On the persistent myth of the empty studio.
Why "the studio is where the work happens" is, in 2026, less true than at any point in the past century — and what that means for how we write about practice.
The studio visit is, in contemporary art writing, almost a genre. The form is familiar: the writer is invited to the artist's studio, where the artist makes tea or coffee, and over the course of an afternoon the writer is shown the work in progress, asked to comment, and given a tour of the space. The writer's notes, taken in a notebook or on a phone, become the basis for a profile, a review, or a feature. The studio is, in this transaction, treated as the privileged location of the work — the place where one can see, more clearly than anywhere else, what the artist is actually doing.
I have done dozens of these visits, over the past fifteen years. I have, in the past two years in particular, begun to suspect that the entire form is slightly out of date. The studio, for an increasing number of artists I have written about, is not — in any meaningful sense — where the work happens. The work happens, increasingly, in a number of other locations that the studio visit is not equipped to register.
What the studio was
The studio, as a category of room, was for most of the twentieth century the central physical location of an artist's practice. The painter painted in the studio. The sculptor carved or welded in the studio. The printmaker pulled prints in the studio. The studio contained, in most cases, both the materials of the work and the work itself in its various stages of completion. To visit the studio was, fairly straightforwardly, to see what the artist was doing.
This model was always something of a fiction — artists have always also worked in libraries, in galleries, in cafés, in correspondence, in their own heads — but it was a useful fiction. The studio was where the visible portion of the work was visible. The other portions were, by necessity, taken on trust.
What the studio is now
For a substantial proportion of the artists I write about today, the studio contains a smaller fraction of the work than it did twenty years ago. The change is not, I want to be careful, a moral failing on the part of the artists. It is a structural change in how contemporary practice tends to happen.
Consider, by way of example, the practice of a young painter I visited last autumn. Her studio was a converted spare bedroom in a flat she shared with a partner. The room contained, at the time of my visit, three small paintings in progress, two completed paintings ready for collection, and a small set of brushes and tubes of paint on a card table. The visible portion of the work in the room would have fit, comfortably, in a single suitcase.
The non-visible portion of the work — the part that did not happen in this room — was considerably larger. She had spent, that month, perhaps four hours a day in the studio. She had spent the rest of her working time on: an extensive correspondence with three other painters about a forthcoming group exhibition; the editing of a small printed publication that was to accompany the show; the documentation and indexing of a body of older work for an archival project; the planning of a residency she would be undertaking in the spring; a substantial amount of reading, mostly of poetry, that she had identified as related to her current concerns; and the visual research that she did on her phone, in transit between commitments, throughout the day.
The studio contains, increasingly, only the most visible portion of the work. The other portions happen in correspondence, in transit, on the phone, in conversation, in the library, in the gallery, in the head.
What the studio visit misses
The studio visit, by the conventional form, is equipped to see only the first of these activities. The writer arrives at the studio, sees the three small paintings, asks about the brushes and the paint, drinks the tea. The writer leaves with notes about three paintings. The other six or seven major streams of the artist's working life are, in most cases, not registered at all.
This is not, again, a failure of the writer or of the artist. It is a failure of the form. The studio visit was developed in a period when the studio contained most of the visible work. It has not, in most contemporary art writing, been updated to account for the fact that the studio now contains, in many cases, a small minority of it.
What we could do instead
I do not want to argue for the abolition of the studio visit. The studio visit is, when it works, useful. The writer who has seen the work in the studio has seen something that no other form of visit can substitute for. There is no replacement for being in the room with the work in its unfinished state.
What I want to argue is that the studio visit should, increasingly, be one of several modes of access to the artist's practice. The writer who wants to understand what an artist is doing in 2026 needs to see, in addition to the studio: the correspondence; the reading; the conversation with other artists; the documentation of older work; the planning of forthcoming work; the gallery visits the artist makes on their own time. These are all parts of the practice. The studio is, increasingly, the part that is easiest to see and not, by any reasonable measure, the most important.
What this means for criticism
The implications for criticism are real. The conventional review of a contemporary art show is, structurally, an evaluation of the visible product of the artist's practice. The product is what is in the room. The review evaluates the room. This is reasonable as far as it goes. It is also, increasingly, partial.
The exhibition that we see in the room is, in many cases, the small visible portion of a much larger working process. The same is true of the body of work that the artist has made over a period of years. The same is true of the artist's career. The critic who evaluates only the room is evaluating, by structural necessity, only the part of the work that the artist has chosen to make visible.
This is not a complaint about contemporary practice. It is, in my view, a productive feature of how practice now happens. The artist is, increasingly, doing a much larger range of things than the conventional studio model permits us to register. Some of those things are visible in the room; many of them are not. The critic who wants to do justice to the practice needs to find ways of writing about the parts of the work that are not in the room — without lapsing into hagiography or into vague claims about "the artist's process."
How exactly to do this is, I admit, an open question. I have been trying, in the past two years, to find a form for it. I have not yet succeeded. The form I want — a way of writing about practice that is honest about how much of practice is not in the studio — is, I think, still to be invented. Until it is, the studio visit will continue to do most of the work, and we will continue to write reviews that are, in most cases, slightly more confident than they have any right to be.