A brush with...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.