Maestro Arts signs visual artist Mat Collishaw
We are delighted to welcome Mat Collishaw to the Maestro Arts family, representing him for his classical music projects.
Collishaw came to public attention in the 1980s as part of the Young British Artists circle that included Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin and revolutionised the art world. He has since gone on to international acclaim, with recent exhibitions across Europe and in America, Turkey and Korea.
He works in a wide range of media, including photography, video and 3D printing and recently turned his attention to working with classical music with Sky Burial, a meditation on our relationships with both death and nature, which accompanies a live performance of Fauré’s Requiem.
Rachel van Walsum said: ‘We are incredibly excited to work with Mat Collishaw on his future classical music projects. I have always been aware of his seminal work with the Young British Artists, but when I walked into the concert hall last November, I wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming effect of seeing his Sky Burial. With his often provocative but always profoundly meaningful flare, he created a shocking but utterly beautiful visual narrative for Fauré’s Requiem that takes it into an entirely new realm. This is exactly the sort of project we champion at Maestro Arts, bringing together artistic disciplines to create groundbreaking multi-sensory experiences. More than ever, the classical music world needs artists like Mat to bring fresh perspectives, using new technologies and unexpected visual language to underscore the power of music and help it reach new audiences. I can’t wait to develop new projects with him and see where his vision leads.’
Mat Collishaw said: ‘Art is there to engage with you and to make you think and feel things. Classical music, like a lot of art that was made before the 20th century, gets put into the zone of being something that socially sophisticated people do as a recreation, and not something that’s alive, revolutionary and life changing. And yet, classical music has the capacity to move and transform people like no other music. When you’re in a concert hall with an 80-piece orchestra and a 60-piece choir, it’s so powerful to have those vibrations resonating through you. If I can create something on top of that, that takes people to another place, I hope it can be an extremely powerful artistic tool and it might make classical music more inviting for people who wouldn’t normally go.’
