Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

People who - and I think that's been a huge education for me. I think it's a - it's a privilege to be able to meet such a broad cross-section of New York and increasingly the world, and to get a feel of how people respond to visual culture.

I believe that artists should be part of the culture. I think that my work clearly bears that out.

That should be something that an artist can respond to as well in terms of a painting.

Status and class and social anxiety and perhaps social code are all released when you look at paintings of powerful individuals from the past.

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.