Please, Step Inside the Homes of Artists

“The line between art and life is fluid and indistinct,” writes the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist in the foreword to Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake. It’s the third book from the art patron and author Tiqui Atencio Demirdjian, who, in her previous two projects, interviewed collectors about their artistic obsessions and explored the homes of dealers. Her latest, out this fall from Rizzoli, examines the myriad ways artists’ lives, routines, and aesthetics intersect with and depart from the work they put out into the world. “I wanted to understand what it meant to spend one’s life surrounded by and devoted to art, but this time from the perspective of those who create it,” says Atencio Demirdjian. “I wanted to show their journeys and their creative pursuits.”

For some artists featured, the line Obrist describes is less defined than it is for others: There are homes in which studios melt into living spaces, and ones that feel utterly separate from any creative practice. “There are artists in the book who cannot have their own work on their walls at home,” Atencio Demirdjian says. “As one said to me, ‘I have enough of that at the studio every day.’ ” Others, like the French conceptualist Bernar Venet and the Swiss sculptor Not Vital, have transformed parts of their homes into galleries or foundations, blurring the boundaries between public and private. Was there anything that Atencio Demirdjian felt that all of the houses had in common? “An eye for quality and good taste,” she says. “I didn’t find anything that was not spot-on.”

Julie Mehretu | Painter

Bernar Venet | French Conceptual Artist

Each home in the book was captured by the French photographer Jean-François Jaussaud, who worked entirely with natural light and was careful not to zhuzh or modify any of the spaces he encountered. “You’ll see a little bowl where the dogs come have water, or some shoes that have been left behind. The pillows are not puffed up,” says Atencio Demirdjian. “In some kitchens, you can see that they’re real cooks.” Atencio Demirdjian also decided to include photographs of each artist in their studio, alongside works in progress. “Whether it’s in the same place or separate, it’s still part of their lives, and it depicts the whole picture,” she says.

If anything, the book proves that there is no typical way for an artist to live. There is plenty of envy-inducing real estate, from Julie Mehretu’s meticulously renovated former rectory, in Harlem, to Miquel Barceló’s medieval hunting lodge, in Mallorca. The English countryside retreat of painter Glenn Brown, whose work often veers into the realm of the uncanny, is as traditional as can be—he and his husband hired an architectural historian and a special firm to restore the home, down to period-correct hinge screws, to its original 1730 state. Maurizio Cattelan, ever the mischief maker, decided against opening his actual doors to Atencio Demirdjian, instead submitting “a fantasy home formed in the dusty corners of a conceptual artist’s imagination.”

Not Vital | Painter, Sculptor

A few artists made a point of returning to the places where they grew up. William Kentridge updated his childhood home in Johannesburg to reflect South Africa’s changing social landscape while catering to the evolving needs of his family. The kitchen, relegated to the household staff a generation ago, was combined with the dining room and is now the heart of the house; a garage was transformed into a library where his children studied for their exams. Jac Leirner negotiated with her siblings to inherit her parents’ São Paulo house, a modernist structure built in 1960. “I had to fight hard to get it and move back,” she tells the author. “It’s what keeps me here in Brazil. It is my baby.”

Not Vital, who grew up in a small village in Switzerland’s Engadin region, has acquired an impressive portfolio of properties in the area, including his family home in Sent; a 17th-century house in Ardez, which he operates as Fundaziun Not Vital and opens to the public every August; and a thousand-year-old castle and surrounding estate in Tarasp, which he acquired for a price equivalent to that of “a large apartment in St. Moritz because no one wanted it,” he tells Atencio Demirdjian. The artist has unified and enlivened the lot of them with his large-scale sculptures, indoors and out. An exterior wall of the house in Sent, an otherwise traditional Swiss structure, is embellished with a bronze Vital sculpture of Vaslav Nijinsky; beneath it, on the lawn, sits a “room-size” aluminum reproduction of the artist’s molar.

Miquel Barceló | Painter

Few of the artists’ domestic tableaux surprised Atencio Demirdjian, with the exception of Tracey Emin’s. “The place where she lives is so different from the image that she portrays,” says the author. Emin’s Georgian townhouse in London’s posh Fitzrovia neighborhood, with its elegantly spare rooms dotted with velvet furniture, is somewhat at odds with the raw, hard-living themes of her early work. (Perhaps her most famous piece, the Turner Prize–nominated My Bed, from 1998, featured an unmade bed surrounded by a pile of empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, condoms, and blood-stained underwear.) Per Emin, the home is a sanctuary in the most essential sense: “I have been homeless three times in my life, really homeless, with nowhere to go at all. So having a home like this and feeling safe and warm in it matters greatly to me,” she tells Atencio Demirdjian. Emin also designed the space herself, without input from a decorator or architect. “I’m an artist,” she says matter-of-factly. “Why would I want someone else doing my house?”

Atencio Demirdjian hopes her audience will appreciate the vulnerability it takes for artists to offer such glimpses into their personal lives. “I wanted the reader to feel that they’ve been entrusted with this wonderful opportunity,” she says. “It’s a big privilege.” Did this project prompt the author to think differently about the way she lives? “No, it didn’t change my way of seeing or living,” she says. “We all want to be comfortable. We all want to be surrounded by what you consider beautiful. And there’s a common denominator of peace and calm. We’re all striving to live in a way that makes us happy.”

Tracey Emin | Artist

Bernar Venet: © Jean-François Jaussaud, artworks courtesy of Lawrence Weiner, Diverted with, © 2024 Lawrence Weiner Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Bernar Venet, Saturation with 2 and 3, Courtesy of the Artist, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris; Carl Andre, 49 Ace Zinc Square, © 2024 Carl Andre/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; César, Carrosseries de voitures compressées, © 2024 SBJ/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris. BOTTOM: © Jean-François Jaussaud, All artworks by Bernar Venet, Courtesy of the Artist, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris; Sol LeWitt, Table © 2024 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY; Sol LeWitt, Asymmetrical Pyramid Drawing #428 © 2024 The LeWitt Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Not Vital: © Jean-François Jaussaud, artwork Courtesy of the Artist; © Jean-François Jaussaud; © Jean-François Jaussaud, artwork courtesy of Louise Bourgeois, The Medical Print, © 2024 The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Miquel Barceló: © Jean-François Jaussaud, courtesy of Miquel Barceló, Ismael 1er, Courtesy of the Artist, © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Ettore Sottsass, yellow chairs and “Treetops” floor lamp © erede Ettore Sottsass/Artists Rights Society, NY, 2024; © Jean-François Jaussaud (2).

Tracey Emin: © Jean-François Jaussaud, All artworks by Tracey Emin, Courtesy of the Artist, © Tracey Emin, All rights reserved, DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, 2024 (3).