The Easel

10th December 2024

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, Tate Modern review – an exhaustive and exhausting show

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 2nd December 2024

From the 1950’s artists viewed technology as a new frontier. Some work is “poignant”, with wobbly machines being “like metaphors for life”. Our growing understanding of perception paralleled the emergence of op art. Computers, though, have complicated things. When used to aid (imperfect) human creativity, they are fine but attempts at autonomous creativity fall flat. “When a machine takes control … the results become less interesting.  I left the exhibition feeling profoundly depressed.”

3rd December 2024

Picasso: printmaker at the British Museum review – an eye-opener of a show in more ways than one

Melanie McDonough | The Standard | 6th November 2024

Picasso loved the print medium – in bursts. His print activity was dominated by two vaunted collections – the mid-career Vollard Suite and the huge 347 Suite done toward the end of his life. At well over 2000 works, printmaking was a major part of his oeuvre. It was a place to develop ideas (often inspired by classical sculpture) and express his erotic obsessions. And print offered many different techniques. He mastered all of them, with “insolent ease”.

The magic of Tirzah Garwood

Matthew Lyons | Engelsberg Ideas | 26th November 2024

Garwood married a renowned artist who died early in WW2. Her own death, soon after the war, propelled her “into an unearned oblivion”. A current London exhibition is her first in 70 years. After an initial foray into woodblock printing, she switched to painting, capturing a distinctive “English vernacular … dog shows, vegetable gardens, quiet domesticity”. Some works might seem “childlike”, but they are “without sentimentality. [This is] life itself hiding in plain sight. The more you look, the more astonishing it all is.”

Older links
Newer links