Introduction

Darling Killers’ 1st season closes with a very special extended episode featuring the artist Melanie Bonajo in discussion with members of the Dead Darlings collective. We recorded in Berlin before our auction at Heimathafen with our twentieth anniversary show in W139 still months ahead, so the timing was perfect to dive deep into conversations about collectivity, authorship and collaboration, and discuss social activism in a backdrop of institutional restraint. We talked about what it means to choose the path less traveled by, yet still find ways to financially support your project and reach out beyond a limited periphery. Melanie Bonajo tells us about their repeated (and failed) attempts to leave the art world behind, and about how they kept getting sucked back in, by an invitation to represent the Netherlands in the 2022 Venice Biennale for example. This journey took them from “rage-camp” to “cuddle puddle”, so tune in and find out how! In this episode the dead darling we discuss is a rejected proposal, therefore not the same work offered up for the last resurrection of Darling Killers. Instead we have a very typical Bonajo image, that happens to be rolled up in their attic and in need of a new home… The starting price as always: 1 euro. Need I say more?

Born in Harare, currently based in NYC and Amsterdam, James Beckett is what Jane Austen might call “very accomplished”. Winner of the Prix de Rome for Art in Public Space after a residency at the Rijksakademie, he has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, with work in the permanent collections of places like Stedelijk Museum and Centre Pompidou, yet still, he can’t resist the urge to kill a darling here and there, and that of course is my cue to sniff him out and hold him accountable for his crimes! Elusive in the best of times, and busy with an ambitious new public art project, (that we didn’t even get to), yet for your sake, I managed to pin him down for some witty repartee and a bit of arty-farty banter. It probably helps that we’ve been friends for aeons, and-spoiler alert-we didn’t shy away from memory lane. The work, part of the project, “My Friend André’s Grandmother’s Sawmill”, is not at all what you might expect, and you are in for a treat! This is a real piece de la resistance as Dead Darlings go. Listen as James peels away all the layers, and gives you a chance to bid and take this work home. This piece must be picked up in Amsterdam, or shipped professionally. We are too scared of cracking the museum glass ; ). Subscribe to Darling Killers and find James work at our signature Resurrauction at one euro starting price!

Uta Eisenreich is an Amsterdam-based artist and visual researcher. Born in Germany into a family of teachers — a forgetful mathematician, an erratic elementary school teacher, a dancer, and a teenage amateur magician — she grew up channeling these diverse influences. She graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academy, with humorous photographic works that reveal and question the hidden rules and structures of order (that's the cutting edge of German humour of course). She also works with performance and video. Her critically acclaimed books are artworks in-and-of-themselves, and for the Resurrauction, she offers the world two unique volumes as a set. A not B and AS IF, made together with award winning Julia Born, were subject to mysterious “fuck ups” in production ten years apart, and for very different reasons. Killed not by the artist, but by external circumstances, these darlings are as desirable as they are obscure! Listen to their stories and join our online auction! Teaser: book-nerds and collectors: Be excited! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to acquire these very special editions, even more unique than the official collectable books, offered by the author at the symbolic price of one euro.

"I had the pleasure of sitting down in the studio with Lieve Hakkers, recipient of the prestigious Royal Award for Free Painting in 2025. Layered and mysterious, her work draws you in with its melancholic intensity. We talk about method, paint, and the body. We talk about her large-scale work, Circle Jerk - a bold painting in six panels that came with a sexual content warning! Lieve is a painter’s painter. Hours of study, research, experimentation and solitude, mix with her bold and original colour palette to create her distinct visual language." The utterly enchanting, dark little painting she chose for this month’s Resurrauction, is titled Metallica II. By bidding here you support the artist and Darling Killers directly.

For this episode of Darling Killers, I sit down with the illustrious Ruth Van Beek, and it immediately becomes painfully obvious that I can barely disguise my greed for the small sculpture she brought along as her contribution to this month’s Resurrauction. Well, I am only human! Ruth’s collages obfuscate and reveal in equal measure. Ruth doesn’t hesitate to destroy images in order to create images. She lives and works in a seaside town with her family and a formidable collection of clocks. Working with an eclectic archive as raw material, she creates playful and painterly works that more often than not, end up in one of her delightful and widely acclaimed artist books. Blue figure is a rare three-dimensional rendering of one of her collages that doubles as a kind of talisman that has served its time watching over the artist's studio.

A tall impeccably dressed red headed Italian man with an uncanny resemblance to Vincent van Gogh, and the gift of the gab, is currently working on a series of collectable sculptures and prints, based on a delirious yet adorable inner world. J is for jaded. A is for art lover, C for cringe. O for omg, and the final "P-O" stands for Premature Osteoporosis. Born and raised in Firenze, the cradle of the Renaissance, Jacopo Calonaci, a reformed painter, ended up in Amsterdam, the king-sized bed of art funding, but he never quite got comfortable in that bed. Instead he carved his own path. Check out his Etsy store: @Studio Giggly, where your cutest hallucinations will come to life, and for god’s sake give the seal of excellence, your seal of approval.

In this episode of Darling Killers, Aurélien Lepetit sits down with Jessie Gong. Their conversation touches on the technical, and practical aspects of his practice, the homage to a family tradition, and the moral implications of working with textiles and technology in terms of sustainability. Aurélien works at the crossroads of textile techniques, computing, and plant-based processes, transforming biometric and empirical data into a textile lexicon (Did you get all that? No? Then listen to this episode where he unpacks it all in a sexy voice)! Currently he researches old alchemical books and makes dye from food waste, medicinal plants and suburban flowers. The work Aurélien selected for our "Resurrauction" is a dead darling because it was made before that switch. RGB is available at the symbolic starting price of one euro.

Charlott Markus didn’t so much kill this darling, as wish to resurrect it! Pygmalion 09, a work from her exam show at the Rietveld Academy, is for all intents and purposes ‘dead to the world’, buried in the past, yet already containing the seeds of themes and patterns that reappear and evolve throughout her work. Extended still lives, activism, textiles, memento mori, the colour blue and last but not least, the coded autobiographical references in seemingly abstract works. Woven into the fabric of her oeuvre, are the people, the places and the ideas that left their mark on her. Informed by a background in psychology and theology, the spirituality contained within this beautifully constructed photographic composition is palpable, and this archival print has been generously offered up for auction at the symbolic starting price of one euro.

Our first guest on Darling Killers, Finn Godwin wakes up every morning and gets to work. His embracing of the ethos of homework on the kitchen table is admirable, and his “restless hand syndrome” requires that he keeps busy. Ink drawings in the morning, paintings in the afternoon, intricate collage work in the evening. A lot of time and craftsmanship goes into creating each and every elaborate vignette. The truth of the image lies in the detail. Nature is very much his thing, and for our “Resurrauction” he is offering an incredible piece that took over two years to make, Autumn Garden (unfinished) is a typical specimen of his work, one however he has recently given up on. We urge you to pick up where he left off! The work is available at our “Resurrauction” at the symbolic starting price of one euro.

Hanna, Lina, Tania and Jessie, aka the Dead Darlings Collective, got together in Amsterdam to record a conversation about things to come! We talk about our origins, the ideas baked into the work we do, and we introduce Darling Killers, the podcast where artists are interrogated about an artwork they killed. This work will subsequently be available on our website, where anyone can bid for it at our monthly “resurrauction”. Follow, subscribe, stay tuned!