Russell Tovey on art galleries

Does Rocky come with you when you go kind of gallery tour? Yeah. Yes. Well, I'm going to the Christie's and Sotheby's got big previews, so I've run upstairs. Second. I'll bring the dog. And I said, yeah, absolutely. He's going to be coming around, looking at all this expensive art. And are you going, cause you want to have a look at the art, but also because you're interested in buying as well. Yeah. And in terms of going to other galleries, I love The Tate Modern, I love the Tate Britain. Take Modern, gets me excited every time I'm in there. And so that turbine hall she's in her gallery, Camden Arts center, South London gallery, all like little ones. And the fact they're all free because when you go abroad, you realize how lucky we are that you can go into all these galleries and you don't have to pay anything. And you obviously travel for work as well. Do you get time? Go to galleries. Yeah, totally. I make time. It's my thing. I love it. And what galleries abroad have you been to recently? I went to the Keith Haring exhibition at the de young museum in San Francisco recently, which is coming here. But I think it's not coming here for like another two years. And it's just brilliant. Absolutely brilliant because you see so many of his works recreated in art books, but when you see them in the flesh, you really see the detail on how gifted he was, that the line, just as a linesman, how he's able to articulate that on a page and to see it all together in one exhibitions, mind mind blowing. That was brilliant. And do you ever go and see art kind of outside the gallery space? I go to a degree shows. I try and see that. And young artists work. That's really exciting when you go around and you see something really fresh and then all the commercial galleries or are London really, but East London, West London, that's a very exciting place to discover good artists,

Which one's in East London, kind of your go to ones that you think, yeah, they're going to have something good on.My go-to galleries in East London would be a cool gallery called Carlos Ishugawa, which is off the white chapel road, tiny little gallery, some of the hottest artists around at the moment, one called Oscar Murillo, which is a Colombian artist who only graduated from the Royal Academy about two years ago. And now his work is selling for like hundreds of thousands of pounds at auction, but his work is so exciting. And then there's another gallery called Carl Freidman gallery, which has a great selection of really cool artists. And I go there a lot. Kate McGarry, Jonathan Vinner gallery is one of my absolute favorites. I'm obsessed with an artist at the moment called Will Boon and another called Joe Bradley. And he represents them.

And have you been to the Venice Biennale as well? Yeah, I went when, I know Tracy a bit, so I went when she was representing Britain. And do you like to surround yourself like at home or in life with ar. Summer exhibition Royal Academy, it's everything's kind of, the walls are covered in this stuff everywhere. Do you like to create art yourself? A few years ago I wanted to be a photographer for a little while, but then I wanted to be Wolfgang Tillmans. That's what I wanted to be on Nan Goldin. But then I feel like, because I love what artists do so much. I want to keep them on a pedestal and I don't ever want to, feel like, I'm going to put myself trying to compete with them because I just love it so much that I want to keep it slightly pure and separate from what I do. And yeah, sometimes you see work and you think literally anyone could do that. I feel like what they haven't and that whole argument, I just feel like, I want them to keep doing what they're doing because it makes me happy. And I'm able to enjoy that separate from what I do. As well as contemporary artists. Do we, you briefly mentioned that at the beginning, like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. Do you like to kind of go and look at their works as well? As what, as the contemporary side? Yeah. All the artists looking back. I love, I love going to the National Portrait Gallery and seeing all the Holbein’s. I used to be obsessed with Kings and Queens. So suddenly seeing all these portraits of the boy King, Edward the sixth and Henry eighth and Anne Boleyn and all these incredible paintings just there in front of you that are hundreds of years old, like incredibly famous. Well, thank you so much, Russell chatting to us about art. Really appreciate it.