The Easel

25th July 2023

Erwin Wurm: Trap of the Truth

David Trigg | Studio International | 21st July 2023

Wurm’s sculptures depict consumer items in funny ways – overweight cars, bendy trucks, couture bags on long spindly legs. It’s OK to laugh, but that just shows how skillfully Wurm uses his favourite “tools” – paradox, and the idea of the absurd. Does the price tag on a Hermes Birkin bag justify its prestige – it is, after all, just a bag. Yet we conform. “Advertisements give us this illusion of freedom, and we believe it, which is more than ridiculous.”

Private view: Albrecht Dürer

Holly Black | The World of Interiors | 18th July 2023

Dürer’s prints were the “blockbusters” of that age. His representation of mythical and religious stories was an obvious attraction but also conspicuous were items of technology – books, textiles, scientific instruments, clocks. These placed the images in contemporary Nuremberg, gaving his images a “hidden power” – an ingenious way to “bring together the visual codes of religion and myth with the vernacular objects of contemporary life.” Images are here.

Hardwick Hall tapestries: 440-year-old artefacts restored and displayed after two decades of work

Zena Hawley | Derbyshire Live | 21st July 2023

A 24 year renovation … OMG! The 13 Gideon tapestries were made in Flanders in 1578 and purchased by an Elizabethan aristocrat in 1592. They have hung in the same country house ever since. Because they are so old, so dirty and so big, the painstaking conservation (described here) has taken decades. A conservator estimates that the tapestries, now back on the same walls they have decorated for centuries, are good to go for “at least another 100 years”.

18th July 2023

Spotlight on Reynolds at Kenwood House: celebrating the artist who dominated English cultural life in his age

Melanie McDonough | Evening Standard | 13th July 2023

A London show celebrates the 300th anniversary of Reynolds birth. Coverage is mostly deferential – founder of the Royal Academy of Arts, his renowned portraiture and so on. This fawning is all too much for one critic who can’t resist speaking plainly. “Reynolds has no imagination as a painter. [He] doesn’t have enough empathy with his sitters to expose their souls, His portraits are cynical hackwork. A minor talent [who] like the aristocracy, just won’t go away.”

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