The Easel

12th May 2026

Cecily Brown: ‘Painting happens very quickly; often I don’t know if it’s working’

Jackie Wullschlager | Financial Times | 21st March 2026

After art school, Brown left London for New York where she hoped she would fit in. Two decades later she is back for her first major solo show. Her “landscapes-as-abstractions” are both commercially appealing and critically acclaimed. Gestural amalgams of “flesh and pastoral” don’t carry a message other than her appreciation of painting. For some critics her work can be “inert” but not this writer. Brown wants to show “convulsive beauty [and] has magnificently achieved it … a triumphant homecoming”.

Henry Moore at Kew: Monumental Nature

Sarah Tucker | The Arbuturian | 9th May 2026

Can a garden become part of an artwork?  The sculptor Henry Moore saw sculpture as “an art of the open air” and this show places thirty of his large modernist works amidst the Victorian splendour of London’s Kew Gardens. While not an obvious pairing the result, says this writer, is “unexpectedly profound”. Amidst Kew’s ancient trees, not only do Moore’s works become “elemental” but the trees begin to look “anatomical … nature keeps quietly demonstrating [sculpture-like] forms nearby. Magnificent.”

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