All these works and more will appear in Wateridge's exhibition Mittelland, which opened yesterday, to coincide with the beginning of the Frieze Art Fair. 'Everything in these works happens in here,' says Wateridge, gesturing around the studio, in which a life-sized garden extension sits empty behind me, its sliding glass doors closed on a clean, wood interior. 'Everything I paint is constructed.' Wateridge works from scale models, building large sets and paying actors and art students to model for him. 'The scale sets create a kind of fully immersive, faux-documentary feel,' he says. Wateridge loves working with actors because 'they're comfortable being private in public. I sometimes set them exercises, like a theatre workshop, to see what happens. Normally they're just bitching about jobs, but it can look just right in the context of the picture.' He takes between 1,500 and 2,000 photographs of each scene and works from this database, iPad in one hand, paintbrush in the other.
