Inside the Studio: MA History of Art Students Meet Artist Thomas Hirschhorn

On April 4, 2025, the artist Thomas Hirschhorn welcomed a contingent from the MA History of Art Department to his studio in Aubervilliers, Paris.

On April 4, 2025, the artist Thomas Hirschhorn welcomed a contingent from the MA History of Art Department to his studio in Aubervilliers, Paris. The group included MA students taking the Special Subjects offered this year by Mignon Nixon, Nick Robbins, and Stephanie Schwartz. Hirschhorn shared work-in-progress for the “Pavillon Simone Weil” he is preparing for Geneva for April-June 2026. He also showed them panels from another current project, My Atlas, which takes inspiration from Aby Warburg’s famous Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. In their wide-ranging discussion with Hirschhorn about his current work, he emphasised the vital importance to him of art history, not only for the artist but for everyone. Hirschhorn works in public space, including, in current times, the space of social media, where he posts daily, sometimes in the form of a thickly layered collage, or a small "Post" or "Meme" that poses a question, such as (often): ‘What can we learn from art history, for today’s understanding?’ and ‘What can I still do without AI?’ (fail, try to avoid being jealous...). Hirschhorn left us with the idea that ‘if Big History can’t teach us, we must learn from History of Art’. 

The visit with to Hirschhorn’s studio followed the previous day’s private tour of the Maison Européene de la Photographie with Dr Simon Baker, Director of the museum and an alumnus of the UCL History of Art Department, and his colleagues. Simon showed the group through the current major exhibition ‘Dennis Morris—Music + Life’ and introduced the group to the MEP Library. They also experienced a ‘behind-the-scenes’ introduction to a forthcoming exhibition, the first retrospective of the work of Marie-Laure De Decker, including work on Decker’s unstudied archives.

The trip concluded with a visit to the Jardin des plantes, where the group explored the historic landscape of the gardens and the iron-and-glass greenhouses built in the 1830s to house tropical plant collections. They were able to compare botanical approaches to space and classification with those next door in the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie compare, which houses George Cuvier’s famous collection of skeletons and specimens in a nineteenth-century display. The trip allowed students to make connections across modules and to build a collective conversation around issues of history, politics, classifications, and the image. 

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