Encounters

To celebrate the millennium, the National Gallery, London, has commissioned twenty-five of the world’s leading contemporary artists to create an entirely new work in response to the Gallery’s collection of the greatest European painters of the past. These new works - paintings, drawings, sculpture, photographs, and video - are presented here alongside the paintings that inspired them. Substantial essays on each modern artist, based on in-depth interviews as their works took shape, offer a vivid and privileged understanding of the origin and meaning of the new work, describing how it was made and its relation to other works by the same artist, and the influence, direct or indirect, of the National Gallery’s collection.