358 MINUTES WITH...Thomas Houseago

The trauma-bedeviled artist, with some help from his Hollywood support bros Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, opens his first show in a decade in New York.

- RACHEL CORBETT

I MEET THE Sculptor Thomas Houseago on a sunny August day at his outdoor studio on an oceanside cliff in Malibu. He arrives late and a little manic, bursting from his car in a mauve sweatshirt and lavender sweatpants, his hair a tuft of yellow blond, rattling off apologies and promising that he is prepared to talk about "everything." Over the next six hours, he does.

Houseago takes me on a tour of the dozens of giant sculptures he's made over the past year: redwood owls he carved with a chain saw, an eight-foot-tall plaster-and-wood Minotaur, some kind of Goyainspired child-eating Cyclops with an erection the size of a sub sandwich. There are also some pleasant domestic still lifes: a sunflower, a coffee pot. In a few days, many of the works would be shipped to New York, where, on September 9, the artist was to open his first solo show in the city in a decade. It takes up three floors of the Lévy Gorvy Dayan Mansion off Madison Avenue.

Houseago, who is 52, has never been an easygoing person and never made easygoing art. "It's usually men with some unhealed trauma who gravitate to my work," he says.

Men like him. He grew up poor in Leeds, England. There are tales of drunkenness and drug use, bankruptcy and despair, in his history. He tried to work it all out in his art. Early on, as an art student, inspired by Chris Burden, he set himself on fire and photographed it. He became a success when his monumental primitivist Baby was a standout at the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

Soon after, he joined two megagalleries: Hauser & Wirth and Gagosian.

This exhibition was originally supposed to appear at Gagosian, but when Houseago visited the 24th Street gallery to plan it out last year, the space filled him with dread.