S2 E1 • Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA.

S2 E2 • Stuart Brisley

Stuart Brisley is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances which pushed his body to extremes. But his work as an artist over four decades has embraced sculpture and installation, films and fictions, large-scale participatory projects and, most recently, the Web. Illustrated with archive footage and photographs, this profile of the artist explores his understandings of collaboration and community, of politics and the market, of humour and failure. At the centre of his diverse work are the essential qualities of what it means to be human. Brisley’s art remains challenging and provocative, not least in the recent project in which he has orchestrated works centred on a Museum of Ordure. The museum has a curator and a collector, and, at least as it was shown at the Freud Museum, London, an apparent display of human excrement.

S2 E3 • Michael Craig-Martin

In 1973 Michael Craig-Martin exhibited a glass of water on a shelf, together with a printed text, and called the work An Oak Tree. As the text explained, the artist had changed the glass of water into an oak tree. More than thirty years later, Craig-Martin creates – along with screen-savers, works on LCD monitors and conventional paintings – gloriously colourful environments with blown-up outline images of domestic objects. The conceptual and the rigorously material have been central to the artist’s complex development across four decades of work that is both intellectually demanding and austerely beautiful. At the same time Craig-Martin achieved an almost legendary status as a teacher at Goldsmiths, where he encouraged, among many others, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas. Richly illustrated with works and environments filmed in Bregenz and Dublin, as well as at notable exhibitions in England, this film profile outlines the career of one of today’s most innovative and influential artists.

S2 E4 • Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk is a leading figure in British contemporary art. His 1991 degree show work Cave, a blue ceramic plaque commemorating his occupancy of a studio, and Pop, the waxwork figure of himself as Sid Vicious, are among the iconic artworks of the 1990s. His "self-portrait" signatures and his finely crafted sculptures of everyday objects (such as cardboard boxes cast in bronze) bring the commonplace into an art space and challenge the viewer to engage in new ways.

S2 E5 • Malcolm Morley

Malcolm Morley is one of the most significant and influential painters working today. Born in England but active in the United States since the late 1950s, Morley has developed an intensely individual vision embracing, but never determined by, autobiography, politics, psychoanalysis, myth, the visual culture of his time and the limitless potential of paint. Filmed as Morley works in his distinctive manner on a spectacular new canvas, this documentary features the artist's provocative reflections on his life, painting technique, influences and concerns. It also illustrates a wide range of his paintings from the earliest abstract works, through the painstakingly precise depictions of reproductions (on postcards, from travel brochures) of ships, contemporary scenes and Old Masters, to the catastrophe pictures of the 1970s. Paintings engaging with ancient cultures followed, and then works based on the cardboard cut-out aeroplane and boat kits which Morley has made since his youth. Most recently, he has returned to paintings of news photographs, exploring a striking and challenging new range of imagery.

S2 E6 • Julian Opie

This program looks at the distinctive work of the artist and portraitist Julian Opie, who is known for his use of deceptively simple and visually striking designs across a variety of different mediums

S2 E7 • Lisa Milroy

Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting images of people, blank facades of buildings, clichés of photographic landscapes. More recent work is looser and less apparently realist. Speaking about the development of her art from the early 1980s onwards, Lisa Milroy discusses how she uses the sensual and descriptive power of paint to express her unique ways of looking at the world. She reflects on the changes in her work; on the impact of Japan and its culture; on photography and time; and on the craft and process of painting.

S2 E8 • Joe Tilson

Since the 1960s, when he was associated with British Pop Art, Joe Tilson has enjoyed international acclaim for the individuality and originality of his paintings, constructions, prints and multiples. All of his playful, engaging work is informed with ideas from literature, philosophy, ethnography and alchemy. Tilson's early work focussed on mass-market consumerism and politics. But he was soon disenchanted with mechanical methods of production and his art in the 1970s and 1980s employed hand-worked wood and metal in intriguing ways. Shot in and around the artist's studio in Cortona, Italy, this film was produced alongside Joe Tilson's first British retrospective at London's Royal Academy of Arts. He speaks engagingly about his career, his craft and many of his key works, including his most recent paintings. Inspired by the landscape surrounding his home in the Tuscan hills, these works use striking and vibrant colours in conjunction with text, and explore the enduring themes of sex, birth and death.

S2 E9 • Tony Cragg

S2 E10 • Liliane Lijn

S2 E11 • Boyle Family

S2 E12 • Ian Hamilton Finlay

S2 E13 • Yinka Shonibare

S2 E14 • Vong Phaophanit

S2 E15 • Ian Davenport

S2 E16 • Dalziel & Scullion

S2 E17 • Gereon Krebber

S2 E18 • Richard Wilson

S2 E19 • Graham Gussin

S2 E20 • Hamish Fulton

S2 E21 • Conrad Shawcross

S2 E22 • Tony Hill