The Easel

14th March 2023

‘Going big suited her. Going very big’ – the uncontainable brilliance of sculptor Phyllida Barlow

Barlow, an art school professor, got her first major show a year after retirement. Kaboom – recognition, gallery representation and multiple honours! An obituary is here; the linked piece is more an appreciation. Mostly made from discarded building materials, her works “fold, they sprawl, they teeter, they slump and erupt. [They are] anti-monumental, for all their size, a wonderful parody of sculpture’s history of self-regarding masculinity, a burlesque of sculptural gravity.”

David Hockney Is Not Afraid to Go High Tech

Moving to Tennessee in the early 1980’s to take up an academic post, Lee started photographing nearby communities. After seven years he abruptly stopped, due to his “minimal” interest in recognition. Decades later, a book and a first exhibition have stunned critics. Says one: ”he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. It’s not often that a body of photography is hoisted up from obscurity and straight into the canon”. Images are here.

Old and New Discoveries: Baldwin Lee Interviewed by Mark Steinmetz

Moving to Tennessee in the early 1980’s to take up an academic post, Lee started photographing nearby communities. After seven years he abruptly stopped, due to his “minimal” interest in recognition. Decades later, a book and a first exhibition have stunned critics. Says one: ”he is one of the great overlooked luminaries of American picture-making. It’s not often that a body of photography is hoisted up from obscurity and straight into the canon”. Images are here.

Drippers & Printmakers

When abstract expressionism emerged in postwar New York, the leading critic of the day claimed it a “uniquely American” idea. Well, maybe. New York hosted many artists during the war, notably the famous surrealists. They significantly influenced local artists who were developing new approaches to abstraction. Robert Motherwell commented that abstract expressionism should really have been called “abstract surrealism”.

The great collectors

Art collecting in the late 19th century was an “imperial” activity – more was deemed better. Then, private dealers emerged with collections inspired by connoisseurship. Subsequently, gilded age millionaires assembled collections full of rare and famous pieces.  Nowadays, all romance is gone. Collections are a means for “speculative and headline-grabbing self-aggrandizement. Wealth is… the only protagonist—the ultimate reference of merit, quality, content, and meaning.”

7th March 2023

Wangechi Mutu Stages a Family Reunion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”.