One of my first memories of photography isn’t from a camera—it’s from a book my old man was thumbing through about Nicolas de Staël. There was this black-and-white portrait by Denise Colomb—Staël standing in his studio, brooding like a storm cloud. I remember thinking, “That’s it. That’s the thing. I want in.”

Not the gallery walls. Not the openings with bad white wine. The mess. The solitude. The splatter on the floor and the madness in the air.

My first gig in New York was a late-night studio visit with Alfredo Martinez (RIP) for Mass Appeal—the guy who had been in jail for faking Basquiats. The Redhook studio looked like a bunker. He offered me a warm beer and kept painting like nothing mattered. I left with paint on my shoes and a feeling I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Since then, I never really stopped. These past few years, that impulse became something more. Galleries like Pace, Hauser & Wirth, and Lehmann Maupin started inviting me in to photograph their artists at work—quiet moments of focus, rituals, repetition, the strange chaos of creation in progress. 

I finally pulled together a proper selection of these artist studio visits. Check it out!
http://www.axeldupeux.com/studiovisits