Interviews
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Berlinde de Bruyckere – interview: ‘My themes are not easy. You can’t look to my work to become happy’
The Belgian artist talks about the issues, artists and musicians that inspire her, the evolution of key motifs and techniques, the influence of her childhood experiences, and the joy of making her first public sculpture
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Natalia Millman – interview: ‘I want to talk about grief in an approachable way’
Inviting others to write a letter about their grief, and responding to each with a drawing, was the starting point for Natalia Millman to process her own loss
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Ernest Edmonds – interview: ‘The technology didn’t make it easy at the time, but it was clearly right for the future’
On the occasion of Networked, his show at Gazelli Art House, London, the pioneering computer artist talks about his practice over the past 60 years and his latest work, Quantum Tango – and offers advice to artists wanting to follow…
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Mika Rottenberg – interview: ‘I’m not an angel or a political activist. I want to be authentic’
The multidisciplinary artist talks about her first solo exhibition in Spain, at Hauser & Wirth Menorca, and discusses the importance of materials, how her works develop in dialogue with her thoughts and visions, and why she no longer blurs fact…
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Emma Talbot – interview: ‘I imagine the experience of life as an epic story – the one we all have’
Large installations, paintings on silk, fabric sculptures and drawings convey the connection between the specific and the universal and between life and death. Talbot tells us how myth, tragedy and politics colour her magical world
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Jeremy Deller – interview: ‘I’m not looking for the next thing. I’m just following my nose and seeing where it takes me’
How did he go from asking a brass band to play acid house to filming former miners re-enacting a seminal moment from the 1984 miners’ strike, to his current assignment: staging a nationwide feast of art, music, processions and performances…
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William Mackrell – interview: ‘I have an interest in dissecting the myth of Sisyphus – the persistence in the seemingly impossible’
His work has included lighting 1,000 candles and getting two horses to pull a car. Now, he is using his dismantled childhood bed in one show and dancing in overalls laden with coins in another. He explains his interest in…
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Marina Tabassum – interview: ‘Architecture is my life and my lifestyle, everything together’
The award-winning Bangladeshi architect behind this year’s Serpentine Pavilion on why she has shunned ‘flashy buildings with instant appeal’ and instead built a mosque and housing for refugees
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Kiki Smith – interview: ‘Artists are always trying to reveal themselves and remain hidden at the same time’
Known for her tapestries, body parts and folkloric motifs, Kiki Smith talks about meaning, process, and why it’s important that a work should have enough in it to take care of itself
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Jonathan Baldock – interview: ‘Weird is a word that’s often used to describe me. I like the use of that word, I’m reclaiming it and giving it power’
As a Noah’s ark of his non-binary stuffed toys goes on show at Jupiter Artland, the artist talks about growing up gay in the 1980s, being working-class in the elite art world, and why experiencing art in person, in galleries…
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Christopher Le Brun & Charlotte Verity – interview: ‘There is such a thing as too much dialogue’
To coincide with a rare joint exhibition now on view at The Gallery at Windsor in Florida, the artists consider the limitless possibilities of paint, their resistance to genre boundaries and the importance of keeping a harmonious distance between one…
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Lina Lapelytė – interview: ‘Between this group of performers, what we share is the virtuosity of listening’
Perhaps best known for her eco-opera Sun & Sea (Marina), Lapelytė discusses her approach to improvisation and collaboration, the joy of interacting with architecture and the virtuosity of listening and her new installation at The Cosmic House, London
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Louisa Gagliardi – interview: ‘Something really important in my work is how disconnected we feel in this hyperconnected digital world’
At the opening of her show at MASI Lugano, Gagliardi says she draws from Renaissance art and surrealism, film and TV as much as social media, to create digitally manipulated images and printed portraits and landscapes that express the isolation…
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Maryam Tafakory – interview: ‘We weren’t just learning to draw – we were tasting pleasures we weren’t allowed’
The film-maker collages found footage with the cinema of post-revolutionary Iran to explore censorship and prohibition. She discusses her life growing up in Iran, her parents’ refusal to let her attend art school, and what winning the 2024 Film London…
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Stephen Dean – interview: ‘A ladder fitted perfectly into a place that combined the terrestrial with the celestial world’
Dean discusses Crescendo, his installation of a 15-metre ladder decorated with his signature coloured dichroic stained glass, in the Saint-Denis Cathedral Basilica in Paris
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Anna Perach – interview: ‘I am always searching for that magic ingredient’
The artist talks about why she is more like Sergei Diaghilev than Taylor Swift, how she explains the incest and murder in Greek mythology to her son, and what led to her interest in tufted fabric
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Gabriella Boyd – interview: ‘I work through intuitive and formal problems until I get to a believable emotional space’
The artist shares the experiences and educational journeys through which her layered and intimate paintings have evolved, revealing interior and exterior worlds in a richly emotive palette
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Liorah Tchiprout – interview: ‘Painting is terrifying!’
As her second solo show arrives in London, the printmaker and painter discusses her unconventional path to artistic success, the joys of Yiddish literature and her ‘pseudo-pantheon’ of homemade dolls
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Selva Aparicio – interview: ‘I have worked a lot with mourning. It is my whole life’
Aparicio has had a packed year, with her first major solo show in Chicago and two works commissioned in Belgium. The second, unveiled in Ypres this month, reflects the fragility and preciousness of life – and not only for those…
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Flora Yukhnovich – interview: ‘I’m always looking at history through a kaleidoscope of contemporary references’
Where better to view the work of contemporary rococo-inspired painter Flora Yukhnovich than at the Wallace Collection, where they hang proud among the canvases and decorative items that have long inspired her? She tells us about her work and her…
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Goshka Macuga – interview: ‘I wanted to invite viewers to consider the thin veil that separates past horrors from current realities’
Macuga, whose exhibition Born from Stone is now on view at the London Mithraeum, discusses the potent allure of caves for the human psyche, a complicated relationship with her native Poland and the inexorable reiteration of violence throughout history
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Lucía Pizzani – interview: ‘Come on, look at me, I’m here. We both are. We are beings and we are alive’
The London-based Venezuelan artist talks about her commission at Harewood House, her exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects and her inclusion in the curated ceramics section Smoke at Frieze London 2024
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Hetain Patel – interview: ‘Getting to that essence of creation, which is self-expression: that is why this project exists’
Alongside the artist’s own work, which includes a carpet-covered Ford Escort, is a cornucopia of submissions from artists, crafters, collectors and hobbyists, including elaborate cosplay costumes, football shirts, kites and even a Lego underground railway. Here, Patel takes us behind…
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Mella Shaw – interview: ‘All art is a form of activism. I use my practice to engage people with the emotion of environmental issues’
The artist talks about her award-winning work Sounding Line, which focuses on the overuse of marine sonar and its devastating effect on whales, and what she hopes it will achieve
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