Multisciplinary London-based artist Richie Culver expands the themes of his iconic paintings in his new album, I Trust Pain, out on October 31st via Fixed Abode. With him we talk about underground culture, his birth city of Hull, using DMs as canvas, and nothingness.
What does the term ‘underground’ mean to you? This line, which serves as the opening for Culver’s new record, can only evoke a deep sense of alienation. What does underground really mean in the age of hypervisibility? What hides beyond what seems to be a fully accessible landscape? Do underground music and art scenes still manage to thrive as they once did, far from the watchful eye of the machine? The appeal of an artist like Richie Culver lies precisely in this tension. Many of his paintings follow a formula that combines graffiti-like typography, short, punchy phrases that feel lifted from meme accounts poking fun at the struggles of the artist’s life, and, above all, a sharp critique of the art world’s elitism that devours underground artists — all of this delivered with top-notch humour.
“Tell your rich friend about my art stuff,” “I need to make money. End of story,” “Huge fan of your old stuff,” “I did not get into art school but I got into Berghain”: Culver’s statements resemble the tropes of online communication yet don’t believe there’s any superficiality behind these catchphrases. On the contrary, he stands as one of the last foot soldiers of a kind of visual art that laughs at itself, using the tools of the present to explore feelings of displacement, loneliness, and the hardships of being an artist in a discouraging art landscape.
With I Trust Pain, released via friend and collaborator Rainy Miller’s label Fixed Abode, Culver expands the themes of his visual art into musical compositions. Miller has described Northern Gothic as the style that, for some time now, has emerged among artists like Culver, Blackhaine, Bitter Gold, and Miller himself. We’re talking about a group of UK artists reflecting on themes of labour, identity, mental illness, and alienation, always deeply connected to the places where they were born and raised. In Culver’s case, that place is Hull: a port city in eastern England that also gave birth to none other than Genesis P. Orridge, the iconic artist behind COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and the birth of industrial music as a genre. The creator of an underground culture that had so much influencing power it almost became mainstream.
The connection to industrial imagery is clear in Culver’s work and in the work of the other musicians involved in I Trust Pain. “Went from stacking shelves in the factory / Now I’m applying for a PhD / It was all for you I was not for me.” Culver’s strength lies in his ability to create poetry after swallowing the darkness of an industrial landscape, of a commercial art world, of the pressure of having to escape one’s hometown, and of human beings bending under corporate logic. Today, we sit down with him to talk about his new album, underground culture, that town of Hull that links him to P. Orridge’s legacy. And, above all, about what it means to confront nothingness in one’s artistic process.
Hi Richie, thank you for this interview. I was immediately struck by the idea that your works of art could be “nothing more than fragments of lyrics from songs [you] had yet to write.” We’re in this era of continuous chaotic redefinition of media: slogans can become images, art can become advertising, text can become movement and lyrics can become symbols. What’s the process of going from the stillness of paintings to the movement and temporality of music?
The transition from painting to music is less a shift in medium and more an extension of the same inquiry. My paintings often emerge from fragments (phrases, overheard sentences, or internal monologues) that refuse to resolve into narrative. They function as suspended moments: static inscriptions that gesture toward something larger but remain incomplete. In that sense, they are already charged with temporality, with an implicit before and after that the canvas can’t contain.
You’re very in touch with social media (as we all are) and are very aware of how it shapes our ways of thinking and communicating. Sometimes your works feel like part of an ethnographic exploration of online and pop culture. Can you tell me something about the relationship you have with online culture in relation to your work?
My relationship with social media (Instagram) has been mainly work related. There has been times when I have used it in performative ways also over the years. Using the DMs and comment sections as a canvas or method. I find it all really tiring now and the algorithm is all over the place. I usually always have something to promote visual or sound related though.
A legend says that when Michelangelo Antonioni visited Mark Rothko in his studio in New York, Rothko told him “I like your films, they’re about the same thing my paintings are about: Nothingness.” Your work is also very connected to the nihilistic yet rich and complex theme of nothingness, something that lurks in that dimension between emptiness and hyperinformation, social media aphorisms and ambiguity, silence and sound. I’d like to know what your interpretation of nothingness is and whether it is an important part of your work.
As a white, straight, English, male artist in his forties, I don’t really have anything to say in 2025. I am aware of the redundancy of my position. The cultural conversation often (and rightly) seeks other voices, other urgencies. My response to that is not to claim authority but to lean into the condition of nothingness itself — the sense of not really having anything definitive to say. In that way, my work both acknowledges and performs this tension: it’s about the absurdity of making work when there is nothing new to contribute, and the strange compulsion as an artist to keep working anyway.
“My work both acknowledges and performs this tension: it’s about the absurdity of making work when there is nothing new to contribute, and the strange compulsion as an artist to keep working anyway.”
The installation view at Passage Hermannplatz was accompanied by this very melancholic poem, but the song you name after the work I Trust Pain in the album is, by contrast, one of the most uplifting. I’m interested in what you said about “building friction” between the artworks and the songs, more than just doing mere “musical translations.” Can you tell me more about this process?
The idea of building friction basically comes from resisting the temptation to let the painting and the music mirror one another too neatly. If a text appears on canvas and then reappears in a song, the danger is that one becomes an illustration of the other, a kind of closed circuit of meaning. What interests me instead is how dissonance can create a more charged space for interpretation. With I Trust Pain, the painting carries a heaviness, a kind of quiet melancholy, whereas the song pushes toward something more buoyant and expansive. The contradiction is deliberate, it unsettles the viewer or listener who might expect continuity.
I see a lot of similarities between your practice and that of Genesis P. Orridge. They could range from writing the most horrific lyrics (like the ones in Hamburger Lady) to having a great sense of humour, and they always had an incredible way with words. I feel like the same applies to you: the mix of horror and comedy is one of the cores of your work. Of course Genesis’ practice was born out of 70s culture, while yours reflects contemporary times and how we relate to one another in this particular age. So I’d like to know what’s your relationship with Genesis’ work, as you both grew up in Hull and you seem to be influenced by their practice.
Thank you. I appreciate this connection. I have actually worked with the Estate twice this year: once at Spatial Festival in Berlin and then Camden Arts Centre. Genesis P-Orridge’s work has always loomed large for me, not just because of the Hull connection, but because of the way they embodied contradiction. Their practice moved fluidly between horror and humour, provocation and tenderness. That refusal to resolve into a single position is something I recognise in my own work: the insistence that darkness and absurdity are not mutually exclusive but can coexist and even amplify one another.
What are some specific things about growing up in Hull that influenced your work?
Growing up in Hull is a constant process of mine, like a drawn out divorce that I can’t fully say goodbye to. I worked in factories, Tesco’s, as a builder and all kinds of jobs. So it’s always there. It made me who I am and I love that place in a way that you can only love a town you had to leave.
Your album starts with an ode to underground culture, and a lot of your artworks are about the tension created by the concept of ‘underground artist’ in the commercial art world landscape. Who do you consider underground artists in this hyper-visible era?
What comes to mind for me are labels like Industrial Coast, Deathbed Tapes, Total Black, Breathing Problems Productions, Phage Tapes. Industrial Coast for instance does A Monday Night in Middlesbrough where they put on a noise night on a Monday night that wouldn’t work on a Saturday night in London. It’s this kind of dedication to a scene that means a lot to me.
Can you tell me more about the process of ideating the videos for the songs of the album? They are kind of different from one another, but still immediately recognisable as part of your universe. What’s your relationship with video as an artistic medium?
I constantly make films, so videos to accompany songs are important to me. It’s a nice chance to collaborate and see what another artist can bring out of a sound, visually.