The Easel

10th March 2026

Pat Oleszko

Dan Cameron | The Brooklyn Rail | 4th March 2026

When Oleszko took up burlesque dancing as an art student, it foreshadowed a flamboyant career. Fifty years later, her performance art is being celebrated (and vindicated) with a show of her inflatable sculptures and meticulous costumes. Says she, “I think of myself as a sculptor who happens to be using my body as the armature. My ideas are primarily visual, and I activate them through words, movement and situation. [I am proud that] I can actually reach people in a way that is unprescribed.”

A Sweeping Retrospective for Artist Carol Bove Positions Her Among the Sculptural Titans

Grace Edquist | Vogue | 27th February 2026

These days Bove does “big” sculpture but that’s not where she started. First came a decade of drawings, then conceptual assemblages of found objects and small sculptures and then, a decade ago, large looping structures.  Their contradictory qualities – hefty but with an air of delicacy – have made her reputation. Recent works incorporate found materials alongside brightly coloured crumpled steel.  Says a curator “I think Carol is putting a very feminist lens on that tradition [of masculine sculpture].”

Whitney Biennial 2026 Review: The Revolution Will Be Cute

Jjenny Wu | ArtReview | 7th March 2026

Britain’s Tate Prize is a regular target for scorn. It seems that the Whiteny Museum’s Biennial plays a similar role in the US. This year’s show has no unifying  theme – something that one writer calls “incoherent” but another says reflects its thankless task of “capturing the zeitgeist”. Perhaps it is simply copying the “moods and maladies” of US culture and politics. If so, “that knockoff quality is precisely what gives art its shabby charm.”

Inside the Enigmatic Mind of Photographer Larry Sultan

Miss Rosen | AnOther | 23rd February 2026

Sultan’s interest in photography was sparked by billboard imagery. Later, his career turned to another piece of Americana – the suburbs of Los Angeles. These houses were often depicted, wrongly in Sultan’s view, as “generic structures for generic lives”. What he saw was “the complex and often dark and bewildering world of suburban life.” His images of bedrooms, backyards and fences, capture this ambiguity. Said he, “I don’t know what to make of things, and I like to give a viewer the same kind of openness.” 

Bird-Shaped Promises and Life After War: ‘Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Genius’ at the Neue Galerie

Valeria Salvin | The Science Survey | 3rd February 2026

Paris has dominated the history of modernism, thus obscuring achievements elsewhere. Vienna Werkstätte was born out of the Arts and Crafts movement and emphasised simplicity and (geometric) clarity of shape in decorative arts objects. Peche, an Austrian designer, changed that with imaginative and opulent designs, inspired by the rococco. His creations ranged across metalwork, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper and jewellery. Peche was “the greatest ornamental genius Austria has produced since the Baroque”.

Blood on the Canvas

George Prochnik | Literary Review | 8th March 2026

An American critic said of Soutine that “he had no biography outside his art … his art was a substitute for a biography”. If that is right, what is a new biography to say? It resists claims that the heightened emotional tenor of Soutine’s work reflected his “traumatic Jewish experience”. It also pushes back on the view that the privations of his early life shaped his art. Perhaps the emotion of Soutine’s work instanced something very common, the perpetual struggle “between humanity’s life and death drives”.

The Polite Art of Lending Loot

Sarah Jilani | ArtReview | 9th March 2026

The state of play in the debate over restitution. Younger audiences and major sponsors are “less willing to associate with institutions that warehouse colonial loot.” As these pressures build, a common response is the long-term loan, an administrative “holding pattern” that involves neither an “ethical concession” nor a change in ownership. Claims of “universal custodianship” may ultimately fail to sidestep the crucial issue – how to balance the claims of originating communities with the interests of western viewers.

3rd March 2026

Rose Wylie Memories Relived and Shared

Sue Hubbard | Artlyst | 26th February 2026

Wylie emerged, middle-aged, from motherhood full of ambition for her art. Now 91, she has built an international reputation with work that is an irreverent mish mash of the high and low brow. This includes a “splodgy red elephant, a blue frog and a yellow omelette”, all featuring bright colours and thick brushstrokes. It takes “dedication to paint this badly – if by badly one means creating images that are simplified to their essence”. Says one writer “a stunning, life-affirming exhibition”. Images are here

Jasper Johns: between the clock and the bed

Alison McDonald | Gagosian Quarterly | 6th February 2026

An interview with an obvious commercial slant, but interesting, nonetheless. When Johns started making “crosshatch” paintings in 1972, they were abruptly different from his previous work. These “fraught and fidgety” patterns bore no relation to pop art but neither did they have the emotional drama of artists such as Pollock and Rothko. Some speculated that he was referencing Picasso and Munch. Mostly though, they showed that Johns “didn’t just know how to paint, he knew how to make a painting do more.”

Tracey Emin’s A Second Life at the Tate Modern: beyond the YBA heyday, the artist sings anew

Dora Davies-Evitt | tatler | 26th February 2026

Emin has lived life to excess and then, well, “overshared”. This leads some critics to see weaknesses in a “vast” survey. One suggests, for example, that Emin’s sculptures are not great and her neons belong in hotel foyers. This writer disagrees. Emin takes “the thing [worth saying] and drags it into the public – sex, shame, trauma, abortion – made digestible through aesthetic force and relatability (that messy, unmade bed) … her art is attractive for its lack of euphemism and varnish.”

Can the Louvre still be saved?

Hanno Rauterberg | Die Zeit | 25th February 2026

News from the Louvre is horrendous – theft, water leaks, ticket fraud and worker unrest. Some of these problems are old news but with 8.7m visitors a year have not seemed urgent. Such complacency had led to an alleged focus on prestige projects rather than essential but mundane maintenance. Says the (German) writer, the result is something “not atypical for France, a crude mixture of overconfidence and self-neglect. We can consider ourselves lucky if [the Louvre] doesn’t suffer total collapse.” 

Art after Ovid

David McAllister | Prospect | 10th February 2026

Written 2000 years ago Ovid’s Metamorphoses is an epic tale of change and transformation. A Rijksmuseum show makes the case that it has become “intrinsic to the western canon”. In the tale of Apollo and Daphne, Bernini sculpted Daphne transforming into a tree. Lustful Jupiter was painted by Michelangelo as a swan. Rodin sculpted Pygmalion falling in love with his own sculpture. All illustrate that we do not control change and “nothing is permanently central”.

Rare Basquiat Drawings Go On View in Denmark

Caroline Roux | Galerie | 3rd February 2026

Basquiat’s ‘head’ drawings are an anomaly. Done early in his career, they are finished works, yet he chose not to exhibit them. His usual plethora of cultural references and textural fragments are absent while lines weave around these figures suggesting “extraordinary psychological strain”. Says the curator, “they are not portraits [but] live in an interpretational zone”. The broader view of Basquiat’s work has been influenced by perceptions that his estate has been managed to emphasise  mythology over artistry.

The Resurging Relevance of The School of London Painters

Sebastian Smee | Sotheby's | 27th February 2026

An appreciation. Once someone suggested the moniker “school of London”, it stuck. What does it mean? It wasn’t a group like the Impressionists who shared an identifiable style and preference for working outdoors. Yet Freud, Bacon, Kitaj and Auerbach shared friendships, a preference for oil paint and a modern approach to the figure. Rivalry doubtless was also at play. Collectively they breathed new life into the “grand figurative tradition” and showing how “paint could amplify experience”.

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