The Easel

10th March 2026

Pat Oleszko

Dan Cameron | The Brooklyn Rail | 4th March 2026

When Oleszko took up burlesque dancing as an art student, it foreshadowed a flamboyant career. Fifty years later, her performance art is being celebrated (and vindicated) with a show of her inflatable sculptures and meticulous costumes. Says she, “I think of myself as a sculptor who happens to be using my body as the armature. My ideas are primarily visual, and I activate them through words, movement and situation. [I am proud that] I can actually reach people in a way that is unprescribed.”

A Sweeping Retrospective for Artist Carol Bove Positions Her Among the Sculptural Titans

Grace Edquist | Vogue | 27th February 2026

These days Bove does “big” sculpture but that’s not where she started. First came a decade of drawings, then conceptual assemblages of found objects and small sculptures and then, a decade ago, large looping structures.  Their contradictory qualities – hefty but with an air of delicacy – have made her reputation. Recent works incorporate found materials alongside brightly coloured crumpled steel.  Says a curator “I think Carol is putting a very feminist lens on that tradition [of masculine sculpture].”

3rd March 2026

Tracey Emin’s A Second Life at the Tate Modern: beyond the YBA heyday, the artist sings anew

Dora Davies-Evitt | tatler | 26th February 2026

Emin has lived life to excess and then, well, “overshared”. This leads some critics to see weaknesses in a “vast” survey. One suggests, for example, that Emin’s sculptures are not great and her neons belong in hotel foyers. This writer disagrees. Emin takes “the thing [worth saying] and drags it into the public – sex, shame, trauma, abortion – made digestible through aesthetic force and relatability (that messy, unmade bed) … her art is attractive for its lack of euphemism and varnish.”

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