Will Ferreira Dyke interviews Rene Matić, the youngest artist ever nominated for the Turner Prize. The pair discuss love, Lily Allen and creating space for “rudeness”.
“I want to be famous for loving. Or maybe just for like… having great shoes,” says artist Rene Matić, half serious, half amused. This is their answer to one of those New York Times 36 Questions That Lead to Love. When asked when they last sang to themselves, “right before this,” they laugh. “I’m obsessed with the new Lily Allen album. It’s got that perfect gossipy energy, but also it has that truth that I’m obsessed with, addressing the complications of love.”
We talk soon after the release of West End Girl, but more importantly following the announcement of their Turner Prize nomination earlier this year. At twenty-seven, Matić is the youngest artist ever shortlisted for the award, nudging out the previous record holder, everybody’s (least) favourite, Damien Hirst. The other nominees include Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa, with the winner to be announced this December. For now, Matić sits in this space of anticipation. We talk about where Rene is at in this moment, shifts in their practice, as well as ideas of rudeness and love that run throughout their work.
Talking about love always feels slightly banal and vacuous. Plato called it a longing for wholeness, Socrates a symptom of lack, and bell hooks wrote that book we’ve all read. (Or said we have, at least.) Love, as a word, drifts through daily life almost unnoticed. ‘Thanks love’ to a stranger holding the door open, ‘love you’ to a colleague who makes the perfect brew. It moves so lightly through language that its weight often slips away. Culture has flattened it into headlines, betrayals, and the endless choreography of coupling and uncoupling – à la Madeline! Yet love, as a feeling, is different. It is complex, guttural. It is smallest word for the most complicated emotion, and for Matić, it is the engine behind much of their work.
Nominated for their solo exhibition As Opposed to the Truth at CCA, Berlin (2024), an edited version is now on display at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, until February 2026. A year on, the work feels newly charged with an almost prophetic significance. “It’s not something I celebrate,” Matić says. The exhibition began as a personal response to the endless churn of misinformation, political doublespeak, and rhetorical grandeur. Of the show’s genesis, Matic explains they “kept thinking about how a genocide can happen at the same time as Brat summer.”
The exhibition spans film, sound, and installation. It includes Restoration (2022–ongoing), a collection of found black dolls tenderly repaired; Untitled (No Place for Violence) (2024), an installation of flags that exposes the double logic of national symbols; and Feeling Wheel (2022–ongoing), a photographic project which borrows therapeutic tools used to map emotion. One work, 365 – named after the Party Girl track – is a layered soundscape that weaves together church bells and chorales from the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, interlaced with words from James Baldwin, bell hooks and Bad Gal Riri.
Despite the breadth of their practice, Matić is still most often and perhaps wrongly described as a photographer. It’s a term they find ‘sticky’, declaring: “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing in that department.” And yet, Tate acquired some of their images in 2021, and they have been on display at Tate Britain ever since the rehang. Matić’s photographs are undeniably special. They have this lingering honesty and warmth, a palpable intimacy.
When Matić first began working with their gallerist, Rosa, the work followed the logic of a photo album, casual point-and-shoot images, printed without ceremony. “She told me, you need to stop printing your work at Snappy Snaps!” Matić recalls. They were defiant. “Absolutely not. This is part of the practice. I don’t give a fuck.” After persisting, they eventually found themselves in the darkroom. Looking back, “I had to bite my tongue because it was definitely a good shift.” Matic continues to explain “I was interested in the chemistry, how blackness and whiteness came together to form an image. It’s magic.” The first series they printed was shown earlier this summer at Arcadia Missa, in their exhibition Idols, Mothers, Lovers, Friends.
One work from this series, Touching Campbell, visually literalises Matić’s practice. The portrait is spare: a figure in a black T-shirt against a white background, slightly out of focus. Matić’s hand cradles Campbell’s head, its weight almost tangible. The glint of a chain and the shimmer of a hoop earring punctuate the otherwise dissolving image and warmly welcomes you in. That same corporeal intimacy reminds me of their Upon This Rock exhibition at South London Gallery (2022), which included a film composed of interviews with their family exploring their relationship to Britishness and Blackness. Matić has said they didn’t fully understand the work until filming the final scene, which ended, unplanned, in a hug with their father. “Physical touch is definitely a big love language of mine,” they add, smiling.
Matić often returns to the idea of rudeness as central to their practice. “When I was younger, my mum would tell me not to be rude,” they recall. “What she really meant was, don’t interrupt.” But interruption became their language. “I talk about in-betweenness all the time,” they say. “Race, gender, sexuality. I’m already in between all of it. I have already interrupted just by existing, so I may as well run with it.” Matić uses this understanding as a ‘tool’, something they “can rely on when things feel uncertain.” Their work pairs this sharp rudeness with an honest tenderness, qualities that might seem at odds but in practice form a delicate, inseparable balance.
Love, for Matić, “interrupts everything” and is “one of the bravest things we can do.” They add, “I don’t want to be soft in that love all the time. That is where rudeness comes in. It is not lying down and taking it, it is demanding something. Demanding care.” Reflecting on bell hooks, who writes that ‘love can’t exist without care’, Matić acknowledges its imperfections. “There have been so many instances where I wasn’t cared for, but I told myself I had been loved in. And that is how I got through it.” The title of the show emerged whilst Matić was in therapy, discussing how their work searches for love in places where it rarely exists. Their therapist replied, “Oh, so as opposed to the truth.” (GAG)
Matić waits in the strange limbo before the Turner Prize announcement. With many projects on the horizon – including an upcoming V&A East commission and a presentation at The Photographers Gallery next year – they are already making history. Whatever the outcome, Matić remains one of Britain’s most compelling artists, known for loving rudely and, perhaps, for their shoes – though mercifully, those stayed out of shot. Before logging off our call, Matić lent forward, reaching for their notebook as they remember a line attributed to Freud, how ‘bold one gets when one is sure of being loved.’ They laugh softly. “I think it could be how rude one gets when one is sure of being loved. That’s really the basis of all this.”
