A brush with...

Olafur Eliasson 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. Eliasson was born in 1967 in Copenhagen and grew up between Denmark and Iceland, where his parents were from. His installations, sculptures, photographs and paintings, among other projects, reflect a profound concern with human presence in nature and how we perceive and interact with the world around us. His works can be deceptively simple or enormously complex, but often share a rigorous and reductive geometry, which may conversely produce expansive and multifarious perceptual, sensory and embodied effects. Eliasson has stated that “the spectator is the central issue”, a long-established aspect of conceptual and environmental practices, but for him it is important that the viewer not only completes the work, but is also transformed by it. This subjective and individual revelation is, he hopes, allied to a sense of collective experience, what he calls a “we-ness”, that often alerts his audience to wider cultural and social issues including the climate catastrophe. Indeed, environment, in multiple senses, is the fundamental element of his work.He discusses his deep concern about the climate catastrophe and the importance of action. He reflects on his concept of “seeing yourself sensing” and its shifting nature in relation to different works across his career, and how he often includes the word “your” in his titles as a gesture of trust towards his audience. He discusses the wealth of writers and thinkers that inform his work on a daily basis, from Donna Haraway to Alva Noë. He recalls the epiphany of experiencing a work by James Turrell and his fascination with early Renaissance conceptions of space. He reflects on his early fascination with breakdance and his current enjoyment of music by Hilda Gunnarsdóttir and Rosalía. Plus, he gives insight into life in his vast studio in Berlin, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?Olafur Eliasson: Presence, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, until 12 July 2026; Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey, Museum MACAN, Jakarta, Indonesia, 12 April 2026, Your view matter by Olafur Eliasson, Padimai Art & Tech Studio, Tanjong Pagar Distripark, Singapore, 31 March 2026; and Olafur’s first permanent public work in the UK, Your planetary assembly, 2025, is on view at Oxford North, Oxford, UK now.

Luc Tuymans 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. Tuymans, who was born in 1958 in Mortsel, Belgium, and lives and works in Antwerp, has transformed the territory of painting in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Using photographs and images from film and other media, he tackles a breadth of subjects and motifs, including contemporary politics, cataclysmic historical events, art history, and apparently banal everyday objects and environments, with paintings that are redolent with atmosphere and poetic power. Tuymans’s process of finding the images and deciding how to transform them is slow and precise, and worked through in various stages before it reaches the canvas, where he makes the final piece in oil on a single day. In the resulting pictures, the motif can be veiled or oblique, and sometimes close to abstract, and he has used the term “authentic forgeries” to describe them. In this way, they articulate the elusiveness of representation through painting—a quality Tuymans has described as the medium’s “belatedness”—as well as the subjective nature of experience and memory, both personal and collective. He discusses the early impact of Piet Mondrian and Léon Spilliaert, his ongoing admiration for Francisco de Goya, and his response to Théodore Gericault and Mark Rothko in recent series of paintings. He reflects on the importance of literature, including the writings of Thomas Pynchon, and film, especially the painterly approach of David Lynch. He gives insight into his studio life and his singular approach to image-making, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for? Luc Tuymans: The Fruit Basket, David Zwirner New York, until 19 December; David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 24 February-4 April 2026; Luc Tuymans, Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy, until 22 February 2026. 

Kader Attia 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. Attia was born in 1970 in Dugny, France, and lives in Berlin and Paris. He grew up between the French capital and Bab el Oued, a suburb of Algiers in Algeria, and his Algerian-French identity and the culture and history of Europe and North Africa—the global north and south—have profoundly informed his subject matter and materials. His work across three decades in photography, collage, sculpture, installation and sound, is concerned with a central concept: repair. By association, the notion of repair is inevitably connected with violence and injury. Within this overarching theme, he explores political and social issues in the present and the complex legacies of colonialism. While directly addressing particular historical and current moments, his work is rich in metaphor, and he considers this poetic aspect crucial to art’s ability to effect social change. Attia regards his output as the evidence of an ongoing process of research, but despite its fundamentally philosophical and textual genesis, it is often dramatic visually and experientially.He reflects on what he calls the “menemonic traces” and ghosts present through his work, explains why he feels the gaze is a bodily phenomenon beyond the ocular, and discusses the importance of his trips while a young person in Congo and Mexico. He talks about his early interest in Michelangelo’s drawings, his engagement with writers from the psychoanalyst Karima Lazali to the poets Édouard Glissant and Aimé Césaire, and the cathartic power of music. Plus he gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?Kader Attia: Shattering and Gathering our Traces, Lehmann Maupin, New York, until 20 December; Kader Attia. The Lost Paradise, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain, until 18 January 2026; Kader Attia: A Descent into Paradise, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, until 4 January 2026.Bienal de Sao Paulo: Not All Travellers Walk Roads—Of Humanity as Practice, until 11 January 2026; The World Tree: 24th Paiz Art Biennial, Guatemala City and Antigua Guatemala, until 15 February 2026.

Mary Kelly 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.Kelly was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, US, in 1941 and lives today in Los Angeles. She has played a fundamental role in the history and ongoing development of conceptual and feminist art, with works that have explored sexuality and women’s experience, wider issues of identity, the spectacle and trauma of war, and the nature of memory in relation to history and geopolitics. Informed by a range of thought, including critical theory, psychoanalysis and literature, her work takes diverse physical forms, but often manifests in multimedia installations, involving a rich materiality that includes text and documents, photography and printmaking, sculpture, sound and film. She reflects on her groundbreaking projects like Post-Partum Document (1973-77) and Interim (1984-89), and the way that her use of autobiography has shifted in her work over time. She discusses the dramatic shift in her life following her move to Beirut in the 1960s and the events of May 1968. She recalls the moment she encountered Franz Kline’s work aged 15 and how it confirmed a lifelong pursuit of non-figurative work. She reflects on her role within Conceptualism and her esteem for her peers in that movement. She discusses the importance of writers as diverse as Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, William Carlos Williams and Jacques Lacan. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including a moving answer to the ultimate question: what is art for?Mary Kelly: We don’t want to set the world on fire, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, until 17 January 2026

Peter Doig 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. Doig, who was born in Edinburgh in 1959 but grew up in Trinidad and Canada, has created a relentlessly inventive and evolving body of paintings over the past 40 years. Informed by memory, by Doig’s own photographs and found images, by an intimate knowledge and interpretation of art history, by a profound response to place and architecture, and by images and moods evoking diverse cultural forms beyond visual art, his works possess a poetic and sonorous sense of feeling and atmosphere. Often realised over many years, each painting is unique rather than part of a series, even if it shares recurring iconography with other pieces. Fundamentally concerned with figuration, Doig draws on a vast range of painterly approaches from resonant stains to thick impasto, stretching his medium to its full expressive potential and into the realms of abstraction. He has said that he wants painting to be a world unto itself and perhaps no other artist of the past few decades has created such a distinctive language for achieving that aim. Indeed, so widespread is his influence that one might describe a painterly strand in recent art around the globe as Doigian. Across his career, Peter’s work has been informed by a passionate engagement with music. He has said: “Music, being an invisible art form, is open to interpretation within the mind’s eye, and reflections from the mind’s eye are often what I’m attempting to depict in my work.” He achieves a particular tonality and ambience that evoke his aspiration to the condition of that artform, a factor emphasised in House of Music, the exhibition at the Serpentine South until 8 February 2026. He discusses several of the paintings in that show in depth, and reflects on his changing response to Trinidad, where he was based between 2002 and 2019, and his references in the paintings to the “residues of imperialism”. Among much else, he discusses the early influence of Edward Burra, his enduring fascination with Henri Matisse, his response to early graffiti art in New York, and his current fascination with Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John the Baptist (1608). He talks about his friendship and collaboration with the poet Derek Walcott and the importance to his work of STUDIOFILMCLUB, the repertory cinema he founded in his Port of Spain studio with Che Lovelace. Plus, he gives insight into his life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: “what is art for?”Peter Doig: House of Music, Serpentine South, London, until 8 February 2026. There are a number of Sound Service events on Sundays through the length of the exhibition, as well as other evening sessions. Visit serpentinegalleries.org to find out more.

Christopher Wool 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 their lives and work. Wool, who was born in Chicago in 1955, and lives between New York and Marfa, Texas, today, is a sophisticated and dextrous explorer of the act of making paintings and other forms of art. He emerged in a period in which painting’s validity was being questioned amid the supremacy of conceptual and photographic practices in the avant-garde scene of New York in the late 1970s. And he has made light of that doubt in a cerebral practice in which he probes paint’s capacity to reflect diverse material properties, processes and effects, its openness to chance events and slippages, and its ability to contain or convey meaning through words and image. Working in often overlapping series embodied by particular methods or tools, propositions and actions, his practice has been one of relentless curiosity, where his own output is consistently reevaluated and recast through the literal repurposing of existing imagery as the foundation of new works. Though best known for his paintings, Christopher has made photographs from the start of his career, and since the mid-2010s has developed a fertile seam of sculpture. His work across all these media is similarly agile, with the different strands in a seemingly endless evolving conversation on pictorial, material and spatial concerns. He discusses the seismic effect of experiencing the Art Ensemble of Chicago and an installation by Dan Flavin as a young person, seeing Jean-Michel Basquiat’s first New York solo show with Dieter Roth, how Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye influenced one of his untitled text paintings, and eventually the title of his recent acclaimed New York and Marfa show, See Stop Run, and how jazz has been a consistent source of inspiration. He gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate, “What is art for?”Christopher Wool, Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London, until 19 December; See Stop Run West Texas, Brite Building, Marfa, Texas, until at least May 2027.

Suzanne Jackson 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. Jackson, who was born in 1944 in St. Louis, Missouri, but grew up in San Francisco and Fairbanks, Alaska, has worked across drawing and painting, poetry, dance and theatre, to explore a strong and often spiritual connection between people and the natural world. With a fluid and poetic painting style, Suzanne has responded to the many different natural and social environments in which she has lived in the US, from San Francisco and Los Angeles, to Fairbanks, Alaska and Savannah, Georgia, to forge a distinctive take on the world and the communities that inhabit it. She taps into a broad range of artistic languages, including Native American and African American traditions, and exhibits a deep sensitivity to history and ecology while reflecting profoundly on her personal lived experience. She has also been a gallery owner and public art administrator, with a keen sense of the role art can play in uniting and inspiring communities. Today, she makes installations formed by painted and sculptural forms that hang in the exhibition space, directly addressing subjects including the climate catastrophe. She discusses the important moment where she first encountered the work of Barbara Chase Riboud, a profound encounter with Elizabeth Catlett and her admiration for Torkwase Dyson. She talks of her passion for the cartoons Archy and Mehitabel and Krazy Kat, and her love of Mississippi Delta Blues and jazz or as she calls it, African American classical music. Plus she gives insight into her life in the studio and answer our usual questions, including the ultimate, “what is art for?”Suzanne Jackson: What is Love, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, until 1 March 2026; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 14 May-23 August 2026; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 26 September 2026-7 February 2027

Wolfgang Tillmans 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. Tillmans, born in Remscheid, Germany, in 1968, has changed the history of photography. He has taken established genres of art and the photographic medium, from portraiture to still life, landscape, political subjects and abstraction, and relentlessly experimented with the framing, printing and presentation of his images and photographic objects. His subjects include everything from urgent imagery of social events like protests or club nights, formal portraits and experimental cameraless photography. From the very start of his now close to four-decade career, Tillmans has shown his works in installations that respond specifically to the intricacies of the spaces in which they are displayed, with the photographs presented in formats that range from postcard size to vast and enveloping prints. The images might abut the corner of a room, be hung high up the walls or unorthodoxly low, or adjacent to bureaucratic elements like fire exit signs. They might be organised in flurries or constellations, or in spare linear arrangements or grids. Through this process, Wolfgang consistently reenergises his archive, juxtaposing images taken years and sometimes decades apart. While photography has remained his primary medium, Wolfgang has steadily expanded his media, with video installation, text and sound and music gaining increasing prominence in his exhibitions. He discusses the early impact on him of seeing the work of Kurt Schwitters, his current interest in the paintings of Francisco de Zurbarán, his long association with the contemporary German artist Isa Genzken, a profound experience at a Laurie Anderson concert in 1986 and the influence of the Indian writer and philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti. Plus he gives insight into his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?Wolfgang Tillmans: Build From Here, Maureen Paley, London, 3 October–20 December; Ausstellung in Remscheid, Haus Cleff, Remscheid, until 4 January 2026; 36th Bienal São Paulo: Not every traveler walks the roads – On humanity as a practice, until 11 January 2026; Fictions of Display, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, until 4 January 2026; Könnt ihr noch? – Kunst und Demokratie, Königsklasse, Schloss Herrenchiemsee, Munich, until 12 October 2025; On View: Begegnungen mit dem Fotografischen, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, until 12 October 2025

Jeffrey Gibson talks to Ben Luke, welcome to A brush with… 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.Gibson—born in 1972 in Colorado Springs, in the US, and based today in Germantown, New York—has created a visual language which fuses text, high colour and rich pattern, and a diverse materiality to evoke joy and exuberance as well as critique and resistance. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Jeffrey brings together Indigenous languages and histories, queer aesthetics, an abiding concern with broader ancient, historic, Modern and contemporary visual culture, and a profound engagement with popular music and literature. His works range from painting, in which he trained, to myriad sculptural forms, performances and installations and video. With this interdisciplinary practice, he deliberately confronts orthodoxies in the art world and art history, questioning biases regarding taste, value and legitimacy, confronting and subverting stereotypes of Indigenous people and culture, and proposing a radical interaction with the objects and spaces he creates. He reflects on his work’s overarching collage aesthetic, the deliberate confrontation in his work with decorative and craft traditions, and the role of colour in his work generally and in his new works for an exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in Paris. He discusses the early impact of Henri Matisse, his love of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s textile sculptures, the importance to him of Frank Bowling and David Hammons. He talks about his connection with the poet Layli Long Soldier, whose poem inspired the title for his US pavilion presentation at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and recalls a remarkable and formative encounter with the writer and critic Hélène Cixous. He also discusses the experience of encountering the music of Goldie and drum and bass in London in the 1990s and how it is reflected in his work today. Plus, he gives insight into his studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate, what is art for?Jeffrey Gibson: THIS IS DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE, Hauser & Wirth, Paris, 20 October-20 December; The Genesis Facade Commission, Jeffrey Gibson: The Animal That Therefore I Am, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,12 September–May 2026; Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, The Broad, Los Angeles, until 28 September; Jeffrey Gibson: POWER FULL BECAUSE WE’RE DIFFERENT, MASS MoCA, North Adams, US, until September 2026; Jeffrey Gibson: boshullichi / inlʋchi / we will continue to change, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, until December 2026; An Indigenous Present, co-curated by Jeffrey Gibson, ICA Boston, 9 October-8 March 2026; Frist Art Museum, Nashville, 26 June-27 September 2026, Frye Art Museum, Seattle, 7 November 2026-14 February 2027.