A brush with...

Pio Abad talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Abad explores objects and images that have personal resonance and political potency. His primary medium is installations comprising multiple materials, forms and methods, from fine pen drawings and textiles to photography and text...

Anne Imhof 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. Imhof, who was born in 1978 in Giessen in Germany, is primarily known for her epic durational performances involving diverse collectives of dancers, musicians and actors. Their movement, speech and song is built from often fragm...

Caragh Thuring 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. Thuring, who was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the UK since 1973 makes paintings that present fragments of images, patterns and abstraction in compositions that often upend the conventions of her medium, while re...

In this first episode of the new series, Lisa Yuskavage 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. Yuskavage, was born in Philadelphia in 1962 and lives today in New York, makes paintings that involve a cast of stylised and often eroticised, mostly female characters set...

Andrew Cranston 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. Cranston, who was born in 1969 in Hawick, Scotland, draws on experiences—moments seen, felt or remembered—which are filtered, embellished, complicated, and sometimes almost obliterated through the process of bei...

Sanya Kantarovsky talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Kantarovsky was born in Moscow in 1982 and emigrated to to Providence, Rhode Island, when he was ten years old. He lives and works in New York City today. His paintings present scenarios that are at once arresting and all...

Hurvin Anderson talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Anderson was born in Birmingham, UK, in 1965, the youngest of eight siblings, the rest of whom were born in Jamaica. His paintings are a poetic response to place, teeming with personal and cultural resonance. He transforms...

Lorna Simpson 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. Simpson was born in Brooklyn, New York, 1960. Her conceptual approach to photography, and image-making more widely, reflects a desire to subvert the conventional framing of different forms of identity. From her ea...

Danh Vo 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. Vo was born in 1975 in Bà Rja, Vietnam and raised in Denmark. He lives and works between Germany, where he has a studio in Güldenhof, 80km outside Berlin, and Mexico City. His art is often founded in personal experience...

Veronica Ryan 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. Ryan was born in 1956 in Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Montserrat and came to the UK as an infant. She now lives between London and New York. She explores personal, collective and historical memory through a range of scu...

Catherine Opie 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. Over more than three decades, Opie, who was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, and lives today in Los Angeles, has created photographic portraits, cityscapes and landscapes that have borne witness to social and poli...

Louis Fratino 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. Fratino was born in 1993 in Annapolis, Maryland, US, and lives in New York. His paintings reflect on memory and the intimate details of daily life to transmit a deeply felt response to his immediate circumstances...

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 co...

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 othe...

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 his...

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 s...

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 an...

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 peri...

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...

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 s...

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 ma...

Teresita Fernández 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. Fernández, born in 1968 in Miami, Florida, is, in the broadest sense, a landscape artist. But her work across three decades has been a rigorous consideration and poetic probing of the nature of landscape. Fun...

Jane and Louise Wilson talk to Ben Luke about their influences—from writers to musicians, film-makers and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work. Jane and Louise Wilson, born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, in 1967, have been collaborating as a duo since their student days in the late 1980s. Identical twins, they have used their connection as a mea...

Tai Shani 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. Shani makes sculpture and installations, paintings, performances and films, underpinned by writing that is experimental in approach and singular in its voice. Shani, who was was born in 1976 in London, where she lives...

Hew Locke 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. Locke was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, UK, to the artists Donald and Leila Locke. The family sailed from the UK to Guyana in 1966 and Hew was based there until 1980. He returned to the UK to study art in 1980 and now li...