The Easel

24th September 2019

Damien Hirst Butterfly Genocide

Edward Lucie-Smith | Artlyst | 22nd September 2019

Hirst has the critics riled up – again. New works riff on the religious mandala, using not paints but butterfly wings. Thousands of them. One critic is delighted though more are not. Says one of the  naysayers – “it’s not shocking, it’s not clever and it’s not good.” Staying calm, the above writer suggests a connection to Hirst’s earlier work: “the butterfly, while visually seductive, always carries the inference of death.”

Mona Hatoum interview: ‘If everything is predictable, then it’s not interesting’

Ben Luke | Evening Standard | 5th September 2019

Hatoum was studying in London when stranded by war in her native Lebanon. Her work is not a literal replaying of her experience of displacement. Nonetheless, a theme that pervades many works is precariousness. “I’m really interested in modern ruins … even those structures that are supposed to be solid, to contain you, they can collapse.” Last week, Hatoum was announced as a Praemium Imperiale winner.

Sir Antony Gormley’s art explores an interior realm

J U-S | The Economist | 21st September 2019

Gormley’s trademark work is the expressionless metal body form. Often based on molds of his own body, these figures appear in all sorts of situations, most famously his Angel of the North atop a hill in northern England. One view of a large survey show is that it is “too unfocused, and ultimately too polite”. The more positive view is that Gormley’s work is a sustained exploration of the body as a place “of memory, emotion and imagination”.

17th September 2019

William Blake: The greatest visionary in 200 years

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 10th September 2019

Blake was baffling two centuries ago and, it seems, remains so. His poetry is dense, his iconic paintings “small and dark and hard to interpret”. Often considered together, the prevailing view is that Blake was primarily a painter. Perhaps we shouldn’t try too hard at interpretation. Perhaps it’s enough that this “isolated visionary” helped inspire English Romanticism and somehow still has resonance today.

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