One of my favorite artists was on the walls at the Lenbachhaus in Munich— and I had no idea she would be there. Shifting the Silence, built around Etel Adnan's final book, is an exhibition about the difficulty of saying what a work of art is. It left me thinking about language and its limits, about what images do that sentences cannot, and about an artist who, knowing she was dying, chose to write about the beauty of the world.

Spanish painter Gemma Alpuente on her own chemical process technique, abstract art as freedom, the corruption of the art world, and the book she is writing for artists about emotional management and getting started.

An Australian in Paris who let the 2015 terrorist attacks force him to question whether abstraction could be justified at all — and came out the other side with a practice built on dissent. Anthony White talks Kiefer, Foucault, the Gilets Jaunes, Rosa Parks, and why the most important thing he can tell you is: be kind.

She completed a Master's in Botany, questioned the academic path, and ended up painting in the same London house as Piet Mondrian. Özlem Thompson on colour, imperfection, and why the universe we don't yet understand is the most interesting subject of all.

He began with furniture and materials in Buenos Aires. He arrived in Barcelona and found paper and ink. Alejo Palacios on craftsmanship, inherited knowledge, and the harmony that comes from simplicity.

Most of his icons are dead. He's lived in San Francisco, Berlin, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and now a small town at the northern tip of Bavaria — and through all of it, he's been in the studio. Kottie Paloma makes paintings that function like fossils: gritty, humorous, archetypal records of what it means to be alive right now. We spoke with him about process, the art world's secondary market madness, and why the Pink Panther is quietly becoming one of his heroes.

She grew up between Swedish prairies and the ocean, in a family where art was simply how you expressed yourself. After a decade in Paris, time in Beijing, and years directing for luxury brands, Sara Ödman quit her art director role and returned to the one thing that had always been true: the empty canvas, and the energy that rises the moment she starts to fill it.