The Easel

14th November 2023

Daido Moriyama retrospective: 60 years of influence

Geoff Harris | Amateur Photographer | 27th October 2023

Despite widespread acclaim, some think Moriyama is still underappreciated outside Japan. Perhaps that is because his images are unpretentious – grainy, black and white, disregarding technical perfection. What distinguishes him is his introspective style. “He is not really looking at the city per se, but at his inner territory – the streets of his mind.” Moriyama’s images record moments when “what’s in front of him somehow chimes with his emotions and memories.”

7th November 2023

El Anatsui – interview: ‘My inspiration comes from things people have used – there are so many endless delights’

Veronica Simpson | Studio International | 27th October 2023

A commission for Tate’s Turbine Hall is a great career opportunity. Given its vast proportions, though, it is not an opportunity for the faint-hearted. El Anatsui’s voluptuous sail-like sculptures, made with his signature bottletops, are so big that most reviewers do no more than describe. One brief assessment suffices – “a shimmering, gorgeous, powerful elegy for a half-forgotten past”. An interview with the artist in the linked piece is illuminating.

The Story Behind Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Most Beguiling Photographs

Lydia Figes | AnOther | 30th October 2023

Sugimoto found that the camera is loose with the truth. Careful lighting and long exposures allowed him to make stuffed animals appear alive. Similar effects could also be achieved, he found, with waxwork figures. Long exposures of seascapes create weirdly flat – almost abstract – images that somehow speak of a post-human world. Says the curator “no-one has ever made photographs like these. His work isn’t about documenting the world.”  Images are here.

Nicole Eisenman: the lesbian pioneer who changed art

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 30th October 2023

Eisenman’s first retrospective in London has opened with surprisingly little of the effusive praise associated with much of her career. Says one critic, her fusing of “Renaissance aesthetic with comics and queer porn … comes across as grandstanding and narrow”. The above writer more or less agrees. “Eisenman’s recurring weakness [is] the absence of an edit button. [Her current work is] increasingly weak and increasingly big. As art they are clunky fails.”

A show of Hans

Tanya Harrod | The World of Interiors | 16th October 2023

The extraordinary 35-year collaboration between British studio potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper generated a global reputation for each. Rie, being the more gregarious (and long lived) has enjoyed most of the posthumous attention. That’s a pity. Of the two, Coper was the more sculptural and his pieces “full of stilled energy”. Rie acknowledged as much, saying “I am a potter but he was an artist”. A video about Coper’s work (11 min) is here and some images here.

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