A brush with... – Details, episodes & analysis

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A brush with...

The Art Newspaper

Arts

Frequency: 1 episode/15d. Total Eps: 144

A brush with..., sponsored by Bloomberg Connects, is a podcast by The Art Newspaper that features in-depth conversations with leading international artists. Host Ben Luke asks 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? What do they get up to in the studio every day? And what is art for, anyway?

The podcast offers a fascinating insight into the inspirations, the preoccupations and the working lives of some of the most prominent artists today.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Apple Podcasts

🇨🇦 Canada - visualArts
20/08/2026
#9
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
20/08/2026
#4
🇬🇧 Great Britain - arts
20/08/2026
#82
🇩🇪 Germany - visualArts
20/08/2026
#22
🇺🇸 USA - visualArts
20/08/2026
#9
🇫🇷 France - visualArts
20/08/2026
#3
🇫🇷 France - arts
20/08/2026
#71
🇨🇦 Canada - visualArts
19/08/2026
#10
🇬🇧 Great Britain - visualArts
19/08/2026
#6
🇬🇧 Great Britain - arts
19/08/2026
#95

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https://app.bloombergconnects.org/ABrushWith
22 shares
http://corkstgalleries.com/
8 shares
https://artikabooks.com/?utm_source=podcast&amp
4 shares

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffDoMK12LO4
1 share
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQrSgQ8y80w
1 share
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9RzO7phej8T2Bj0YtpkSyA
1 share

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RSS feed quality

Good

Score global : 89%

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A brush with... Arthur Jafa

Season 23 · Episode 4

Tuesday, August 20, 2024 • Duration 01:13:39

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.

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A brush with... Eva Rothschild

Season 23 · Episode 3

Tuesday, August 13, 2024 • Duration 01:00:18

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.

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A brush with... Alex Katz

Season 21 · Episode 2

Tuesday, April 2, 2024 • Duration 47:04

Alex Katz 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. Katz, born in Brooklyn in 1927, is one of the most distinctive and influential painters of recent decades. Since he began making art in the 1940s, he has aimed to paint what he has called “the now”: to distil fleeting visual experiences into timeless art. It might be a spark of interaction between friends or family, the play of light across water, a field of grass or between the leaves of a tree, the movements of dancers, the electric illumination of an office building at night, or—more than anything else—stolen glances, everyday gestures and intimate exchanges with his wife Ada, who he has painted more than 1,000 times since they married in 1958. From the start, Katz has aimed to match what he calls the “muscularity” of the Abstract Expressionist artists that were dominant in New York when he emerged onto the art scene there in the 1950s, while never giving up on observed reality. He has said “the optical element is the most important thing to me”. He discusses the early influence of Paul Cezanne, the enduring power of his forebears, from Giotto to Rubens and Willem de Kooning, and his admiration for artists as diverse as Utamaro, Martha Diamond and Chantal Joffe. He reflects on the “emotional extension” of the poet Frank O’Hara and his interest in jazz maestros like Pres and Charlie Parker. Plus, he answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Alex Katz: Claire, Grass and Water, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy, 17 April-29 September; Alex Katz: Wedding Dresses, Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, US, until 2 June; Alex Katz: Collaborations with Poets, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio, 15 September-15 November.

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A brush with… Shahzia Sikander

Season 21 · Episode 1

Wednesday, March 27, 2024 • Duration 01:04:35

Shahzia Sikander 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. Sikander, born in 1969 in Lahore, Pakistan, trained in the tradition of Indo-Persian manuscript painting and has used its forms, techniques and language as a launchpad for a wide-ranging engagement with colonial and postcolonial histories, with feminism, gender and sexuality, and with cultural identity and narratives around race. Working in drawing, painting, animation, video, mosaic and most recently sculpture, she has created a body of work in which existing and invented images and forms are juxtaposed to vivid and poetic effect. Technically exquisite and conceptually profound, her works have an instant impact but reward slow looking with layered narratives, references and histories. She discusses her early discovery of Michelangelo in Lahore, explains how she has channelled the “soulfulness” Eva Hesse found in minimalism in her response to historic manuscript painting, reflects on the importance of her teenage experience of Mogadishu, Somalia, and speaks about the enormous importance of poetry to her work, including the US writer Adrienne Rich’s translations of the Indian poet Mirza Ghalib. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio, and answers our usual questions, including which artwork, if she could only have one, she would most like to live with.

Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Palazzo SoranzoVan Axel, Venice, Italy, 20 April-20 October; Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, US, 14 February-4 May 2025; Cleveland Museum of Art, 14 February-8 June 2025. Shahzia Sikander: Havah…to breathe, air, life, University of Houston, Texas, US, until 31 October; Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change, Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 28 April 2024.

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A brush with… Nalini Malani

Season 20 · Episode 4

Wednesday, February 21, 2024 • Duration 58:43

Nalini Malani 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. Malani was born in Karachi in 1946 and lives and works today in Mumbai. Her work in drawing and painting, performance, video and installation, responds to contemporary politics and human rights issues through the language of ancient myths, of poets, writers and thinkers, and of the history of art. She is increasingly celebrated for her installations that she calls “animation chambers”, fusing video and drawings, text and voice. They engulf the viewer in environments that contain endlessly shifting sequences of imagery and stirring soundtracks—a call to action in terms of both their political and cultural content. She discusses her early and enduring admiration of Indian Kalighat painting, how Louise Bourgeois’ reflections on memory are a consistent inspiration, why she has repeatedly returned to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and about the pivotal period she spent in Paris between 1970 and 1972, meeting many leading intellectuals and artists. Plus she gives insight into her life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including “what is art for?”

Nalini Malani: Can You Hear Me? and Ballad of a Woman, Concrete, Dubai, in collaboration with Volte Art Projects, 25 February-3 March; Nalini Malani: The Pain of Others 1966-1979, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS)/Jehangir Nicholson Art Gallery, Mumbai, India, 1 August-5 November; Ambienti 1956-2010: Environments by Women Artists II, MAXXI, Rome, 9 April-6 October; Nalini Malani: In Search of Vanished Blood, collection display, Tate Modern, London, 13 December 2024-September 2025.

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A brush with... Zineb Sedira

Season 20 · Episode 3

Wednesday, February 14, 2024 • Duration 01:03:54

Zineb Sedira 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. Sedira, born in Paris in 1963 to Algerian parents and based in London since 1986, uses film, photography, installation, sculpture and other media to reflect on memory, from the personal to the collective and historical. She explores representation, language and family, intimately informed by her French, Algerian and British identity. By mining her singular autobiography and its connection with colonial histories and their contemporary legacies, Sedira has created a body of work that is at once politically nuanced, emotionally complex and visually rich. She discusses her early interest in Mary Kelly, her enduring engagement with the art of JMW Turner, and her admiration for the Algerian painter Baya. She reflects on her fascination with the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 1969, the subject of a body of work. And she talks about her love of jazz and ska, the influence of postcolonial writers, among much else. Plus, she gives insight into her studio life and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: “what is art for?”

Zineb Sedira: Dreams Have No Titles, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 15 February-12 May; the film version of the work is on display at Tate Britain until September 2024; Dreams Have No Titles, Cultural Foundation, Abu Dhabi , UAE, 3 October-28 January 2025; Let’s go on singing!, Goodman Gallery, London, until 16 March; Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal, 19 June 2025-22 September 2025.

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A brush with... Stanley Whitney

Season 20 · Episode 2

Wednesday, February 7, 2024 • Duration 54:02

Stanley Whitney 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. Whitney, born in Philadelphia in 1946, makes abstract paintings that feature interlocking rectangles, squares and bands of paint whose intense colours hum with musical resonance and rhythm. Rigorously structured yet full of improvisation and unexpected incident, his paintings are both arresting and slow-burning: they grab you with their bold hues and hold you with their complex harmonies and dissonances, their sense of constant movement. He is particularly known for his square-format paintings of the past two decades but his career has been a lifelong search for a distinctive form of painting—one that, as he has said, is defiantly abstract yet contains “the complexity of the world”. He reflects on his encounters with an early mentor, Philip Guston; being painted by Barkley Hendricks, a fellow student at Yale; and his close friendship with David Hammons. He discusses his love of Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paolo Veronese and Henri Matisse, as well as the work of Gees Bend quilters. And explains how he connects this deep love of painting to musical greats including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Charlie Mingus. Plus he discusses in detail his life in the studio and answers our usual questions, including “what is art for?”

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, US, 9 February-27 May; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US, 14 November-16 March 2025; Institute of Contemporary Art /Boston, US, 17 April 2025–1 September 2025; Stanley Whitney: Dear Paris, Gagosian, Paris, until 28 February.

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A brush with... Wilhelm Sasnal

Season 20 · Episode 1

Wednesday, January 31, 2024 • Duration 46:29

Polish artist Wilhelm Sasnal 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. Sasnal, born in 1972 in Tarnów, Poland, has made one of the most significant contributions to painting in the 21st century. He works with photographic imagery, drawn from an array of sources including newspapers, film, music videos, album covers, graphic novels, historic art and, crucially, his own photographs, including those taken on his smartphone, of his family. He also makes films, both in collaboration with his wife Anka and on his own. The result is a body of work that engages profoundly with contemporary life and the saturation of images that accompanies it. He discusses his array of source images and the process of choosing and using them, and how he has balanced the public and private across his career. He talks about risk-taking and allowing the paint to dictate the path of a picture. He reflects on how music was the spur for his discovery of art, and how it continues to be central to his work today. He talks about artists as diverse as Degas, Seurat, Sigmar Polke and Wolfgang Tillmans. And he answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: “What is art for?”

Wilhelm Sasnal, Sadie Coles HQ, Kingly St, London, until 16 March; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 30 March-1 September; Wilhelm’s film The Assistant will be screened later in 2024.

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A brush with... Camille Henrot

Season 19 · Episode 4

Wednesday, December 13, 2023 • Duration 59:51

Camille Henrot 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. Henrot was born in 1978 in Paris and studied film at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in the French capital. She uses drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and film to reflect on a huge range of subject matter, from anthropology and the climate emergency, to biodiversity and motherhood, to art history, literature and the excesses of the digital experience. At the heart of her practice is a concern with different forms of language and knowledge and how they are structured and composed. Her work emerges from deep research and is full of intriguing contradictions, awash with fragmentation and disruption yet pregnant with humour and delight. Henrot grapples with the stuff around us and within us; her art explores distinctively how the empirical and the subjective, the outer world and her own private realm, intersect. She discusses her early and enduring passion for the art of Saul Steinberg and Louise Bourgeois, a profound friendship with the architect and thinker Yona Friedman, finding a kindred experience in the work of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector, her use of musical playlists in the studio, and her fascination with the sadistic violence of Disney cartoons. Plus, she gives insight into her life in the studio and has a profound answer to our ultimate question: “what is art for?”

Camille Henrot’s books Milkyways and Mother Tongue are published by Hatje Cantz and priced £22 and £48.

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A brush with... Urs Fischer

Season 19 · Episode 3

Wednesday, December 6, 2023 • Duration 49:07

Urs Fischer 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 1973 in Zurich, Switzerland, Fischer makes work across multiple disciplines and media that defies categorisation. Whether he is working in photography, painting, drawing, sculpture or installation, he often upends the given characteristics of his medium. His art is in a state of constant transformation, being pushed and pulled in unexpected directions, often with a pronounced absurdity and always with a distinctive impact. He reflects on the experience of curating an exhibition of John Chamberlain’s work for Aspen Art Museum and how, if at all, it has affected his own practice. He discusses his early interest in Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel, why he recreated Giambologna’s Abduction of the Sabine Women (1579-83) in the form of a candle, and Rodin’s The Kiss (1882) from plasticine. He talks about Headz, the jazz and drawing workshop-cum-venue he created with Spencer Sweeney, and his experience of watching several movies in a single day. And he answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

John Chamberlain: The Tighter They’re Wound, The Harder They Unravel, curated by Urs Fischer, is at the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, US, 15 December-7 April 2024.

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A brush with... – Details, episodes & analysis

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A brush with... – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other99+

Spotify20

Youtube6

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other99+

Spotify20

Youtube6

Apple Podcasts

Spotify