Episodes
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Jeff Wall talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work.
Wall—who was born in 1946 in Vancouver, Canada, where he still lives, though he also works in Los Angeles—makes photographs but aspires to approach his medium with the freedom, range and openness taken for granted by other artforms. Presented on a large scale, his images are enormously varied, from those that are close to reportage; to what he calls “near-documentary” images—tableaux, where he recreates a scene he has witnessed in reality with actors; to elaborately staged environments responding to art or literature; and even what he calls “hallucinations”. Crucially, he has used the term “cinematographic” to describe his approach, in that his pictures use different degrees of preparation and processing before he presses the shutter and afterwards, thereby applying what Jeff has called “aspects of the arts of dramatisation” to the pictorial practice of still photography. Because of this, his work has long had a fascinating philosophical relationship with truth and reality—two key cornerstones of orthodox claims for his medium’s potency—and what Wall has called “blatant artifice”. Initially famous for the technique he pioneered in the art world of presenting vast transparencies on lightboxes, he now mostly works with prints, on a similar scale, in both colour and black and white. As he has engaged closely with the history of art, books and film, Jeff has used the term “prose poems” to describe his photographs: that form’s complex structures and language and ability to conjure broad constellations of meanings, perfectly describe his art and how we experience it. He discusses how comics and Bruegel were his earliest visual inspirations, talks about his responses to historic works by Katsushika Hokusai and Albrecht Dürer, reflects on the “accidents while reading” that have led him to make images responding to literary works by Franz Kafka and Yukio Mishima, among others. Plus he answers some of our usual questions, including the ultimate, “what is art for?”
Jeff Wall: Life in Pictures, White Cube Bermondsey, London until 12 January 2025; Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon, Portugal, April-August 2025.
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Goshka Macuga talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work.
Macuga was born in 1967 in Warsaw, Poland. Her deep research into multifarious subjects manifests in the form of installations, sculpture, tapestry, photography, video and more. As well as making objects, she occupies a role that relates closely to that of a curator and historian, often weaving together her creations with existing materials, including artworks and archival documents. Place has enormous significance in her practice, whether it is the museum or gallery, the city or the country in which she is presenting her ideas. After exploring her site and engaging in lengthy research, she fuses her own subjective interest with objective material, to produce absorbing and often complex environments that provoke broad meanings and reactions. She discusses the transformative impact of seeing the work of Christo in an art magazine; her interest in Paul Nash and Eileen Agar—and the personal importance to her of a work by Agar that is in her studio; how the subversive strategies used by Stanisław Lem when he was writing science fiction in Communist Poland have influenced her practice; and how, during Covid, she created a club for dancing in her studio. Plus, she gives insight into her rituals and disciplines and answers our usual questions, including, “what is art for?”
Goshka Macuga: Born from Stone, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, until 18 January 2025.
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Sonia Boyce talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Boyce, a recent Golden Lion-winner at the Venice Biennale, was born in London in 1962 and first made an impact through her figurative drawings before shifting to what she calls a “multi-sensory” practice. Over the past three decades, her art has been a social experience, as she has worked with individual and collective collaborators to create performances, video pieces and installations. They reflect on a wealth of subjects, from personal and collective memory, to sound as a conveyor of subjective feeling and cultural experience, to the dynamics and meanings of space and environment, and to questions of value and power and who bestows and holds them. Sonia’s art is about people but also formed by them—people are her raw materials. She talks about her interest in power and authorship and the shift in her career, away from drawing to relational and social practice. She discusses the transformative experiences of seeing work by the Fenix feminist art collective, Frida Kahlo and visiting the 1981 exhibition in Wolverhampton, Black Art an’ Done. She reflects on William Morris’s wallpaper designs and the different ways in which they have manifested in her work. She discusses the connections between Dada and jazz music, and the influence of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, and much more. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate, “What is art for?”
Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation and Lygia Clark: The I and the You, Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 12 January; Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way, Toronto Biennial, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, until 6 April 2025; AMONG THE INVISIBLE JOINS: Works from the Enea Righi Collection, MUSEION—Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, until 2 March 2025.
Listen to Sonia Boyce talking about Feeling Her Way, in the episode of The Week in Art podcast from 22 April 2022, Venice Biennale Special.
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Episode 100: A brush with… Marlene DumasIn this, the 100th episode of A brush with…, Marlene Dumas talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Dumas was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953 and lives and works in Amsterdam. She is a painter whose intensity is unrivalled. Using found images and responding to memory, she has the ability to seduce and repel, to lull and to shock, often all in a single image or group of works. She is endlessly daring in her questioning of her medium and what it can do, in the unorthodox formats and scale she chooses for her imagery, in the way she reflects on historic art and ideas, movies and literature, and in her unflinching confrontation of her own life. Her paintings and drawings are a means of responding to external events and internal feelings in ways that can be absurd, confounding, funny and profoundly affecting. And while her themes and language are consistent, she is always pushing herself to new territory and breaking boundaries. She discusses the early influence of comic illustration, the enduring effect on her of Francisco Goya’s work, how she grew to love the work of Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres after first dismissing them, and her admiration for Nicole Eisenman and Diane Arbus, among others. She also gives insight in her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including, “What is art for?”
Marlene Dumas: Mourning Marsyas, Frith Street Gallery, London, until 16 November.
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Robert Longo talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, Longo was a key figure in what was called the Pictures generation of artists, which emerged in New York in the late 1970s. After that initial burst of attention he has since met with wide acclaim with his translations of everything from reportage photographs to historic paintings into vast charcoal drawings. By rendering the images in this way, he reinforces the impact of the original sources and yet prompts questions about the meaning and the power structures within and around them. By expanding their scale, he also transforms them. Up close—as we are overwhelmed by the analogue artisanship involved in the drawing—these dramatic images are abstracted. He talks about why he favours the term “collision” over “collage” and reflects on the concern with violence in his work. He discusses being, as he puts it, “an abstract artist working representationally”. He explains the process behind his responses to major works of art by everyone from Jackson Pollock to Rembrandt and Manet, and talks about the influence of Gretchen Bender on his newest Combine pieces. And he details the breadth of inspirations for his 1980s Men in the Cities series, from James Chance, frontman of the Contortions, to Rainer Werner Fassbender’s An American Soldier. Plus, he gives insight into studio habits and rituals and answers our usual questions, including, “What is art for?”
Robert Longo: Searchers, Thaddaeus Ropac, London, 8 October-20 November; Pace, London, 9 October-9 November; Robert Longo, Albertina Museum, Vienna, until 26 January; Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, US, 25 October-23 February 2025.
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Rana Begum talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work.
Begum was born in Bangladesh in 1977, came to the UK when she was eight years old and now lives and works in London. She distils everything she does into three essential elements—light, colour and form. From them, she conjures a distinctive array of works that often sit between sculpture, painting and architecture. She draws on influences that vary from canonic Modernist sculptors and painters to historic designs in the Qur’an and Islamic architecture. And she reflects on lived experiences, including growing up in rural Bangladesh and negotiating the London cityscape. Though they may take simple, tangible shape on first impressions, her creations engage the space around them and the senses of her audience in often surprising ways, creating a profound and finely balanced connection between object, environment and viewer.
She discusses how her early experiences of reading the Qur’an and the illuminations within it continue to affect her work today. She explains her newfound fascination with J.M.W. Turner, particularly his late paintings. She reflects on how she discovered Anni Albers later than her husband Josef, but how she has since influenced her work. She gives insight into life in the studio and rituals she adheres to, and answers our usual questions, including “What is art for?”
Rana Begum, Kate MacGarry, London, until 26 October; No.1367 Mesh, Pallant House, Chichester, UK; No. 1387 Fence, The Verbier 3-D Foundation, Verbier, Switzerland.
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Arthur Jafa talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Jafa 's work in film, sculpture and installation explores Black being with an unflinching eye for systemic and historic inequity and violence and an exuberant harnessing of disparate manifestations of Black—and particularly African American—culture. Jafa has only garnered major art world attention in the past decade, but in that time he has been prolific in creating landmark works that have shocked, stirred and moved his audiences, including Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), The White Album (2018) and his latest film, BEN GAZARRA (2024, formerly known as *****), which reimagines the climactic scenes in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. He discusses how, when he was a child, he was profoundly affected by seeing James Brown in concert and reading Jack Kirby’s creations for Marvel Comics. He explains how he feels inspired and challenged by Anne Imhof’s work, and how Jean-Michel Basquiat is an ongoing point of reference. He also describes the sheer power of seeing another transformative performance as a child: Mahalia Jackson singing in a Mississippi church. Plus, he gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Arthur Jafa, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 14 September-14 December; Arthur Jafa: Works from the MCA Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, until 2 March 2025; Arthur Jafa, Galerie Champ Lacombe, Biarritz, France, until 5 September.
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Eva Rothschild talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Rothschild, born in Dublin in 1971, has a profound sense of the unique qualities and peculiar power of her discipline, sculpture. Although her art clearly relates to the history of abstraction and Modernism, it balances a reverence and deep curiosity for this sculptural history with playfulness and subversion. In her sculptures, time-honoured avant garde principles meet the forms and practices of popular culture. Born of much instinctive experimentation in the studio, her work engages, often exuberantly, with diverse sculptural processes—from casting and welding to stacking and balancing—and properties—from weight and solidity to patina, texture and colour. As well as exploring gallery space in often unexpected ways, she has developed a rich seam of public sculpture, with major permanent works including a playground in East London. She discusses her the “material giddiness” she feels in making work, how she uses negative space and porosity as key elements in her sculpture, and why she feels that black is almost more a material than a colour. She reflects on the early influence of a catalogue of the British Museum’s Tutankamen in her family home as a child, discusses how Barbara Hepworth remains an enduring influence, recalls the shock of encountering Cady Noland’s work in a catalogue when she was a student and remembers the profound effect of seeing Sinead O’Connor perform in Dublin in the 1980s. She gives insight into her studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Eva Rothschild, Modern Art, Helmet Row, London, 6-28 September; Still Lives, The Hepworth Wakefield, until January 2025; solo exhibition, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2026.
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Charline von Heyl talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Von Heyl, born in 1960 in Mainz, Germany, is one of the most original painters working today. Her art deliberately defies description, evading orthodox definitions like abstract or figurative by attempting to reach a space in which the viewer is emotionally and intellectually engaged to the extent that such terms are meaningless—a place, she has said, “where thoughts and feelings meet”. Her canvases are complex, with multiple layers of forms applied with apparently contradictory languages, from intricately applied patterns and hard-edges to free-flowing painterly passages. The images she paints are similarly disparate, with identifiable shapes alongside loose, lyrical, inchoate forms. And while some patterns, motifs, techniques, colour relationships and structures might repeat—particularly among discrete clusters of paintings—Von Heyl resists having a signature style. She keeps herself—and us, as viewers—guessing. Her paintings are the opposite of one-liners, instead revealing more the longer they are absorbed. While she is entirely individual in her language, Von Heyl is one of a number of artists internationally who are testing the possibilities of painting in the 21st century. She discusses the balance of chance and choice at the heart of her work, how she tunes herself “into a certain vibe” while painting, the different “speeds” at which she works, and the “contamination”, more than influence, of other artists. She reflects on her early transformative encounter with the German painter Wols, being taught by Jörg Immendorf, her fascination with Le Corbusier’s paintings and how Emily Dickinson and Peter Handke’s writings have affected her work. Plus she gives insight into her studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
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Michael Craig-Martin talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Craig-Martin was born in Dublin in 1941, and grew up in the US, but has been based in London for most of his working life. Over the past six decades he has created an instantly recognisable body of work in which everyday objects are depicted simply in black outlines and often filled and surrounded by saturated, bright colour. The objects can be alone, in close-up fragments, or in complex combinations, and are captured in everything from small prints to room-scale installations. Intending at first to eschew style, Craig-Martin came to realise that his technique is inimitably his. And the works’ meaning has also shifted over the decades, gaining new and poetic meanings. Fifty years on from his first drawing, his core questions remain: what is it to represent something, to make an image of it? How does image-making work? What does it allow you to do? And what happens when a viewer encounters what you have done? The result is a world of sensation and visual and experiential pleasure that might seem unexpected given the nature of the items he depicts. This knack of making the humdrum compelling, even lending it a sensory power and emotional resonance, is why Craig-Martin has remained an enduringly significant figure in contemporary art. He talks about returning to the basics of drawing in the mid-1970s when it was “forbidden territory”, his slow but eventually hearty embrace of colour, why humour is a useful tool in addressing subjects of the utmost seriousness, his early encounter with the work of Picasso as a child in Washington DC, the effect of studying according to the principles of Josef Albers at Yale, his admiration for Bruce Nauman and Gerhard Richter, and his love of the work of Samuel Beckett. Plus, he responds to our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Michael Craig-Martin, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 21 September-10 December; Michael Craig-Martin: An Anthology, Prints and Multiples 1996 – 2024, Cristea Roberts, London, 25 October-23 November.
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Igshaan Adams talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Adams, born in 1982, who explores human space, both interior and exterior, and how that space speaks to racial, sexual and historical identities. Working in particular with wall and floor-based textiles, and sculpture, often brought together in atmospheric installations, Adams does not depict people but evokes their presence. He particularly refers to the community in which he was born and grew up in South Africa, Bonteheuwel near Cape Town, and suggests the marks people have made in that environment. They range from the traces on domestic floors to so-called “desire lines”, pathways forged in landscapes and cityscapes that reveal how we subvert the structures put in place to control and surveil us, and thus act as everyday gestures of resistance. Adams’s art is based on research but also deeply informed by his own story, as a mixed-race, queer man. Though referencing great difficulty and hardship, his is a language of unashamed beauty and elegance. In the podcast, he reflects on his curiosity about traces of human activity, his embrace of beauty, his longstanding engagement with Sufism, and the influence of the South African artists Nandipha Mntambo and Nicholas Hlobo, the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois and the love poems of Rumi. He gives insight into life in his studio in Cape Town, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Igshaan Adams: Weerhoud, The Hepworth Wakefield, UK, 22 June-3 November; Igshaan Adams, ICA/Boston, US, until 15 February 2025;
Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, 14 September-5 January, 2025
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Otobong Nkanga talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Nkanga, born in 1974 in Kano, Nigeria, explores the land and the environment in relation to our bodies and the cultures and histories that mould and define them. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, sound, photography and video, Otobong brings together what she calls constellations of images, movements and objects, to poetically interweave ideas relating to cultural history and anthropology, geography and geology. She fuses in-depth research with her own lived experience. The result is a practice with a distinctive coherence between materials and concepts, where references to present-day geopolitical and ecological realities sit alongside forms, metaphors and symbols that speak to broader timescales and narratives and disparate belief systems. She reflects on her early choice to pursue art over architecture, discusses her use of minerals and particular colours, recalls encountering the Bakor monoliths in Nigeria as a child, and then Western masters from Caravaggio to De Hooch in Europe. She talks about her enjoyment of writers like Uwem Akpan and Helon Habila and the huge range of music she plays in her studio, from Alt-J via Fatoumata Diawara to Rihanna. Plus she gives insights into life in her studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: “what is art for?”
Otobong Nkanga: We Come from Fire and Return to Fire, Lisson Gallery,
London, until 3 August.
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Lynn Hershman Leeson talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Leeson, born in 1941 in Cleveland, Ohio, US, and now based in San Francisco, is one of the pioneers of media art. Over more than half a century, she has explored how people and society engage with, and are shaped by, technology—from surveillance and control, via scientific progress, to the formation and manipulation of identity. Her work has taken the form of sculptural installation, video, photography, sound, online art, performance, and much more. It moves fluidity across these disciplines and adopts disparate modes, from documentary to historical drama to science-fiction fantasy, in a language awash with art historical and cinematic allusion. At the heart of her practice is a fundamental analysis of how humans can navigate political, social and environmental upheavals, and how technology in contemporary society can liberate and empower as much as oppress and censor. She discusses the epiphany provoked by a photocopier malfunction that prompted her lifelong interest in humans’ engagement with technology, how she felt forced to look beyond conventional spaces when a museum rejected her multimedia Breathing Machines, the early influence of Cézannes she encountered in the Cleveland Museum of Art, the conversations with women artists that led to the Women Art Revolution film and archive, her film with the Cuban artist-activist Tania Bruguera, and a transformative encounter with the theatre of Tadeusz Kantor. Plus, she answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Are Our Eyes Targets?, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany, until 2 February 2025; Lynn Hershman Leeson: Moving-Image Innovator, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 7-20 June
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Ben Luke talks to Michaël Borremans about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Borremans, born in 1963 in Geraardsbergen in Belgium, is one of the most original painters working today. He marries a technical brilliance, born of a careful study of the style and touch of the Old Masters, with a sensibility and atmosphere that are completely his own. Though they depict figures, objects and environments, his paintings remain enigmatic, refusing to settle into easily readable narratives. They are full of uncanny detail and incident which is all the more pronounced because of his sensual handling of the paint. Though he is a perceptive observer of people, things and space, Borremans says he paints culture as opposed to nature. When he makes a painting of a human face, for instance, he is not concerned with the mimetic process of portraiture, rather with a perception of the ineffable nature of human psychology; with what it might mean to be—and to represent—a human being today. Even though it is characterised by an often absurd playfulness, an abiding sense of isolation and disquiet permeates Michaël’s work. He discusses the ongoing influence of Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Jean-Siméon Chardin, the inspirational comedy of Monty Python, the profound writing of Vladimir Nabokov, and his love of music by everyone from Franz Schubert to Taylor Swift. He gives insight into life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Michaël Borremans: The Monkey, David Zwirner, London, opening in London Gallery Weekend, 31 May-2 June, and then 6 June-26 July; Michaël Borremans: The Promise, Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai, China, until 9 June; Michaël Borremans, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 30 November-23 March 2025
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Kapwani Kiwanga talks to Ben Luke about the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Kiwanga was born in Hamilton, Canada, in 1978 and lives in Paris. She works primarily in sculpture and installation but also with performance, sound and video. She explores what she has called “power asymmetries”, drawing from forgotten or unexpected histories and studies in everything from botany to sociology, to create enigmatic but alluring objects and environments in a wealth of materials. Research is at the heart of her project, but it triggers unique combinations of ideas, where forms that might initially appear entirely aesthetic and informed by Modernist geometries are in fact “documents” and “witnesses” to complex socio-political ideas and events. Materials are rarely selected simply for their visual effect; instead, Kiwanga chooses them for their historic, economic or cultural uses. A remarkable economy and precision underpins her language, through which she maximises an acute experiential balance between pleasure, curiosity and disquiet. She reflects on her new work, Trinket, for the Canada Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, about creating a welcoming space for viewers to explore complex histories and ideas, and about balancing seduction and disruption. She reflects on the early influence of the Black Audio Film Collective and how her hanging curtains relate to Felix Gonzalez-Torres; she discusses the significance of residencies in Paris, at the Musée national d’Histoire naturelle, and in Dakar, Senegal; and she talks about why the jazz legend Sun Ra inspired her to make a work. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including: what is art for?
Kapwani Kiwanga: Trinket, Canada Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale, Italy, 20 April-24 November; Kapwani Kiwanga: The Length of the Horizon, Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark, until 25 August.
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Michael Raedecker talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Raedecker, born in Amsterdam in 1963, brings together paint, thread and printed imagery to create canvases pregnant with unsettling and uncanny atmosphere. At the heart of his work is the meeting between humanity and nature and, even though his paintings are mostly unpopulated, the presence of people is always implied through their absence. We see the interiors and exteriors of homes, with lights on, beds ruffled, curtains half-drawn, cars outside; we witness empty loungers beside a swimming pool or an unoccupied lilo floating on its surface. We see landscapes that seem only recently to have been vacated. In still lifes we seem to witness a hastened process of decay. Images become almost hallucinatory through the emphases Michael gives elements of his compositions, with heightened texture or colour or surreal disjunctions. We are thrust into riddles, stories or dreams that are familiar yet otherworldly. He discusses his early encounter with the work of Edward Kienholz, how seeing Luc Tuymans at Documenta in Kassel in 1992 was a turning point in his work, and hear about an encounter with Sigmar Polke at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Raedecker reflects on the importance of 1980s New Romantic and Blitz Kids culture to his early life and how music continues to be central to his time in the studio today. We hear about more studio rituals and he answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Michael Raedecker: Material Worlds, Kunstmuseum den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands, 13 April-28 August; Michael Raedecker, Grimm, Amsterdam, 30 May-20 July
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Alex Katz talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Katz, born in Brooklyn in 1927, is one of the most distinctive and influential painters of recent decades. Since he began making art in the 1940s, he has aimed to paint what he has called “the now”: to distil fleeting visual experiences into timeless art. It might be a spark of interaction between friends or family, the play of light across water, a field of grass or between the leaves of a tree, the movements of dancers, the electric illumination of an office building at night, or—more than anything else—stolen glances, everyday gestures and intimate exchanges with his wife Ada, who he has painted more than 1,000 times since they married in 1958. From the start, Katz has aimed to match what he calls the “muscularity” of the Abstract Expressionist artists that were dominant in New York when he emerged onto the art scene there in the 1950s, while never giving up on observed reality. He has said “the optical element is the most important thing to me”. He discusses the early influence of Paul Cezanne, the enduring power of his forebears, from Giotto to Rubens and Willem de Kooning, and his admiration for artists as diverse as Utamaro, Martha Diamond and Chantal Joffe. He reflects on the “emotional extension” of the poet Frank O’Hara and his interest in jazz maestros like Pres and Charlie Parker. Plus, he answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?
Alex Katz: Claire, Grass and Water, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy, 17 April-29 September; Alex Katz: Wedding Dresses, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, US, until 2 June; Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 15 September-15 November.
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Shahzia Sikander talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Sikander, born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, trained in the tradition of Indo-Persian manuscript painting and has used its forms, techniques and language as a launchpad for a wide-ranging engagement with colonial and postcolonial histories, with feminism, gender and sexuality, and with cultural identity and narratives around race. Working in drawing, painting, animation, video, mosaic and most recently sculpture, she has created a body of work in which existing and invented images and forms are juxtaposed to vivid and poetic effect. Technically exquisite and conceptually profound, her works have an instant impact but reward slow looking with layered narratives, references and histories. She discusses her early discovery of Michelangelo in Lahore, explains how she has channelled the “soulfulness” Eva Hesse found in minimalism in her response to historic manuscript painting, reflects on the importance of her teenage experience of Mogadishu, Somalia, and speaks about the enormous importance of poetry to her work, including the US writer Adrienne Rich’s translations of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including which artwork, if she could only have one, she would most like to live with.
Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Palazzo SoranzoVan Axel, Venice, Italy, 20 April-20 October; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, US, 14 February-4 May 2025; Cleveland Museum of Art, 14 February-8 June 2025. Shahzia Sikander: Havah…to breathe, air, life, University of Houston, Texas, US, until 31 October; Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 28 April 2024.
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Nalini Malani talks to Ben Luke, about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Malani was born in Karachi in 1946 and lives and works today in Mumbai. Her work in drawing and painting, performance, video and installation, responds to contemporary politics and human rights issues through the language of ancient myths, of poets, writers and thinkers, and of the history of art. She is increasingly celebrated for her installations that she calls “animation chambers”, fusing video and drawings, text and voice. They engulf the viewer in environments that contain endlessly shifting sequences of imagery and stirring soundtracks—a call to action in terms of both their political and cultural content. She discusses her early and enduring admiration of Indian Kalighat painting, how Louise Bourgeois’ reflections on memory are a consistent inspiration, why she has repeatedly returned to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and about the pivotal period she spent in Paris between 1970 and 1972, meeting many leading intellectuals and artists. Plus she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including “what is art for?”
Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? and Ballad of a Woman, Concrete, Dubai, in collaboration with Volte Art Projects, 25 February-3 March; Nalini Malani: The Pain of Others 1966-1979, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS)/Jehangir Nicholson Art Gallery, Mumbai, India, 1 August-5 November; Ambienti 1956-2010: Environments by Women Artists II, MAXXI, Rome, 9 April-6 October; Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, collection display, Tate Modern, London, 13 December 2024-September 2025.
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Zineb Sedira talks to Ben Luke about her influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Sedira, born in Paris in 1963 to Algerian parents and based in London since 1986, uses film, photography, installation, sculpture and other media to reflect on memory, from the personal to the collective and historical. She explores representation, language and family, intimately informed by her French, Algerian and British identity. By mining her singular autobiography and its connection with colonial histories and their contemporary legacies, Sedira has created a body of work that is at once politically nuanced, emotionally complex and visually rich. She discusses her early interest in Mary Kelly, her enduring engagement with the art of JMW Turner, and her admiration for the Algerian painter Baya. She reflects on her fascination with the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969, the subject of a body of work. And she talks about her love of jazz and ska, the influence of postcolonial writers, among much else. Plus, she gives insight into her studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: “what is art for?”
Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 15 February-12 May; the film version of the work is on display at Tate Britain until September 2024; Dreams Have No Titles, Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi , UAE, 3 October-28 January 2025; Let’s go on singing!, Goodman Gallery, London, until 16 March; Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 June 2025-22 September 2025.
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