Sarah Sze talks to Ben Luke about the art, literature, music and film that have influenced her and continue to inspire her today, and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Sze, who was born in 1969 in Boston and studied at Yale University and the School of Visual Arts, New York, takes objects and images and gathers them into intricate, uncanny assemblages which often envelop and overwhelm the viewer. Her works are often categorised as sculptural installations but exist o...
Sep 28, 2021•59 min•Season 6Ep. 3
Ben Luke talks to Tacita Dean, whose 16mm and 35mm films, drawings on blackboard, photogravures, collages, sound works and found object pieces form one of the most poetic bodies of work in contemporary art. Dean was born in 1965 in Canterbury in the UK, but for most of her life as an artist has lived outside of Britain, first in Berlin, which has provided the location for some of her most compelling works, and now between the German capital and Los Angeles. As the three-venue group of museum sho...
Sep 21, 2021•57 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Philippe Parreno talks to Ben Luke in depth about his cultural experiences and influences. A master of exhibition-making, Parreno was born in 1964 in Oran, Algeria, but grew up Grenoble in France. Ever since he emerged in the 1990s, he has used the spaces he shows in and the immediate environment around them as an active presence in his work. Architectural elements in the gallery might be animated at certain moments, lighting might flicker according to scores we don’t see, screens might descend ...
Sep 14, 2021•49 min•Season 6Ep. 1
Glenn Ligon talks to Ben Luke about the artists, writers, musicians and other cultural figures who inspire and intrigue him, and the pivotal cultural moments in his life. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1960, Ligon works across various media, from painting to film and neon, and primarily uses text and found images to produce powerful ruminations on contemporary politics, culture and African American identity. Despite the array of media he uses, Ligon’s work is hugely consistent in its language a...
Aug 17, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 4
Alberta Whittle talks to Ben Luke about her influences in art, books, music and other media and the cultural experiences that have shaped her life and work. Over the last few years, Whittle has emerged as one of the most striking new voices in contemporary British art, especially with her collaborative film installations focusing on battling anti-blackness. Born in 1980 in Bridgetown on the Caribbean island of Barbados, Whittle moved to Birmingham in the UK as a teenager before studying at the G...
Aug 10, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 3
Tino Sehgal talks to Ben Luke about his unique work, which transforms the space in which it is shown through the power of movement and sound. Sehgal, who is based in Berlin, moved to art from dance after studying choreography alongside economics. His latest show, at Blenheim Palace, commissioned by the Blenheim Art Foundation, features his work from the last 20 years staged amid the Baroque palace and its gardens. It features interpreters or participants who enact "constructed situations" rangin...
Aug 03, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 2
Oscar Murillo talks to Ben Luke about the defining cultural experiences and influences of his life. Oscar first shot to fame in the art world with paintings that attracted huge attention in 2013—canvases with loose, scratchy, expressive marks, patches of pure colour, and daily dust and grime from the studio, scrawled with words such as "burrito", "yuka" and "chorizo". But he has also consistently made works in sculpture, installation, performance and film. At the heart of his work is an engageme...
Jul 27, 2021•52 min•Season 5Ep. 1
Ellen Gallagher talks about her life and work through the art, literature, music and other cultural experiences that have profoundly affected her. She tells Ben Luke about the extraordinary opportunity she had to live with an original Keith Haring print while at Oberlin College, Ohio; her love of Diego Velázquez and Stanley Brouwn; the influence of the Afrofuturist mythology of the Detroit techno band Drexciya; how Herman Melville, in his novels and novellas, wrote more perceptively about race t...
Jun 29, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Ben Luke talks to Julian Opie about his life and work by exploring the artists that have inspired him, his literary and musical influences and the cultural experiences that have most affected him. He talks about the early influence of Egon Schiele, his passion for Japanese prints by Utamaro and Hiroshige, his fascination with reading about ancient cultures and early humans, and his connection with composer Max Richter and the band Blur, among much else. And he answers the ultimate questions: if ...
Jun 23, 2021•53 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Ben Luke talks to Cristina Iglesias about her life and work. She recalls how Disney's Fantasia made an impression on her as a child, how Velázquez's Spinners (Las Hilanderas) started her lifelong love of the collection of the Prado museum in Madrid, for which she created one of her best-known public projects. She discusses other major public commissions, including her underwater sculptures in the Baja California off Mexico and her latest project, Hondalea, in a lighthouse on Santa Clara island i...
Jun 16, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Ben Luke talks to the US-based artist about his influences and life-changing cultural experiences. They discuss his public sculpture in Margate, April Is the Cruellest Month, with its nods to TS Eliot and Siegfried Sassoon. They reflect on his fusing of his autobiography—and particularly the influence of his mother’s Iraqi Jewish family—with global geopolitics and the legacies of colonialism. They discuss his earliest influences and the contemporary artists, writers and musicians that most inspi...
Jun 09, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Ben Luke talks to the Seoul-born, London-based artist Do Ho Suh about his influences and life-changing cultural experiences. They discuss his recreations of his various homes in coloured fabric and how his early work in South Korea has been ignored by curators and critics. Do Ho reveals that, influenced by a painting of fish and shellfish in his family home, he wanted to be a marine biologist, and that he only switched to art when he realised his maths was not good enough. He reflects on the inf...
Apr 14, 2021•54 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Ben Luke talks to Doris Salcedo about her life and work through the artists she most admires, the writers she returns to and the music she listens to. She recalls her epiphany when confronted with the works of Francisco de Goya, and how his empathy with the victims of war and violence prompted her own aim to give voice to the voiceless in the Colombian civil war and beyond. She talks about the influence of Paul Celan's poetry, which she quotes directly in her Unland series. She describes how Jos...
Apr 07, 2021•53 min•Season 3Ep. 3
As he prepares for a two-part exhibition in Florence, the Tehran-born, Brooklyn-based artist discusses his life and work through the cultural epiphanies and influences that have shaped him. He talks about drawing in the basement of his family home as the Iran-Iraq war raged around him as a child and how visiting the D-Day landing beaches in Normandy prompted a turning point in his work. He talks about the auditory-visual synaesthesia that means he hears and feels the paintings as he creates them...
Mar 31, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 3Ep. 2
As her retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Ethiopian-born, New York-based artist Julie Mehretu talks in depth about her life and work. She discusses the rich language she uses in her paintings, drawing on geopolitical subject matter but pushing towards abstraction. She talks about the influence of contemporary artists like David Hammons, Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon, her collaboration with the British artist Tacita Dean, how Rembrandt made his mark on her as a child and...
Mar 24, 2021•52 min•Season 3Ep. 1
In the last of the present series, Ben Luke talks to Tala Madani, the Tehran-born, Los Angeles-based artist, about the influences and cultural experiences behind her remarkable paintings and animations. She talks about art's role in shaping her experience in the US after she had moved to Oregon from Tehran as a teenager, about the early influence of Francis Bacon, and about a range of artists she continues to think about today, from Giorgio de Chirico to Lee Lozano and Paul McCarthy. As always o...
Feb 03, 2021•55 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Ben Luke talks to Charles Gaines, one of the key figures in American conceptual art, about his influences and cultural experiences and how they have affected his life and work. Gaines discusses the impact of visiting the Metropolitan Museum's collection of African art during a period in which he "completely rethought who I was, not only as a person but as a Black person in America". He talks about the early influence of Magritte and Matisse. He discusses the impact of writers and activists like ...
Jan 27, 2021•50 min•Season 2Ep. 7
This week, Ben Luke interviews the Danish artist Tal R about his influences and cultural experiences. In this in-depth conversation, the painter and sculptor discusses his early love of art and frustration with art school, the unlikely ritual that keeps his art fresh, and why pursuing mystery is perilous for an artist. He talks about the writers and music that he returns to, and discusses painters including Georges Rouault, Marsden Hartley and Alfred Wallis. Plus, he answers our usual questions,...
Jan 20, 2021•54 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Ben Luke talks to Tracey Rose about how her influences and cultural experiences have affected her life and work. Among other things, she talks about her education as the only Black child in a catholic school in South Africa and her performances in which she explored gender and race, pushing her body to extremes. She talks about the seismic effect of seeing international contemporary art after the end of Apartheid, about how Duchamp is the most "African" artist in the Modernist canon, and how exp...
Jan 13, 2021•59 min•Season 2Ep. 5
Ben Luke talks to Rachel Whiteread about how her influences and cultural experiences have affected her life and work. Among other things, she talks about the influence of her parents on her work; the enduring power of Piero della Francesca; the seismic effect of seeing Bruce Nauman's art; how poetry informs her sculpture; and she recalls memorable trips to Egypt and the Soviet Union. Plus, she answers the questions we ask all our guests, including: if you could live with just one work of art, wh...
Dec 23, 2020•58 min•Season 2Ep. 4
Ben Luke talks to the US artist Roni Horn about her life and work, with reference to the art, music and literature that are her influences and touchstones. Among much else, they discuss Horn's enduring engagement with the poems of Emily Dickinson, and the sculptures and installations that she has made as a result; her unique friendship with Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the works it inspired; the jazz and R&B singers that she has listened to throughout her life; and her profound experiences in I...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr•Season 2Ep. 3
Ben Luke talks to the Los Angeles-based painter Christina Quarles about her life and work through her influences and cultural experiences. Quarles discusses her powerful figurative paintings. "I see them," she says, "as being portraits not of looking at a body, but portraits of being within your own body." She discusses the effect of living in Los Angeles and arriving there as a child at the point when the city was engulfed in riots prompted by police brutality; how her work might be as influenc...
Dec 09, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Ben Luke talks to the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson in depth about his influences and cultural experiences. Among much else, they discuss Kjartansson's love of 18th-century art and him being "horny in Rococo class" in school; his admiration for the painter Elizabeth Peyton; how reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray changed his life; and the collaborative ethos behind his video-installation masterpiece The Visitors (2012)—which emerged from "longing to do something with your frie...
Dec 02, 2020•57 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Ben Luke talks to Rashid Johnson about the cultural experiences that have had an impact on his life and work. They discuss his beginnings as a photographer, but how he quickly occupied a "post-medium space", working in everything from film to sculpture, installation and, as with the other artists in the first series, in painting. Rashid talks about his use of materials like black soap and shea butter, the role of books in his work, and the personal and political background to his recent body of ...
Aug 26, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Ben Luke talks to Chantal Joffe about the cultural experiences that have had an impact on her life and work. They discuss the shift in her work from early paintings based on pornography to recent depictions of herself and her daughter; they explore the writers and music that she returns to for inspiration, the museums she regularly visits and the daily rituals of her studio life. Above all, they talk about art in depth, and the inspiration of artists as diverse as Piero della Francesca, Edgar De...
Aug 19, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 3
Ben Luke talks to Jenny Saville about her cultural experiences and their effect on her work and life. We learn about how her uncle inspired her to explore the Old Masters and match their ambition, how having children hugely affected the way she works, the visit to an artist’s studio that changed her life, the epic poetry that drives her painting into new territories, the strange rituals in her daily practice. Ultimately, we explore in depth her passion for art and the compulsion to respond to th...
Aug 12, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 2
In the inaugural episode of The Art Newspaper's podcast series of conversations with artists, host Ben Luke talks to Michael Armitage about his life and work through his cultural experiences: the artists, living and long gone, who he most admires; the art he has pinned to his studio wall; the museum that holds endless inspiration; the writers he returns to; the music he plays as he paints in the studio; the rituals of his daily practice. We learn about the unique fusion of East African and Europ...
Aug 05, 2020•48 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Introducing A brush with... a podcast by The Art Newspaper. In each episode, the host Ben Luke has a conversation with a leading artist, exploring their life and work through their cultural experiences, asking the questions you've always wanted to: who are the artists, historical and contemporary, they most admire? Which are the museums they return to? What are the books, music and other media that most inspire them? And what is art for, anyway? Excerpts featured in the trailer are from A brush ...
Jul 31, 2020•3 min
