The Easel

18th February 2025

Linder’s trailblazing work at the Hayward Gallery

Pendle Harte | Absolutely | 5th February 2025

Dada, the art movement that responded to WW1 horrors with absurdism, found a peerless exponent in Linder. Emerging in punk era Liverpool, her photomontages deliver a lethal view on consumer culture and identity. Yes, feminist issues have moved on since the battles of the 1970’s. Yet her images are so potent, using such an economy of elements that they still resonate. Says she “I find that my old montages feel like prophecy. My idea of voluptuous, overblown lips suddenly [has] been normalised”

Noah Davis at the Barbican: long overdue, emotional and timely

Amah-Rose Abrams | Wallpaper | 7th February 2025

This “beautiful” retrospective speaks to unfulfilled potential. Davis died young, just as he found his painterly voice. Drawing on family photos and scenes from TV, he painted “impeccably composed” scenes of Black life. What sets them apart is their uncanny, “dream-like” quality. A man rides a unicorn. Figures, with blurry faces, are set in dreamy scenes. Yet his early death is omnipresent. Says one critic “Davis is forever a young artist on his way … when everything seemed possible.”

11th February 2025

Etel Adnan Captured the Light of Many Suns

Natalie Haddad | Hyperallergic | 4th February 2025

Before her painting career, Adnan was a successful writer. Little surprise, then, that her paintings are sometimes referred to as ‘tone poems’. Her multicultural early life in Lebanon and Paris gave her art an “ambiguous sense of place”. Exuberant colours and abstract shapes impart a modernist feel to her paintings while her tapestries summon associations with Middle Eastern kilim rugs. Out of that cultural multiplicity, says one critic, Adnan offers “the possibility of another world”.

There: a Feeling | Gregg Bordowitz

Christiana Spens | Studio International | 24th January 2025

Maybe some art just doesn’t suit the written review. Bordowitz is cerebral – artist, writer, filmmaker, activist – with a wide-ranging oeuvre that, starting with the 1980’s AIDS crisis, addresses survival. Yet, reviewers need to spend paragraphs explaining specific works. This art isn’t easy. One critic calls Bordowitz “influential”. Impressive, but this writer struggles with works that are “fleeting … always contingent on something unseen”. Perhaps you just have to be there …

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