The Easel

7th March 2023

Wangechi Mutu Stages a Family Reunion

Emily Lordi | Cultured | 2nd March 2023

Mutu gained prominence with her figurative collages but her sculptures have lifted her reputation further. Many of these works address the legacy of colonialism or gender violence and have the ability to unsettle. The contrast of materials like Nairobi clay in a gleaming New York museum just adds to a sense of disruption. That pleases Mutu – “my work marries the beautiful and the grotesque, because [this is] what my country is about.” One of the top 10 shows of the year, says one critic.

The many faces of Tommy Kha

Larissa Pham | British Journal of Photography | 3rd March 2023

Kha’s family fled Vietnam, so he grew up in the US South. Unsurprisingly, a theme of his photography is the dislocated immigrant experience. He records the efforts of his family to conform to the American idea of “Asian-ness”, even though that Asian-ness is “an uncodified blob, like the ‘Asian’ section at a grocery store”. Kha thus thinks of his photography as both a “haunting, being possessed by the past” and an exorcism, “trying to create something new”. Images are here.

Anish Kapoor’s long-awaited bean sculpture wedged beneath Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard is now complete

Kristine Klein | The Architects Newspaper | 1st February 2023

Cloud Gate, (aka the bean) is Anish Kapoor’s acclaimed public sculpture in Chicago. Now, after much delay, New York has its own, half sized version. Achieving a seamless mirror surface caused endless delays that were only fixed by workers climbing inside “the lustrous legume”. Wedged under a residential tower, the work may not have the impact that envious New Yorkers desired. Sniffs a Chicago critic, “to have it stuffed underneath a building in New York, it’s a little strange. Ours is better.”

The Uncanny Silence of Thomas Demand

Zoe Cooper | Frieze | 6th March 2023

Thomas Demand is a master of deception. His large-scale images depict unremarkable locations – a control room or a work room – where significant events have occurred. Close inspection reveals a triple artifice – he has photographed a life-sized paper model built to replicate a scene taken from another photograph. Our initial take on Demand’s image is thus subverted and we are “caught in an endless loop between reality and artificiality”.

Fortunate Fall

Barry Schwabsky | Spike | 28th February 2023

Joan Mitchell hated being compared to Monet. That hasn’t stopped a Paris museum putting them side by side. Yes, they did share an interest in landscapes. However, that’s where the similarity ends. [Mitchell’s art] “traffics in an impatience and aggressiveness alien to Monet. Her color is brash and brilliant, her slashing brush marks utterly unlike the arabesque obliquity of Monet’s. [This show] succeeds in showing how little the two artists have in common, how little their oeuvres illuminate each other.”

Sharjah Biennial 15 delivers important postcolonial narrative—but loses its experimental edge

Nadine Khalil | The Art Newspaper | 20th February 2023

The idea that the art canon is the Western art canon is tenacious. Too bad if you are an artist not from the West. For 30 years the Sharjah Biennial has promoted non-Western art – Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. This writer thinks that having apparently built links to the broader art world, Sharjah is “aging gracefully [and has lost its] experimental flavour”. Perhaps, one critic wonders, we are seeing the “inevitable … end of the biennial as an end-all measure of worth.” Images are here.

Pen to paper

Warren Frye | The New Criterion | 8th February 2023

Antwerp in the 1500’s was booming and its middle class wanted the finer things in life, including stained glass, tapestries and prints. These crafts all required preparatory drawings, leading the city to become a centre of graphic art.  Drawings became art works in their own right, depicting complex mythologies, religious themes and scenes from everyday life. This is, says the museum, a “once-in-a-lifetime” exhibition that shows how the Northern Renaissance “transformed daily life”.

28th February 2023

Jeff Koons Goes to the Moon

Daniel Riley | GQ | 23rd February 2023

I don’t think I am being entirely mischievous by including this piece. Admittedly, there is humour to be had from just reading what Koons says about himself. One critic called him “the truest believer in a cult of his own invention”. But, like it or not, Koons is more – “perhaps the only person alive with enough money, know-how, and conviction to produce an eight-foot sculpture out of pink Portuguese marble [12 years in the making] that might stand one day beside its 400-year-old [Renaissance] cousins.”

The Photographers Who Showed the Whimsy and Eros of Ukraine before the War

Elianna Kan | Aperture | 17th February 2023

The ambition of any photographer is to create images that resonate. In the mid-1990’s  Chekmenev started taking passport photos of Ukraine’s elderly, an impoverished generation “untouched by the promise of their burgeoning democratic nation”. With the advent of war, his images and those of other photographers have a very specific resonance – they are “reintegrating the past into the present for the preservation of socio-political memory.” More images are here.

Enter the mesmerising, AI-driven world of artist Refik Anadol

TF Chan | Wallpaper | 25th February 2023

Perhaps wanting to refresh its cutting-edge credentials, New York’s MoMA commissioned Anadol, a data artist(?) to create an AI artwork using images from its own collection.  This review of the resulting work has lots of “gee whizz” techno-speak but conspicuously little about its aesthetics. ChatGPT, when tasked by a magazine to review the piece, came back with eerily similar techno-speak. Yawns one critic, it’s “only a screensaver”. A video of Anadol’s installation is here.

The Art of the Shadow: How Painters Have Gotten It Wrong for Centuries

Robert Casati and Patrick Cavanagh | The Reader | 13th February 2023

Technical but interesting. Artists want to paint shadows because they communicate pictorial depth. Sadly, painting shadows accurately can be very difficult. The good news, though, is that our brains have a high tolerance for “implausible” shadows that break the laws of physics. So, when a shadow doesn’t naturally climb up a set of stairs, or a figure doesn’t cast a shadow on the figures behind them, our brains may not rebel. But then this puzzle: should an angel cast a shadow?

The Problem With All-Women Exhibitions

Eliza Goodpasture | ArtReview | 22nd February 2023

A show of female abstract artists is justified by the gallery as being “tactically necessary” to correct a art historical narrative that is biased toward men. It usefully reminds us of unfairly overlooked artists. But, protests the writer, “I simply do not buy the claim that we need more lists of women artists. [We need] to shake out where these artists fall … in the context of art history. How does their work broaden, disrupt, fit into, or question existing narratives of art history?”

The deliberately difficult art of Pierre Dunoyer

Max Feldman | Apollo | 23rd February 2023

Dunoyer is influential in his native France, but little known elsewhere. Perhaps that’s not a surprise. His works may be Instagrammable but not easily explained. He intends his careful abstractions to be “pure objects”, objects that are capable of “turning seeing into thinking”. What Dunoyer means is to deny “above all, that painting has any storytelling capacities”. From there, you are on your own.

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