The Easel

24th February 2026

Yoko Ono’s Art Is an Exercise in Hope

Debra Brehmer | Hyperallergic | 20th January 2026

Ono is one of the world’s “most generous artists,” says the writer, because she incorporates the viewer into her work. By the mid 1960’s she was well known in the art avant garde through works such as Cut Piece (1964) where audiences snipped pieces from her dress. Compared to her work after meeting John Lennon, the early work seems “more radical … collaboration diminished [her] female brazenness”. Says one writer “That tension—between doing and thinking—is where Ono’s art lives.”

The Worst Show of 2025

Travis Diehl | Spike Art Magazine | 31st December 2025

When Johnson’s show opened at the Guggenheim, a critic wondered whether his work was “activism or just décor”. Those doubts persist. Johnson is “just okay” as an artist – so how did he get this prestigious retrospective? Perhaps it’s because his “post-black” work is “citation heavy”, meaning that evaluation of his art is deflected into discussions of “biography and identity”. Palm trees have been hung in the museum’s central void, perhaps “a way to nervously fill that famous space, as if the art itself isn’t enough”.

How Kaari Upson turned her world upside down

Alice Godwin | Apollo | 11th June 2025

About to open in Germany, Upson’s retrospective celebrates a promising career cut short by early death. She came to prominence with her “Larry” series inspired by exploring the abandoned house of an unknown neighbour. It’s a commentary on masculinity but, more importantly, an example of how her art blurs boundaries. She blurs individual identities, but also the boundary between fact versus fiction, between what is public versus private. This retrospective “will surely not be her last.”.

“In the rush to draw a line under the age of the starchitect, we’re at risk of losing more than we think”

Owen Hopkins | Dezeen | 23rd February 2026

Celebrity architects go way back – at least to Michelangelo. However, with the recent spate of deaths of leading architects– most recently Frank Gehry- the starchitect era is said to be over. Glamour projects brought benefits, such as reduced conformity, but often at huge cost. Gehry’s Bilbao boosted the local economy, but few other such projects were as successful. Still, starchitects kept architecture involved in the civic conversation. That is still needed to achieve a “more equitable and sustainable built environment”.

Between Worlds: Visitors to 37-08 Utopia Parkway

Sarah Lea | Gagosian Quarterly | 20th October 2025

Cornell’s studio has been re-created in a Paris gallery, bringing many reminiscences of this unusual artist. He lived in suburban New York and dreamed of travelling to Paris. His collages, box assemblages and films were made with materials from bric-a-brac stores. Inspired by surrealism his boxes are exercises in “urban reverie”. Despite friendships with many notable artists, he was a loner – or as a friend called him, a monk. Says a curator, Cornell was “born on the wrong continent at the wrong time”.

Bright shiny art

Rufus Bird | The Critic | 19th February 2026

When do falling prices indicate not a market slump but merely a healthy rebalancing? Right now in the art market, apparently. Art sellers are looking for new clients but when they are a new demographic or from a new geographic region, established artist may not always appeal. Thankfully, there are always masterpieces – “shiny” art, like the Klimts that were auctioned recently – which sell well and lift spirits. Such shiny art “will continue to ensure the art market remains in good health”. Sounds heroic!

17th February 2026

Lucian Freud The Curator’s Egg National Portrait Gallery

John K Grande | Artlyst | 13th February 2026

Lucien Freud is box office gold, at least in Britain. Why not raid his archives to show rarely seen drawings? Some critics think this is a marvellous idea, one citing Freud’s “instinct for the essential, the indelicate, the confrontational”. Other critics seem less convinced. If the drawings are so good, why pad out the show with famous paintings? Says the writer, the show is “a strange mix of great and insignificant”. Another is even sharper: “ Freud did churn out a lot of nonsense as well as his nuggets of greatness.”

The AI Slop of Pierre Huyghe

Annika Meier | Status Update | 24th January 2026

To date, debate about the implications of AI for art has mostly been hypothetical. Huyghe, a major artist, has just released a 50-minute big budget film using AI, which offers a real example. The reviews are not pretty. One writer notes there are “undeniably powerful images” before admitting that “the work risks boredom”. The linked piece calls its focus on a female figure without a face “misogynistic” and then quotes another critic thus: “with the greatest possible effort, [Huyghe] produces absolute emptiness.”

Zip it

Hal Foster | London Review of Books | 5th February 2026

All the abstract expressionists really BELIEVED. Newman, though, took it to extremes, becoming “pontificating and narcissistic”. Ouch! Inspired by primitivism, he painted canvasses with a vertical “zip” bisecting a flat coloured plane, hoping to convey “the exaltation of its making”. In fact, similar zips had been used by the Russian constructivists a half century earlier. Newman, like his AbEx pals, acted like the proprietor of “a sacred enigma, whose authority must exceed that of all others”.

The Bedazzling, Wild Designs of Modernism’s Forgotten Genius

Michael Kimmelman | Breaking One | 4th February 2026

Architects are now supposed to be multi-disciplinary collaborators rather than isolated creatives. If true, that makes Goff thoroughly modern. Mid-century America saw him as a polymath and a visionary, yet he is now little remembered. What marked him out were his daring designs and use of everyday materials and objects. He designed a church in the oilfields, for example, with a roof structure made from surplus oil pipes. Said one critic “the most provocative manifestation of American architectural genius”.

Seurat and the sea – Courtauld Gallery

Diana Bentley | MSN | 16th February 2026

Seurat’s ‘pointillist’ dotting was a great insight into painting technique. It is not well suited to turbulent or dramatic scenes but is perfect for seascapes, which comprise half of his small output. These images perfectly capture sea haze which appears on still summer days. But there’s more. Such works are calm but also slightly eerie. Perhaps with so little little visual action and few people, our focus returns to Seurat’s depiction of light. Given the intricacy of his technique perhaps that’s exactly what he wanted.

Eugène Atget, Readymade Icon

Julia Curl | Hyperallergic | 30th January 2026

As Paris modernised, Atget had the idea of photographing the old cluttered parts of the city.  It turned into a 30-year project. He didn’t think of himself as an artist, describing his images merely as “documents”. They were utilitarian is style, notably views of buildings taken around dawn when the streets were empty. Somehow those quiet images felt unsettling. Few of his photographs were printed in his lifetime but Atget is now regarded as a “precursor of modern photography”.

“Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” Goes on View At The Frick Collection

Celia McGee | Galerie | 10th February 2026

When Gainsborough moved to Bath, his studio was next door to an upmarket health spa where he could observe the latest fashions. Those fashions can now be seen to have reflected important social changes. Britain’s wealth accumulation in the later 1700’s was immense, due to slavery, plantations, banking and factories. A new middle class wanted what the aristocracy had, including beautiful clothes and flattering Gainsborough portraits. It seems he tired of all the “upward striving”, calling it “the curs’d Face Business”.

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