Although at times obscured by the artist's celebrity, the art of Tracey Emin is serious and focussed, challenging and at times startlingly beautiful. In this film, she speaks frankly about her career, the craft of her immensely varied work, and the immediate, personal themes with which she engages: autobiography, memory, desire, and identity. Many of her best-known works, including Everyone I have ever slept with 1963-1995 (1995) and My bed (1998),...

'It's a simple proposition. We need one hour of your time. You decide what to do with it. What will unfold is completely unpredictable. We are literally going public. We are putting the Plinth in your hands - or literally under your feet!' - Antony Gormley. In the summer of 2009, artist Antony Gormley, previously best known for his iconic Angel of the North, created One & Other, a unique portrait of contemporary Britain. Across 100 days, 2,400 volunteers...

Many of Sam Taylor-Wood's distinctive photographs and films depict an affluent and fashionable social scene. But her concerns are often isolation and anxiety, conflict and alienation. Her art is alluring and disarming, and also frequently formally inventive. She uses multiple screens, still images combined with sound, and complex interior views conjured up with a panoramic camera. Among her earliest photographs are confrontational and sexually charged...

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...

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...

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...

Martin Creed is one of Britain's most engaging contemporary artists. His self-effacing work reflects an anxiety to communicate in a world already full of too many things. So he frequently tries to produce both something and nothing, and does so in idiosyncratic ways with the modest means from everyday life. In 2000 his Martin Creed works solo exhibition was organised by Southampton City Art Gallery. The show provided the first opportunity to reflect...

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...

At the heart of Dryden Goodwin's art is a fascination with drawing. But the ways in which he explores this age-old practice are anything but traditional. He combines drawing with photography, film and large-scale screen-based installations. He is engaged with time as well as line, and with the sculptural potential of two-dimensional images. Other concerns in his art are also strongly contemporary: the city, ideas of public and private, voyeurism,...

David Batchelor’s art is about colour. With lightboxes and everyday plastics, eccentric chandeliers and projections, he brings pure, direct colour into galleries and public spaces. His works are immediately delightful, but they are also concerned with what colour means in today’s world and with how we experience it. David Batchelor’s art is also about the city. His colours are the bright, sharp hues of neon and artificial materials, not the...