The Easel

4th February 2020

Agnes Denes: Absolutes and Intermediates

Denes’s 1982 wheat field in a Manhattan landfill site was a seminal work of land art. A New York retrospective shows a career full of divergent ideas – buried poetry, patterned tree plantings, floating sculptures. Technical drawings of “great beauty” attempt to visualize branches of knowledge. And then there are her pyramid sculptures: “what they all convey is the human drama, our hopes and dreams against great odds.”

28th January 2020

John Baldessari Was Anything But Boring

In 1970, dissatisfied with his art, Baldessari took all his paintings to a crematorium and burned them. He called this action his “best work to date”. That set the tone for a half century of his conceptual art, up to his recent death. Widely influential, his work combined insight, humour and the obvious. One work simply bore the text “everything is purged from this painting but art, no ideas have entered this work.”