S1 E1 • Anish Kapoor

In October 2002 Anish Kapoor completed his extraordinary sculpture Marsyas for The Unilever Series of commissions in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London. A challenging and overwhelming artwork, Marsyas is a vast red PVC membrane stretched between three massive steel rings. The title refers to a satyr in Greek mythology who was flayed alive by the god Apollo. This film follows the making of Marsyas, from the earliest maquettes to the complex installation at Tate. Anish Kapoor comments on each stage of the process, and on the ideas and concerns of his art. Also illustrated are a range of his other sculptures and two recent large-scale works: Sky Mirror in Nottingham and Taratantara, created for the empty shell of Baltic as this new art centre was being built in Gateshead.

Première diffusion : 1 janvier 2005

S1 E2 • Anthony Caro

In the early 1960s Anthony Caro led a revolution in sculpture in Britain. His abstract steel constructions, often painted in bold colours, forged a new and internationally influential sculptural language. In the years since his fertile and diverse practice has consistently challenged and extended what sculpture is, and what it might be. At the age of 80, Anthony Caro remains intensely active, working each day in his studio and overseeing every detail of an extensive retrospective at Tate. Preparations for the show are featured in this profile, along with many of his major works, filmed in Britain, Germany and the United States. In interview Anthony Caro speaks about the development of his art from the bronze figures of the 1950s through the many variations of his work with metals, his hybrids of sculpture and architecture, and his recent large-scale, multi-part responses to Old Master painting and the worlds of myth and Christianity. The film is a portrait of an artist of great distinction whose inventiveness and creative vigour are undiminished.

Première diffusion : 1 mars 2005

S1 E3 • Anthony Gormley

An internationally acclaimed artist, Antony Gormley is best known for his monumental sculpture Angel of the North. This earth-bound figure with its massive wings shares with all of Gormley's work a preoccupation both with the human form and with our shared spiritual potential. Antony Gormley's early lead and iron figures were cast from his own body. They demand a physical and emotional response, but they also raise profound philosophical questions about memory, the mind and our senses. Some of his sculptures, such as the tiny sleeping figure modelled on his infant daughter Still IV, are intensely private. Other works, like Field and Allotment II, are sweeping social and architectural explorations on a grand scale. Many of Antony Gormley's most significant works are illustrated in this film profile, including Bed, made from hundreds of loaves of sliced white bread, and the spectacular Quantum Cloud created alongside the Millennium Dome in London. Antony Gormley offers a reflective commentary on these and other works and on the central investigations and imperatives of his art.

S1 E4 • Chris Ofili

In 2003 Chris Ofili created the spectacular installation within reach for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Combining a cycle of paintings depicting lovers in a Paradise-like garden with a shimmering glass dome, Ofili plunged visitors into disorienting spaces of dense colour and enveloping light. Shot in London, Germany and Venice, this film relates the creation of Within Reach. Chris Ofili's reflections on the process are complemented by interviews with his collaborator in Venice, architect David Adjaye, and the structural engineer from Arup Associates, who helped realise the complex dome. Also included is an exploration of The Upper Room, an installation of 13 exquisite canvases by Ofili, which was first shown in 2002. Both this and Within Reach are about "trying to create an atmosphere for people to feel somehow out of themselves." His aim, the artist explains, is to "do something that is sincerely interesting and can honestly enhance the experience of looking."

S1 E5 • David Batchelor

David Batchelor’s art is about colour. With lightboxes and everyday plastics, eccentric chandeliers and projections, he brings pure, direct colour into galleries and public spaces. His works are immediately delightful, but they are also concerned with what colour means in today’s world and with how we experience it. David Batchelor’s art is also about the city. His colours are the bright, sharp hues of neon and artificial materials, not the soft tones of the natural world. In this profile, the artist is interviewed in his studio, the place where he explores and experiments with “the stuff of the world”. He speaks about many key works and reflects on his distinctive public commissions, including a tower of colour for the Whitehall offices of the Treasury and an illuminated tree by the Thames. Like the best art, these are intellectual works, thoughtful and rigorous, but they are fun too, pleasurable and beautiful.

S1 E6 • Dryden Goodwin

At the heart of Dryden Goodwin’s art is a fascination with drawing. But the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He combines drawing with photography, film and large-scale screen-based installations. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism, desire and emotional distance. Many of Dryden Goodwin’s key works are featured in this profile, including his early animations like Heathrow (1994) and the three-screen installation Closer (2002) which features covert video footage of strangers in the city whose features the artist is tracing with a laser pen. He discusses the ambitious eight-screen Dilate (2003) and his most recent film Flight (2006), which is presented in a gallery alongside a display of the thousands of drawings that he made for its production.

S1 E7 • Gary Hume

Gary Hume makes beautiful paintings. His materials are household paints on aluminium surfaces and his subject's, he says, are "flora, fauna and portraits". The results are elegant, delicate, simple yet elusive and exquisite. Playing gloriously with colour and light, they are paintings of subtle tones, idiosyncratic clashes and insistent reflections. Interviewed in his studio, Gary Hume reflects on his work from the 1980s, when his Doors series won instant acclaim, to his latest creations. As so often, his new work balances recognisable images with abstraction. His people, like Kate (1996) and Michael (2001), are contemporary icons conjured up from bold shapes and strong planes of colour. Illustrated in this profile are many of Gary Hume's most notable paintings, specially filmed in exhibitions in London and Dublin, and in a major 2004 show in Bregenz, Austria. Also featured are the artist's rarely-seen drawings and, in contrasting settings, his deadpan sculpture Snowman.

S1 E8 • Gilbert and George

Gilbert Prousch met George Passmore at St Martin's School of Art in 1967. Since then they have famously lived and worked together as Gilbert & George, creating an extraordinary body of provocative artworks. They have exhibited themselves as "Living Sculptures", documented the banality of their daily lives in London's East End, and, since the late 1970s, produced vibrant, challenging photographic collages. This video profile of Gilbert & George features a characteristically deadpan performance of themselves. Sex, money, race and religion, they explain, are four themes at the heart of their art. Their interview is complemented by images of many of their works, including the remarkable Dirty Words Pictures made in 1977, together with important collages of the 1980s and 1990s. Asked if their work, and their personas, are ironic, Gilbert says, " We always think it's struggle enough to drag something out from inside of ourselves onto that wall without trying to be strange or odd about it. We wanted to be absolutely painful truth," George adds. "I really believe it has to be painful."

S1 E9 • Langlands and Bell

Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, who were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2004, have worked together since 1978. Their precise, formally beautiful art explores the networks of today’s global society within a rigorous conceptual and aesthetic framework. They employ a wide range of media, including models displayed as sculpture, wall paintings, furniture and film. Through this diverse output runs a consistent engagement with ideas of space and place, with architecture and identity, with language and with the hidden connections of international politics. In the interview for this film, the artists reflect on their experiences travelling to the warzone of Afghanistan, where they made the controversial film Zardad’s Dog and researched the digital animation The House of Osama Bin Laden. Other recent works have used the technologies of immersive games and presented the signs and symbols of contemporary networks. Alongside this exploration of virtual worlds, they have also created real-world urban architecture, most notably the spectacular Paddington Basin Bridge in London.

S1 E10 • Mark Wallinger

For his show as Britain's representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale, Mark Wallinger brought together a typically eclectic group of sculptures, videos and installations. Like Ecce Homo, his much-loved life-size statue of Christ created for Trafalgar Square, the exhibition provoked and challenged and moved many of those who experienced it. Mark Wallinger's art is often witty and immediately accessible yet at the same time it engages with some of the traditional grand themes, including religion, spirituality and death. His recent works include the ambitious environment Prometheus, centred around a wall-mounted electric chair, and Threshold to the Kingdom which counterpoints the arrival of passengers at an international airport (and perhaps also in Heaven) with Allegri's beautiful music for the Miserere. In this film profile Wallinger considers the meanings and motivations of his art. He also reflects on his earlier explorations of class and identity, most especially in the series of paintings, photographs and videos about the world of racing which culminated in him owning and running the horse A Real Work of Art.

S1 E11 • Michael Landy

Michael Landy acknowledges that he will probably always be known as "that bloke who destroyed all his belongings". In his 2001 artwork Break Down he publicly and systematically shredded, dismantled and demolished everything that he owned. “I’m always trying to get rid of myself," he says, "so that I can move on. And then I end up always coming back to the same themes… I guess I’m a creature of habit." In this film profile Michael Landy reflects on Break Down and on his other complex and ambitious projects, Scrapheap Services (1996) and Semi-detached (2004). Prompted by his father’s injury from an industrial accident, /Semi-detached/ involved the construction inside Tate Britain of a full-scale replica of the exterior of his parents’ suburban home. He also discusses his meticulous, delicate drawings as well as the ideas and directly personal concerns that underpin his unconventional art.

S1 E12 • Mona Hatoum

The artist Mona Hatoum came to London from Lebanon in 1975. Working initially with performance and video, and in the 1990s with sculpture and installations, she has exhibited widely around the world. In the summer of 2000 Mona Hatoum presented three major new works which marked the inauguration of Tate Britain, London. These works, exhibited under the title The Entire World as a Foreign Land, developed Hatoum's interest in the relationship between individual identity and the notion of a broader cultural and geographic identity, or sense of 'belonging'. In this interview, illustrated with these works and with other key installations including Socle du Monde and Corps étranger, Mona Hatoum explores the diverse sources of her work and her engagement with a wide range of often surprising materials. The artist talks vividly about the centrality of the body to her installations, and the ways in which her work employs changes of scale, intimations of restriction and constraint, and contradictory ideas of attraction and repulsion.

S1 E13 • Rachel Whiteread

S1 E14 • Richard Deacon

S1 E15 • Sam Taylor-Wood

S1 E16 • Tracey Emin

Although at times obscured by the artist's celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focussed, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity. Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995) and My Bed (1998), are illustrated and discussed, as is a wide selection of drawings, prints, paintings, neons, appliqué blankets and installations. "I always say if I didn’t make art, I’d probably be dead," she reflects. "But let’s be more realistic about that. If I didn’t make art and I’d done well in life, then I might have gone into retail. I would probably be the person in the shop that would be always organising the displays, and always making the noticeboard look nice in the canteen, stuff like that. I’m a genuinely creative person." Please note that this video contains explicit images and adult language featured in artworks by Tracey Emin.

S1 E17 • William Turnbull

S1 E18 • Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres studied at Camberwell School of Art from 1946-50, before running the AIA Gallery with painter Henry Mundy whom she married. As a young artist in the 1950's, Ayres was closely involved with leading British abstract artists including Roger Hilton. Ayres was quick to respond to European tachism and American abstract expressionism, creating a body of work that placed her in the forefront of her generation. In the sixties she was the only woman artist to be represented in the important 'Situation' exhibitions, showing large paintings combining oil and paint that aimed for the sublime using very radial drip and pour techniques of action painting. Gillian Ayres defined her career by ranges of style and manner. In the sixties she created glamorous and decorative images in keeping with the hedonistic mood of that time. In the seventies Hans Hofmann inspired Ayres and returned back to an extreme and painterly extraction. Later in that decade Ayres moved back to oil painting and went on to develop her exclusive colourful style and has made an impressive mark on British art.

S1 E19 • Howard Hodgkins

Howard Hodgkin is one of the world's leading painters, whose art is admired both by critics and by a wide public. Beginning with a remembered experience, Hodgkin works on his seductive and complex paintings for long periods, characteristically producing richly coloured, sweeping compositions, which continue into the picture-frame itself. These paintings uniquely straddle representation and abstraction, at the same time as they demonstrate both an awareness of history and an understanding of art's potential today. Most recently, his interest in working in different scales, evident particularly in significantly larger paintings such as Americana and After Vuillard, demonstrates his concern to engage the viewer in new and challenging ways. In this interview, illustrated with many key paintings, Howard Hodgkin speaks with warmth and passion about how his methods, about his influences, about colour and composition, and about the fundamental importance of painting. "You need things to look at," he says simply, "things to affect your feelings, and your intelligence, and your heart."

S1 E20 • Karl Weschke

Karl Weschke's impressive, complex paintings picture the human figure and the landscape, the everyday and the mythical. His subjects include dogs and drowned bodies, creatures from legends and, increasingly in recent years, the monumental ruins of ancient Egypt. For more than fifty years, he has explored the possibilities of painting and its relevance to an uncertain world. Produced alongside a retrospective at Tate St Ives, with additional paintings from British collections, this film profiles the artist in the Cornwall that has been his home since 1955. Filmed in and around his studio and in the coastal landscape that informs all of his work, Weschke speaks engagingly about his rich, remarkable life and about many of his most significant canvases. Like his work, the painter is serious, intense, spare - and yet also with an appealing streak of mischief.

S1 E21 • Martin Creed

Martin Creed is one of Britain's most engaging contemporary artists. His self-effacing work reflects an anxiety to communicate in a world already full of too many things. So he frequently tries to produce both something and nothing, and does so in idiosyncratic ways with the modest means from everyday life. In 2000 his MARTINCREEDWORKS solo exhibition was organised by Southampton City Art Gallery. The show provided the first opportunity to reflect on a wide range of Creed's creations, produced over a decade, including sculpture, installations, interventions, statements and also musical compositions performed with his band owada. Much of this work is illustrated here. Martin Creed discusses his uncertainties about making new works and his reluctance to name what he does as 'art'. He also illustrated how simple, ordinary objects, seen in new ways, can suggest often complex and contradictory meanings. Such objects, and the ideas and questions that they provoke, surprise and delight audiences whose individual experiences of the works will often be strikingly different.

S1 E22 • Sandra Blow

Three spectacular canvases by Sandra Blow were one of the highlights of the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sadly, this was her last show, as she died in August that year. This film was made in her studio in St. Ives as she was preparing to submit her works, and it captures her remarkable character and her fascinating reflections on a lifetime creating beautiful, rigorous, distinctive and joyous paintings. Sandra Blow spent a formative year as a student in Italy in the late 1940s, and she returned to London to begin a distinguished career dedicated to developing her vigorous abstract art. In addition to paint, she worked with a diverse range of materials, including sacking, plaster and coloured paper collages, and while her work often referred to landscape and to architecture, it was always exploring ideas of pure form and colour, balance and chance, light and movement.

S1 E23 • Grayson Perry