Whitechapel Gallery’s The London Open Live 2025 is, excitingly and for the first time, focused fully on live art practices. William Mackrell is one of the 15 selected artists who will be performing on dedicated days between now and September. The preview image of Mackrell’s performance Breaking a Dance (2025) shows the artist in a shiny, glittery suit, in what looks like gold sequins on a blue fabric. His blurred face and contours suggest a wild, abrupt movement. It made me think of a rave, or a participant of Eurovision trying out a sports manoeuvre.
Visiting Mackrell in his studio in north London, however, I am struck by a sense of light and calm. There are works on paper on the walls showing abstract, swirling forms in a coppery gold colour. Two large papers are pinned to the wall like mirror images, forming a wall-sized image of a palm tree, its leaves spread out like angelic wings. There are dried sunflowers on stalks, without petals, their heads a cobalt blue. The sound of a train passing gives the space a soothing rhythm.
Like the imprints of sunflower seeds captured inside the copper-coloured swirls, seemingly floating in the wind, Mackrell’s work has moved seamlessly through different media – painting, photography, sculpture, sound and performance – but also through different tones and registers. His most complex performance was the Arts Council-funded Deux Chevaux in 2014, in which the artist staged a procession of two horses pulling a two-horsepower Citroen 2CV car through central London. At a Launchpad residency in France in 2019, the “performance” was fully carried out by nature. Mackrell was struck by the rows and rows of petal-less sunflowers, about to be cut at the end of the summer harvest, and took some into his studio like companions, though not sure at that time what to do with them (many of Mackrell’s works start with close attention to an object or material). Eventually, he left the sunflowers on photographic paper under a rooflight in his studio, lit by moonlight flooding in. The resulting rayograph, Rage Rage Against the Dying of the Light (2020), has a haunting, yet mesmerising quality.
Last year, Mackrell’s Lipstick performance work Divine (2024) was acquired by Muzej Lapidarium Croatia, where it was recently re-presented at the museum in its show Museum as Muse. Mackrell’s exhibition Exposed Tender is currently showing at Lungley Gallery in London, his third solo exhibition with the gallery. Larger and smaller Lipstick paintings are paired with two “Sleep Pieces”: lightbox installations of a mattress and pillow, carrying imprints of his body in sleep. The gallery is bathed in a warm red light, suggesting danger and desire at once.
Studio International spoke with the artist in his studio before the opening of The London Open Live, where Mackrell will be performing his new work Breaking a Dance.
Read the interview at Studio International