Veronica Ryan 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.

Ryan was born in 1956 in Plymouth on the Caribbean island of Montserrat and came to the UK as an infant. She now lives between London and New York. She explores personal, collective and historical memory through a range of sculptural materials and processes. Her installations and individual sculptures combine a wealth of things and techniques, often all at once, from found objects to time-honoured sculptural materials like bronze and marble; and from carving to casting and crocheting. Colour plays a vital role in her work, in the varied hues of textiles or plaster. And she creates forms as diverse as seeds and fruits, mats and nets, pillows and blankets and architectural structures. Through arresting and often multilayered arrangements, she evokes the minutiae of everyday experience (often with a profoundly personal meaning), makes reference to resonant historical events and their legacies, and addresses major human themes and rites of passage. She reflects on the meanings embedded in her materials, her relationship with psychoanalysis and unconscious processes, and her distinctive approach to displaying her work. She discusses the early influence of her mother’s textiles, her visits to the British Museum and her epiphanic encounter with the work of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. She reflects on the importance of the poetry of Maya Angelou and chamber music and reggae, and she answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1 April – 14 June 2026

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Catherine Opie 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. Over more than three decades, Opie, who was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, and lives today in Los Angeles, has created photographic portraits, cityscapes and landscapes that have borne witness to social and political conditions and tensions—particularly in her native United States—while also reflecting a deeply personal response to people and community. Fundamental to her work is an exploration, as a queer woman and as a documentarian photographer, of the nuanced, multifarious nature of identity, most prominently in LGBTQ+ communities, but also far beyond them. She has committed from her earliest mature images to the idea that, as she has phrased it, “Without representation, there is no visibility”—a belief that remains more vital than ever in the US and across the world in the 2020s. And that visibility is manifest not just in the portraiture for which she is best known, but also in the central place that architecture and interiors play in her work. She repeatedly calls our attention to the juxtaposition of the built environment and the construction of bodies and identities. So she documents her surroundings in the fullest sense: she depicts the people she loves, knows and meets; the spaces they occupy; and the broader physical and social environment around them. Ultimately, she hopes, through encountering her art, viewers will gain a better understanding of humanity in all its complexity. She reflects on her early discovery and desire to make pictures, aged nine, and the key figures that helped her choose to become an artist. She talks about the kinship between poetry and art and the fundamental importance, whatever her subject, of human connection. She reflects on artists as diverse as Holbein and Leonardo and Gerhard Richter and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, on the influence of writers including Joan Didion and Octavia Butler, and on her admiration for Chloe Zhao and Chris Marker. Plus, she gives insights into her life in the studio (and darkroom) and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen, National Portrait Gallery, London, 5 March-31 May 2026; Catherine Opie: The Pause that Dreams Against Erasure, The Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany, 19 July 2026.

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Louis Fratino 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. Fratino was born in 1993 in Annapolis, Maryland, US, and lives in New York. His paintings reflect on memory and the intimate details of daily life to transmit a deeply felt response to his immediate circumstances and the world beyond. His vision is channelled through an abiding passion for art history, and particularly Modernist painters in Europe and the US. Louis’s subjects are the people and places around him, beginning with himself and extending to family, friends, partners and lovers, who he pictures in interior spaces from kitchens to bathrooms and bedrooms, as well as in the city and in nature. Crucial to his art is an exploration of queer life, from touching scenes of companionship to images of sex and desire more broadly. Louis’s painting possesses an everyday poetry yet dwells on the big questions of life. It is a singular and deeply personal practice as well as a major contribution to the expression of queer identity and sexuality in a painterly field that has until recent decades been dominated by heteronormative perspectives. If there is a philosophy in his painting, he says, it is “about living very intensely” and being “very open to experiences”. He reflects on the balance between reality and fantasy in his painting, on how memory is the principal subject of his work, and how he enjoys the “feeling of play in painting”. He discusses artists from Henri Matisse, with whom he has a show at the Baltimore Museum of Art between March and September, to Bhupen Khakhar and Winifred Nicholson, the photographer George Platt Lynes, the poet Sandro Penna and the film-maker Dag Johan Haugerud. Plus, he gives insight into life in his studio and answers our usual questions, including the ultimate: what is art for?

Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again, Baltimore Museum of Art, US, 11 March-6 September.

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