Portraits of a Working Space

Matts Leiderstam is Swedish artist who experiments with ways of viewing. His work has included playing with gazes, making us reconsider how we interact and relate to art works. His interest in art, and ways of presenting art which challenge how we view, has taken him to think about issues such as the effect of the restoration of paintings, and the provenance of portraits of, and by, unknown people. It has also made him think about historical examples of experimenting with viewing and the notion of the studio, such as John Banvard's remarkable Panorama from the 1840s.

He discussed the role the studio has in terms of its relevance to his own work, and explained his own working spaces. His studio is a "space for thinking", it is a place where he can show his work to visitors, but also remains an intensely private space for him. His studio comprises three rooms: a "clean white room", which is a space for "hands-on" work, and a place "to think"; a "messy" office and storage room; and a computer room, a virtual studio which, he confessed, has changed his ways of working. But while the images illustrated the physical aspects of his studio, his final insistence that a studio is a space where desires and "projections concerning other plans" are made, gave us the clearest insight into his methods.