A brush with...

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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