Ben Luke
speaker
1,919 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 1 Sep
Ben Luke’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It's evocative of a particular space and a specific architecture, while also opening up a field of painterly gestures that perform different roles in relation to description and abstraction.
In the series Assembly from 2009, Carre took a similarly fracturing approach to Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe from 1863, as we'll hear, where incidental details like the hat of a figure or even the cherries in a basket of food in the foreground loom up,
amid other seemingly unrelated elements like ladders or checkerboard patterns.
These different levels of focus and attention lend the paintings distinctive rhythms and paces as well as a breadth of texture and touch.
She's deliberately pushed this aspect of her work by commissioning cloth to use as her canvas surface.
The bespoke cloth features photographs or even digital versions of her paintings woven into the surface, giving the pictures a hinterland before she makes the first mark.
The works then become a conversation with her own imagery, a process of amplification or obliteration.
Kara also has a wonderful knack for surprise.
Just when you think you're grasping her practice, she throws a delicious curveball.
It might be with an absurdist painting of advertising images of human figures reimagined through those bricks.
It might be a childlike image of a face, as in Rose Puchong from 2016, named after a kind of tea such that you wonder if this face that's little more than a smudge was formed from a tea stain.
or it might be the way that the work ebbs and flows between reductive and quickly realised gestures and densely honed and finished compositions.
But for all the surprise, there's consistency too.
The complexity of the human relationship to nature is ever-present, for instance in the way that those submarines constantly surface from watery depths, and how the bricks testify to the constant human excavation of Earth to build anew.
The volcanoes speak to a concern with worlds that are evident and even strident, and those that are hidden or latent.
the unfixed meaning in her own paintings is a metaphor for the elusive or not fully graspable world of signs and symbols that we inhabit.
I spoke to Kara just after she'd opened an exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London in June 2026 with pieces of characteristically diverse subject matter and imagery, nods to current affairs including global wars as well as familiar symbols from her lexicon of forms and reflections on historical paintings and sculpture.
Absorbed in these pictures, after returning to them for a second look, I was aware how much they seem to change from one viewing to the next, how mutability is central to their power.
Cara has used a lovely term, juddering, to describe this sense of movement, and I began our conversation by asking Cara why is it important to her to keep her paintings in motion?
Can you tell me how structured the kind of, if you like, lexicon of forms or signs that you're using are when you're in that moment?
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