Varda Caivano: In the Studio featured in The Independent

In the studio: Varda Caivano, artist - 'My paintings are like thoughts... I make many of them at the same time'. By Karen Wright.

Varda Caivano works in a studio close to the train tracks in semi-fashionable Hackney Wick, east London, near where she lives with her partner and young son. Her studio is small, with many paintings turned face to the walls. People are coming soon to collect paintings for her upcoming show at a gallery in Tokyo, and she is still considering what to send. "I always take 40 per cent more then I need so I can see how it looks in the space."

Caivano has had a high-profile year, with a room of her paintings included in the Venice Biennale. Biennale director, Massimiliano Gioni, selected works with her via Skype, she confides, as she makes me a strong coffee.

Born in 1971 in Buenos Aires, with a Jewish psychoanalyst mother and Danish/Italian father, she confesses that her life was comfortable. She attended "a Jewish school that had a lot of recreational activities; it was a really liberal, fun place to learn." Her family were all doctors "so I studied biology, but eventually decided I wanted to be a painter." Her mother encouraged her to study art history, which she did before "getting a scholarship" at Buenos Aires artist Guillermo Kuitca's studio. She then got a job in a museum.

Spending her days studying works of art, she asked questions about technique that seemed to irritate the curators, before admitting that this was not what she wanted to do...

Read more