sun 07/09/2025

Visual Arts Interviews

10 Questions for Artist Michael Landy

Fisun Güner

Much of Michael Landy’s work concerns destruction or decay. The British artist, who recently turned 50 and is part of the YBA generation, came to prominence in 2001 with the Artangel commission Break Down, which saw all his worldly possessions destroyed in an industrial shredder. His next project saw him scale right down, surprising everyone with an exhibition of beautifully executed drawings of weeds.

Read more...

Interview: Artist Richard Wentworth

Mark Hudson

Richard Wentworth is the eminence not-so-grise of British contemporary art.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Director Ken Russell, 1927-2011

Jasper Rees

In 2006 the thatched house in Lymington on the Hampshire coast which had been the home of Ken Russell (b 1927) for 30 years burned down. All of the director’s original film scripts, including Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, were destroyed. So was the bulk of the music collection which inspired him to make his groundbreaking films about composers in the 1960s.

Read more...

Q&A/Gallery: Photographer Rich Hardcastle

ASH Smyth

From Edinburgh to London and back, via Tatooine and Port Talbot, Rich Hardcastle has photographed playwrights and magicians, burlesque dancers and rugby captains, and regularly adorned the covers of The Big Issue, FHM and The Sunday Times Culture section.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist/Dramatist John Byrne

graeme Thomson

"I’m very hard to categorise,” says John Byrne (b 1940), tugging at his magnificent moustache. A restless, defiant, shape-shifting polymath who was an exponent of multimedia long before computers ruled the world, Byrne's singular career is perhaps doomed to gentle underappreciation simply because he can do so much so well. “If you’re hard to categorise they don’t like that." He peers into his coffee as though looking for something. "Whoever 'they' are.”

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Peter Blake

Hilary Whitney

Peter Blake (b 1932) seems to have gone seamlessly from a groovy Sixties mover and shaker – he would probably dispute that but, after all, he did hang out with The Beatles – to National Treasure. His new one-man exhibition, Homage 10 x 5 – Blake’s Artists, is a tribute to 10 of the artists who have excited and interested him over the past 50 years. “These are my nod of appreciation,” he says. “A way of...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Photographer Mick Rock

Hilary Whitney

Mick Rock (b 1948) captured some of rock's most provocative and memorable images: David Bowie at the height of his Ziggy Stardust androgyny; Debbie Harry looking every inch the Marilyn Monroe of punk; Lou Reed sweating beneath his Kabuki make-up - indeed, The Faces of Rock'n'Roll, as a new book surveying four decades of his photographs is titled.

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Mark Wallinger

Fisun Güner Mark Wallinger is fascinated by the idea of 'mirroring' and has recently ventured into unconventional self-portraiture

For his new show at Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger will be unveiling a first: a life-sized, three-dimensional "self-portrait". But it won't be a straightforward representation of the 50-year-old conceptual artist. It will, instead, be a representation of himself as the letter "I" in Times New Roman. His Vauxhall studio, in South London, is filled with pictures of "self-portraits" of the artist as a series of letters. It is also filled with the...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Artist Maggi Hambling

Hilary Whitney Maggi Hambling: 'You’ve got to make your work your best friend'

Next week sees the opening of an exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art of new work by Maggi Hambling, one of the most innovative and prolific - not to mention flamboyant - artists working in Britain today, which neatly coincides with a show of sea paintings at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. You can see a selection in theartsdesk's gallery. Born in 1945,...

Read more...

theartsdesk Q&A: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips

Fisun Güner

Born in 1954, Adam Phillips is a leading psychoanalyst, literary critic and author. For 17 years he worked as a child psychotherapist in the NHS before moving into private practice to work with adults. As well as being a self-confessed "sceptical" psychoanalyst, he is also known as something of "the literati's analyst of choice". His many, often playfully titled books have included The Art of Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (1993);...

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Ganavya, Barbican review - low-key spirituality

At the start or her show, the white-robed singer Ganavya does something unusual: while other performers usually warm their audience up before...

Music Reissues Weekly: Chiswick Records 1975-1982 - Seven Ye...

Chiswick Records 1975-1982 - Seven Years at 45 RPM is a triple album marking the 50th anniversary of the first release...

I Fought the Law, ITVX review - how an 800-year-old law was...

ITV continues its passion for docudramas about injustice, which you can’t...

theartsdesk at the Lahti Sibelius Festival - early epics by...

It’s weird, if wonderful, that vibrant young composers at the end of the 19th century should have featured death so prominently in their hero-...

Deaf Republic, Royal Court review - beautiful images, shame...

The Ukraine war is not the only place of horror in the world, but it does present a challenge to theatre makers who want to respond to events that...

Album: Josh Ritter - I Believe in You, My Honeydew

Americana rocker Josh Ritter can write a beautiful song....

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, Underbelly Boulevard Soho revie...

Laura Benanti has been enchanting Broadway audiences for several decades now, and London has this week been let in on the secret that recently...

Waley-Cohen, Manchester Camerata, Pether, Whitworth Art Gall...

Manchester Camerata is enhancing its reputation for pioneering with three performances featuring Nick Martin’s new Violin Concerto, which it has...