sun 13/07/2025

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... ...
Too Much, Netflix - a romcom that's oversexed, and over...

A thirtysomething American woman with wavering self-confidence, a tendency to talk too much and a longing for married bliss with Mr...

Sir Brian Clarke (1953-2025) - a personal tribute

Brian Clarke died on 1 July 2025, after a long illness. He was one of the most original British artists of our time – wide-ranging, original...

Music Reissues Weekly: Beggars Arkive - Gary Numan's 19...

Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” hit the top of the UK single’s chart in the last week of June 1979. It stayed there for four weeks. Its...

Album: Wet Leg - moisturizer

War, pestilence, famine, death. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my fill of them all. So what better time to visit the genuinely sunny uplands...

Nye, National Theatre review - Michael Sheen's full-blo...

The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for...

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern review - glimpses of anothe...

It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of...

Album: Tami Neilson - Neon Cowgirl

Tami Neilson’s career is long and storied. The short version is that she began with a 1990s Canadian family band (opening for Kitty Wells, aged 10...