The Easel

26th January 2021

The Gloopy Glory of Frank Auerbach’s Portraits

Jason Farago | The New York Times | 21st January 2021

A ‘national treasure in Britain, Auerbach gets few shows in New York. Given one though, critics there are wowed. One ponders the show’s “almost heroic dimension”, a reflection of Auerbach’s “obsession with the painterly stroke”. This writer marvels at the intense, condensed Auerbach gaze: A portrait of the artist’s wife “appears to be just a dense knot of thick golden strokes. You looked at someone for a whole year and saw … this?”

Blockbuster Bloat

Jackson Arn | Art in America | 12th January 2021

When do we reach too much of a good thing? In 1980, Cindy Sherman launched her acclaimed performative photographs Untitled Film Stills. Are her new works just repeating the same ideas? Sherman has been “dulled by decades of A-list indulgence. As pictures have gotten smaller and nimbler, [her] art has gotten bulkier and slower, not to mention pricier. Sherman has become beholden to big-spender audiences who expect the same joke year after year.”

In Making Gavin Brown a Partner, Barbara Gladstone Is Betting That You Can Get Big and Still Think Small

Sarah Douglas | ARTnews | 17th December 2020

To understand the dramas being caused by mega-galleries, read this. Smallish New York gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, was superb at finding new artists but kept losing them to mega galleries. Largish Gladstone Gallery is renowned for looking after its artists but its founder is now in her 80’s. Their merger last year, a rare event, poses the question – can a gallery be viable without being a global selling machine? Many hope so.

5th January 2021

Interiors: hello from the living room

Alfred Mac Adam | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st November 2020

Interiors are a genre with enduring appeal. Images of a simple room with sparse adornments offer “the chaste harmony of geometry “. More often, we get entangled in a painting’s “psychology”. When everything is as it should be, do we infer a sense of security. When things seem a little odd, is it normal messiness or evidence of a crime? And, especially when darkness falls, “looking out or looking in … is charged with voyeurism.” More images are here.

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