The Easel

21st February 2023

Mike Nelson: Extinction Beckons at the Hayward Gallery review, one of the best surveys I’ve seen

Ben Luke | Evening Standard | 21st February 2023

Nelson’s acclaimed installations are hugely ambitious and huge – a labyrinth of “dingy rooms, full of grubby decorations”, salvaged industrial machinery, a woodshed partially buried under sand. Many are “speculative fictions” that feel “uncanny”, tempting the viewer to construct an explanatory narrative. “It’s like walking through a novel, each room a chapter deepening the intrigue, only the protagonists are nearly entirely conjured in our heads … one of the most original shows I have seen.”

Olivia Laing, Hilton Als and More on the “Unapologetic” Art of Alice Neel

Violet Conroy | AnOther | 17th February 2023

Neel’s self-portrait at age 80 is acclaimed because it “tells it as it is”. That about sums up her career in portraiture. Taking people from her neighborhood or her artistic network, she revealed “what the world had done to them and their retaliation”. Of her portrait of Warhol – “Alice saw straight through [the mask he made for himself]. You can feel how much he longs to be beautiful. She’s done him out in the most flattering, girlish pastel shades but she’s also stripped him bare.”

Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Kevin Salatino | The Burlington Magazine | 15th January 2023

As a professor at London’s Royal Academy, Fuseli was a figure of propriety. In private, though, he churned out erotic drawings. The museum claims that these works illuminate 18th century anxieties about polite appearances.  However, Fuseli intended them as private works, undercutting claims that they are a commentary on Enlightenment society.  So, where is the compelling rationale for this show? Private fetishes may be “timeless”, but that doesn’t make them of general interest.

14th February 2023

Peter Doig at the Courtauld Gallery review: magnificence among the masters

Ben Luke | Evening Standard | 9th February 2023

Doig is often called a painter’s painter, a recognition of his painterly skills and distinctive, rich imagery. His canoes floating on forest lakes or, more recently, sunny island scenes are shifting combinations of the remembered and the magical. Not infrequently, they feel vaguely unsettling. “Doig is unmatched in contemporary painting in just this equilibrium of the specific and the inchoate … of unusual colour and of unexplained but intriguing incident across the canvas.”

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits that question history

Kelly Grovier | bbc.com | 17th January 2023

During a brief, covid-interrupted run, this show’s reviews mostly focused on Yiadom-Boyake as a portraitist. Second time around, attention turns to just how enigmatic her portraits are. These are imagined characters, not easily linked to a particular moment or place. Despite the “mute language and furtive glances” there is rarely a narrative. Yiadom-Boakye has taken a genre usually focused on white males and given it vitality through a new focus – “the infinite possibility of blackness”.

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