charged visual language into her first UK solo show.

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I'm speaking today with Lea Bischofberger, a Zurich-based gallerist and art dealer whose life and work are bound up with one of the most remarkable legacies in postwar and contemporary art.

The Bischofberger name runs through some of the defining artistic relationships of the late twentieth century. Her father, Bruno (who passed away in late spring 2026), was a legendary gallerist who worked with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Tinguely, as well as Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, George Condo, Miquel Barceló, Enzo Cucchi, Peter Halley and Mike Bidlo.

But Lea's story isn't only one of inheritance. It is also one of proximity, intuition, independence and renewal. Having grown up close to the artists, collections and conversations that helped shape art history, she now carries that experience into her own gallery work in Zurich.

Through Lea Bischofberger Gallery and Lele Projects, she has shown artists including Kate Daudy, Geraldina Bassani Antivari, Ashkan Sahihi, Roberto Ruspoli, Aryana Sheibani and Ulf Saupe. The programme suggests a more intimate and exploratory chapter, one attentive to memory, materiality, portraiture, language and psychological presence.

In this conversation we talk about legacy, taste, the changing role of the art dealer, Zurich as an art-world city, and what it means to carry history forward without being defined by it.

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Today, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Nadya Tolokonnikova — conceptual artist, musician, activist, wanted criminal, and one of the founders of Pussy Riot, the Russian feminist protest-art collective formed in Moscow in 2011.

Tolokonnikova spent nearly two years in a Russian prison after Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance Punk Prayer inside Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour — an action that transformed a brief act of punk dissent into one of the defining works of political performance art of the 21st century. Since then, her work has continued to confront the spaces where power presents itself as untouchable: the church, the state, the prison system, the museum, the media image.

That history matters in Venice. A national pavilion at the Biennale is never just architecture. It is a state speaking through culture.

Last week, in May 2026, as Russia returned to the Venice Biennale for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pussy Riot and FEMEN staged two connected protests. On May 6, they confronted the Russian Pavilion itself, using Ukrainian flags, pink balaclavas, smoke, flares, punk music, and slogans against Russia’s war. The action forced the pavilion to close temporarily.

On May 7, the confrontation moved from the pavilion to the institution that had allowed Russia back in. At Ca’ Giustinian, the headquarters of the Biennale Foundation, Tolokonnikova and the protesters challenged the Biennale’s leadership and its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, over the claim that culture can remain neutral while being used by the Russian state. Reuters reported that the demonstration continued from the previous day’s action at the Russian Pavilion and was redirected by police to the Biennale Foundation’s headquarters, where flares in the colours of Ukraine were ignited.

This continuity — from the cathedral in Moscow to the pavilion in Venice, and from the pavilion to the Biennale’s own leadership — sits at the centre of our conversation.

Tolokonnikova’s recent work has only sharpened this confrontation between art, punishment, and political theatre. Her 2023 performance and exhibition Putin’s Ashes, later shown at institutions and galleries including Dallas Contemporary, turned the image of Putin into ritual material and helped place her back on Russia’s wanted list. In 2025, POLICE STATE premiered at MOCA in Los Angeles as a durational performance and installation built around the architecture of confinement, before travelling to MCA Chicago later that year.

Her accolades include Time Woman of the Year, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought, the LennonOno Grant for Peace, the Woody Guthrie Prize, and an Honorary Doctorate from RISD. She also carries, as a kind of involuntary badge of honour, the Russian Federation’s 2025 designation of Pussy Riot as an extremist organisation — a reminder that, in authoritarian systems, art is not treated as metaphor when it threatens power. Reuters also reported that Pussy Riot was declared an extremist organisation and banned in Russia in 2025.

So this episode is about protest as art, culture as power, exile, propaganda, and the impossibility of neutrality when neutrality itself becomes a political position.

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In this episode, Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar speaks with Galerie Nordenhake about the role of the gallery today, the importance of sustained artist relationships, and how a gallery with Nordic roots continues to operate within an increasingly global contemporary art world.

Founded by Claes Nordenhake in Malmö in 1976 (meaning celebrating 50 yr in 2026), Galerie Nordenhake is one of Scandinavia’s most internationally respected contemporary art galleries. Today, the gallery operates across Stockholm, Berlin and Mexico City, connecting a Nordic point of origin with a broader European and Latin American presence.

Over nearly five decades, Nordenhake has built a reputation for a rigorous and intellectually grounded programme, representing both established and emerging artists across painting, sculpture, photography, installation, conceptual practice and performance. The gallery is particularly known for its long-term commitment to artists, its close dialogue with institutions, and its ability to support practices that often unfold slowly, critically and with lasting cultural depth.

Historically, the gallery has played an important role in introducing and supporting artists such as Anthony Gormley, Hreinn Friðfinnsson, John Coplans, Esko Männikkö and Mirosław Bałka, while continuing to work with a diverse international roster. Its programme reflects a clear belief in art as a space for visual precision, material intelligence and conceptual seriousness.

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