Q&A: Eliza Wagener, New Contemporaries 2025/2026 artist on Glasgow culture recommendations & more

Ahead of the Glasgow International Festival this June, we caught up with Glasgow-based New Contemporaries 2025/2026 artist Eliza Wagener to hear her thoughts on the city’s current art scene, her favourite cultural spots and recommendations, and the lasting influence of artist Joe Brainard on her recent work.

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO MOVE TO SCOTLAND?

I moved to Scotland in September 2024, after having spent almost my entire life in Hamburg, Germany. What I found most interesting about Glasgow as a city was probably the music. I had been running a web radio called HALLO: Radio with my friends back home in Hamburg and I knew that Glasgow had a couple of really nice DIY web radio stations, such as Clyde Built Radio, as well as the radio festival Radiophrenia, that my friend from Hamburg had told me about. Also, very often when I discovered new music releases on Bandcamp I found out that the artists came from Glasgow. This made the city seem quite compelling to me.

I guess there were also other aspects, such as the fact that I am thinking a lot about space and how the lack of it can negatively influence art making and artist communities. In that sense, at the time, the fact that Glasgow isn't London seemed very appealing to me. But the music was definitely the biggest part in my decision. I've heard a couple of people having similar experiences. One of my friends had the initial idea of moving to Glasgow because of her love for the music of Strawberry Switchblade. My current favourite Glasgow music is the band Life Without Buildings.

TELL US MORE ABOUT THE ART COMMUNITY IN GLASGOW. DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS?

In general, I find the community that I've encountered so far very nice and friendly. And politically speaking, it seems to me that right now a strong arts community is more important than ever. Recently, things aren’t exactly made easy for artists in Glasgow. I find it for example rather shocking to observe places like Trongate 103 getting a letter of eviction with only a month's notice. I just can't wrap my head around how the City Council here—just like in so many other places around the world—seems unable to grasp the importance of artistic production and community for a city. This leaves me quite worried about the future of art making.

There are really a lot of great spaces, events and festivals happening in Glasgow, and I hope they will still be able to do their work in the future. For music and sound, I recommend Counterflows Festival that takes place in April and Radiophrenia Festival in September. They are really nice for ears that like some experimental input. The event series Baked Beans On The Doorstep is great. The club EXIT is putting on a lot of listening events, screenings and exhibitions that go beyond club nights.

In terms of exhibition spaces, I really like the shows at 20 Albert Road, which is an art space in Govanhill shared by Cento, 5b and Ivory Tars. 5b also has another space at Virginia Court in Glasgow's city centre and they do beautiful publications as well. A_Place Gallery is great for painting. My friend Leena Lübbe recently did a show at Machine Glasgow, that was really inspiring. In terms of non-commercial, artist-run spaces 42 Carlton Place, founded by Carol Rhodes and Merlin James, and now curated by Merlin James, is also very interesting. I recommend taking a look at their website, there is a lot of knowledge to discover. There is also City Gallery, a space run by Jen Aldred and Renata Ottati, that I would recommend visiting.

WHAT ARE YOU CURRENTLY WORKING ON?

At the moment, I am mainly working on my degree show, that will open on 12 July 2026 at the Glasgow School of Art's Stow Building. For the show I am working on some large and some small paintings, as well as some objects, like lamps and collages.

Beyond that, this spring I will be on a residency in Cornwall, where I will equally work on paintings, as well as a larger installation for an upcoming project.

WHAT INSPIRES YOU AT THE MOMENT?

I am currently finding a lot of inspiration in the work of an artist called Joe Brainard, whom I wrote my master's thesis about. Joe Brainard left behind a legacy of countless painted, collaged, assembled, illustrated, and written works, and yet never had a big career. As both an in and outsider of the New York School, Joe Brainard helped me to get an understanding of the New York art world of the 1960s and 1970s, a period that he himself described as a “transformation period between Abstract Expressionism and God knows what.” Looking closely into another time also implies a reflection about what has changed since then as well as observing the general conditions that enable art making. My research led me to travel all the way to New York, this past January, which was one of the most inspiring trips in a long time.

What I find incredibly stunning about Joe Brainard, is how collaboration is one of the most essential, if not the essential part of his work. During my research I read, that his diverse collaborations with writers in the form of comic strips, book covers, illustrations and collages make this part of Brainard’s oeuvre alone so rich in collaborations between poetry and art as has not been seen since the 19th century. Joe Brainard's comic strip collaborations "The Complete C Comics" with New York School poets such as Frank O’Hara, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Peter Schjeldahl, Barbara Guest, Ron Padgett, and many more have recently been republished by New York Review Books. Joe Brainard invited his poet friends to provide him with words that he would draw on and the result is really odd comics, that don't really make sense and kind of testify what Maggie Nelson calls the New York School poet's "chatty abstraction" in her book Women, The New York School, And Other True Abstractions. Another thought I had during my research, was how Joe Brainard kind of acted like a "painter among things" and established a uniquely affectionate relationship with the objects of his artistic explorations, which, like his collaborations, testify to an insatiable urge to get to know the world and the people around him.

I really recommend taking a look at his art works, as well as his writing. There is a beautiful quote from his text Self-Portrait on Christmas Night that he wrote in 1961 at the age of only 19 during his first winter in New York City, when everyone else had left the city. In the text he committed himself to “only paint, to see the world, to be big for myself, to do everything, to love and be loved freely, to know beyond the practice and ‘safe,’ to paint honestly therefore to them uglily, to spent what little money I have foolishly, and to not prepare for the future.” I also like another quote by him, that goes: “I don’t have a definite commodity...I’ve had oil-painting shows that were very realistic, then I’ve done jack-off collages, cut-outs one year and drawings...it’s all been different...People want to buy a Warhol or a person instead of a work." My work’s never become ‘a Brainard.’” I see a hidden pleasure and freedom within the refusal of the commodity, that becomes really apparent when looking at Joe Brainard's work.