The Easel

10th May 2022

The Space Between: An Introduction to the Exhibition

Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani | Yale Centre for British Art | 3rd March 2022

Longish, but insightful. Riley’s early black and white abstractions were so startling they were viewed as optical illusions. Time has revealed that to be a gross underestimation. Her prolific output is about “open space, shallow space, multifocal space”, an exploration of perception via the use of ovals, circles and lines. From mid-career, Riley’s increasingly “liberated” use of colour has been an exploration of a different kind – “I was trying to paint sensation.”

Full frontal flatness – Marlene Dumas in Venice, reviewed

Edward Behrens | Apollo | 1st April 2022

Dumas paints portraits, mostly single figures. From that point, her work heads off in all directions, addressing death, eroticism, gender politics, racism. But if her subject matter is various, many of her works share a certain starkness. One critic calls the show “extraordinary” but this writer seems to feel  confronted by that style. “There isn’t a sense here of ‘the pleasures of painting’ … It is fascinating to look at them, but it is also unnerving”. Or, as Dumas has said “A painting is not a postcard.”

Andreas Gursky

Max Dax | Gagosian Quarterly | 5th May 2022

Gursky makes photography seem analogous to painting. Some analogies are purely visual. People in a frozen landscape look like a Breugel painting; images of tulips have a “formal similarity” to Rothko. Then there are analogies coming from how he manipulates his images – for example, adding a jet’s contrail to a landscape. That suggests a conceptual analogy – paintings and photography both need an underlying inspiration. Gursky’s current inspiration … “portents of a period of upheaval”.

Artist Simone Leigh’s work transforms the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Lauren Williams | wbur.org | 22nd April 2022

Leigh, the first Black woman to represent the USA at Venice, states quite plainly that her work primarily addresses other Black women. If that seems exclusionary, it’s worth considering how little of the art canon was intended to be inclusionary. Leigh’s art – notably her bold ceramic and bronze statues – sympathetically imagine a history of Black women that was never written. These works have “grandeur … the power that exudes from Leigh’s art is unrelenting.”

Matisse’s Miracle in Red

Jerry Saltz | Vulture | 3rd May 2022

When Matisse’s painted The Red Studio, his adoring patron baulked. Its “flat pictorial figuration” and enveloping Venetian red created “weird spatial architectonics” that, in 1911, were shocking. Ignored for decades it is now thought a masterpiece. Why? Sensing a distant future of contemporary art, Matisse was “an artist turning away from the “real” world of space, structure, color, narrative, surface, and composition — an artist bound for new beauty”. An excellent video with the curator (8 min) is here.

Hieronymus Bosch, the painter of the devil

Zsuzsa Borbély | Papageno | 17th April 2022

A new Bosch show seems too soon after the 500th anniversary hoopla in 2016. Still, looking at the strange work of this star of the northern Renaissance is no chore. The writer struggles (unsuccessfully) to decode the demonic imagery. Why did Bosch provide so few clues about “the order of importance of what is seen”? Doesn’t this mirror modern life where “we are not always sure that we are always in the front when something is happening?” Morgan Meis’s Easel essay on Bosch is here.

3rd May 2022

Philip Guston’s paintings are controversial. But here they are

Staff | The Economist | 30th April 2022

After a hugely controversial postponement, the Guston retrospective has now opened. A “dramatic reimagining of the curatorial process” has provided a fuller context to the hooded KKK figures. Along with Guston’s  other icons – cigarettes, eyeballs, boots, light bulbs – they communicate a “malignant foreboding” that drew on the social turmoil of late 1960’s America. In this context the hoods “were—and are—a reproach. They are terrible in their ordinariness. [A] magnificent exhibition”.

National Gallery of Art enters new, overdue era with African diaspora show

Philip Kennicott | The Philadelphia Tribune | 19th April 2022

Why do we know about the achievements of the 17th century Dutch “Golden Age” but not the African diaspora that, via slavery, was intertwined with Dutch history? A “landmark” show at Washington’s National Gallery tries to correct this exclusion and is full of “arresting moments”. Can such institutions use their “scholarly and curatorial superstructure” to tell such diverse stories together? “Think “histories” instead of “History.””

Inside the Glorious Art—and Fierce Rivalry—of Ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome

Erin Migdol | Getty | 7th April 2022

Ancient Greece and Rome were superpowers but, in the same millenium, so too was Persia. Despite military rivalry, these nations were culturally highly interconnected, employing each other’s craftsmen and tradesmen as well as trading actively.  This process only accelerated with Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia in 330 BCE. While ancient Athens and Rome have great artistic achievements, “the art and cultures [of Persia] was every bit as sophisticated and intriguing.”

Another World

Jillian Steinhauer | The Nation | 5th April 2022

Niki de Saint Phalle lived a passionate life, describing herself as a “wild, wild weed”. Most renowned for her monumental sculptures of rotund, joyous women, she remains an uncategorisable artist. A new biography, focused on Saint Phalle’s own works and writings, provides only modest clarification. Her “child-like” artistic style was, it seems, a deliberate choice. And, rather than idealizing balance, she embraced “duality … I always felt that the Garden of Eden was right next to Hell”.

Warhol’s Mao turns fifty

Billy Anania | Art in America | 20th April 2022

Warhol had long been making celebrity images when US-China relations began to thaw. Mao’s personality cult, a “synthesis of mass marketing, political status, and stardom”, was an obvious target for pop sensibilities. Warhol’s images of Mao seem prescient given China’s subsequent integration into the world economy. They encouraged Chinese artists skeptical of their politics. Elsewhere however, these images now symbolise the “relationship between art and capital”.

Crumbling is not an instant’s act

Alexander Adams | The Critic | 19th March 2022

Architectural drawings are a niche taste, offering perspective and alluring detail but without art’s expressiveness. The Regency architect Sir John Soane was an avid collector, especially of drawings depicting “fantasies, alternative realities, and lost glories”.  Ruins were a favourite. Should we consider these “lost glories” or just ordinary structures romanticized by time? As for Soane’s own buildings, most have gone, “burned away like mist, while the ruins of Rome live on.”

Reframed at Dulwich Picture Gallery is a bracingly intelligent history of “the woman in the window”

Cal Revely-Calder | The Telegraph | 1st May 2022

A woman standing at a window is a familiar but enigmatic art motif. Sometimes it indicates a woman on display, hinting at “romantic possibility”. Other times it indicates capture – either imprisonment or someone trapped by economic circumstances. Such scenes go back aeons but how we perceive them has changed. And that, it seems, is the point of a London exhibition – to give a window onto “several things: one is these women, but another is you.”

Older links
Newer links