Artists Pick Artists

In the 17th and final conversation of a series on interviews with artists, Stewart Home discusses making art about art and practicing headstands to attain altered states of consciousness.

In his works, which are all performative to varying degrees, Mentrup tests our psychological limits.

Kerstin Cmelka is a filmmaker, video and performance artist, photographer, and writer in Berlin. Her investment in different mediums — contemporary as this may appear — is rooted in etymological thought, tracing back the literal meanings of “art” and “artists.”

Matt Saunders creates unique photographs that are fabricated from the marks of his own paintings.

Mathew Hale has responded to the seven questions by making entirely new works as answers.

Clive Hodgson started as an abstract painter, switched to figuration, then turned back to abstraction after his distaste for narrative and object-based painting grew; he found that it was no longer tenable.

“I decided to make abstraction paintings because they were the hardest, and, to me, most interesting thing to do.”

The elusive Des Lawrence picked for this series an artist he confessed was “hard to track.” But John Wilkins, who goes by WIL, is an “overlooked genius,” he said.

I crossed my fingers and wrote as persuasively as I could when asking Des Lawrence for an interview. The artist Tom Chamberlain, who picked him, warned me, “there’s a possibility he might refuse; it’s hard, but worth it, getting him to talk about his work.” Indeed, there is nothing on the internet written or said by him. I know of nothing in print.

All paintings have their own speed — in execution and in what it takes to read them. Tom Chamberlain makes work that is durational in both its formation (or erasure) and in the time required to witness its self-disclosure.

Serban Savu lives in Cluj, Romania and makes his paintings in a former paintbrush factory. His subjects are his surroundings, his people and places, sometimes painted directly or other times invented.