The Easel

20th October 2026

Issy Wood: Self-Portraits review – suffocatingly revealing works from the ultimate zillennial painter

Eddy Frankel | The Guardian | 16th October 2026

Wood, a young artist and “market darling” has a small selection of her works on show at London’s Portrait Gallery. They are all self-portraits and are characteristically “tense”, large format, tightly cropped compositions of her face. In some she wears a mask, presenting the complexity of “contemporary identity”. Her art, says the writer, is that of “the bored, the medicated, the perpetually online, the depressed overachiever … she’s not just good, she’s quietly important.”

13th October 2026

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing, Barbican review- painting at its most joyously intelligent

Sarah Kent | the arts desk | 10th October 2026

It’s hard to get a feel for Ryman’s singular white paintings because reproductions usually miss their subtleties. Yet the subtleties are there, such as “a glossy, almost perfect white haunted by a memory of green”. Variation in the density and texture of the paint and the framing materials were also Ryman specialties. For one critic, such minute effects are “dry and boring”. Ryman explained that he used white because it helped “make things visible”. Don’t try to analyse, he advised, “the essence of all painting is feeling”.

The bravest modern artist — he dares to paint Jesus

Waldemar Januszczak | Waldemar.tv | 5th October 2026

Described as a “brutalist-realist“, Howson’s early work included Glasgow “bovver boys” with bulging neck muscles. That subject matter reflected the social tensions of post-Thatcher Britain. Following a turn toward religion, he now frequently paints “uncool” images of Jesus. The writer admits the exhibition is “tangibly discomforting” with images that make you feel “you are being splattered with Jesus’s sweat”. So, what’s the attraction? “Its strikingly original …boy, can he draw”.

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