Picture an artist. Do you see a lone master in a studio dabbing paint on to canvas? Or someone at a wheel, shaping clay? What’s less likely is that you’ll envisage a team. Yet great artworks throughout the centuries have often emerged as a result of collective endeavour: think of the artisans who decorated tombs in ancient Egypt, or Fra Angelico’s 15th-century workshop that produced frescoes across Florence, or Rodin’s 19th-century Paris studio, where assistants sculpted and cast under his direction. And this way of working hasn’t gone away: many artworks today are not physically made by the named artist, but by specialist fabricators such as AB Fine Art Foundry in London and Factum Arte in Madrid.
Marina Abramović using a 3D digital scanner at the Factum Arte workshop in Madrid. She spent seven years collaborating with Adam Lowe and his Factum Arte team © Oak Taylor Smith
“The time of Michelangelo and Leonardo is gone,” Marina Abramović tells me. “With today’s tools — including AI — it’s no longer necessary for artists to learn a craft. What matters is the content, the idea. It doesn’t matter what tools you use if you achieve it.” But even Abramović has found fabricators indispensable. On her carved self-portraits Five Stages of Maya Dance (2013), she spent seven years collaborating with Factum Arte co-founder Adam Lowe — whom she calls “an inventor, scientist and technician in one person”. Lowe “invented an entire machine to produce the works”, she says, as well as identifying alabaster as an alternative to marble to capture the sense of transience she was seeking. In the final pieces, Abramović’s image appears clear from afar and vanishes as you get closer. “We were both so happy that life and death could be represented in one piece,” she says.
French-Egyptian artist Ghada Amer collaborated with the Guadalajara-based workshop Cerámica Suro to create her sculptural works © Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Bruno Daureo Part of the ‘Thought’ series of abstract sculptures that Ghada Amer created with Cerámica Suro © Courtesy of Ghada Amer and Kewenig Gallery. Photo: Lepkowski Studios
Often these collaborations are born from the need to solve a problem. When New York-based Ghada Amer was struggling to enlarge her Thought series of abstract sculptural forms, she turned to Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico. “By understanding Ghada’s approach, we developed a ceramic body [the mix of clay] and firing curves [the various temperatures] that let us create large, complex pieces,” says the studio’s director José Noé Suro. “It was a three-ring circus — colour, construction, firing, all working in harmony.”
For Amer, fabricators are crucial “both as creators in their own right and as teachers”. But while they contribute specific skills to her work, she — like Abramović — is clear about the boundaries. “They do not influence the ideas and I continue to control the outcome.”
William Kentridge’s ‘Peripheral Thought No. 1’ (2015) © Courtesy of the artist and Stephens Tapestry Studio Tapestries by the South African artist William Kentridge are created in conjunction with the Stephens Tapestry Studio in Eswatini © Stephens Tapestry Studio
William Kentridge has a less clear-cut conception of authorship. For decades he has worked with Stephens Tapestry Studio in Eswatini, southern Africa, first with Marguerite Stephens and now with her daughter Christine Weavind, on tapestries layering bold silhouettes over antique maps. “Translating an image into tapestry isn’t just mechanical,” Kentridge says. “Every stitch involves decisions — what to enlarge, what to simplify, what colour to use. It’s the skill of the weaver that gives a tapestry a particular quality.” Weavind describes it as a relationship of mutual respect. “William entrusts us with his designs and leaves the translation largely in our hands.”
For Jasleen Kaur, whose poignant yet humorous installations often reference her Punjabi-Sikh background and her upbringing in Glasgow, collaboration and attribution are moral issues. “It’s an ethical question,” she says, “respecting expertise and employing independent makers rather than large firms. I’m careful to credit the people I work with.”
Turner Prize winner Jasleen Kaur has credited a host of collaborators, including ceramicists, embroiderers and glass casters © Suzanne Pettigrew
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