The Easel

7th May 2024

ESSAY: The kitsch we need

Morgan Meis | The-Easel

Ron Mueck, the hyper realist sculptor, is very popular with the gallery-going public. In contrast, critics throw at his work terms like “unrelentingly kitsch and sentimental”. Contributing Editor Morgan Meis acknowledges some of this criticism but thinks that sculptures like his Pregnant Woman or A Girl are important.

“Mueck is actually exploring a subject matter [pregnancy and infancy] that has been strikingly neglected hitherto. [I]f art does happen in Pregnant Woman, it is because Mueck has presented the physical reality of pregnancy, the astounding and mysterious fact of what it means to have one’s body transformed in that way. This is something Western art has not wanted to do, has not allowed space for, in most of its history. I am glad that Pregnant Woman exists.”

Tribute: Richard Serra (1938-2024)

Pansy Schulman | Architectural Record | 27th March 2024

Casual jobs at a steel works gave Serra “a certain respect for the potential of steel”. This respect later expressed itself in metres-high torqued sheets of rust-covered steel. These huge installations commanded attention, in part due to their size, but also some nervousness that the looming steel might fall over. Serra is considered to have redefined “the connection between viewer and artwork” The saga of his work Clara Clara, intended for Paris’s Tuileries Gardens, is recounted here.

Enter the void with Pierre Huyghe

Michael Prodger | Apollo | 1st May 2024

Huyghe is famous for exploring realities that “might have been”. In this Venice show, his sculptures and installations incorporate AI systems that go about the business of harvesting information and reacting to it. These “speculative fictions” of existence are “inert, funereal, [with a] slow moving beauty.” They are conceptually rich but not necessarily artistically rich. “There is the niggling sense of something so meaningful that it ends up carrying no sense at all.” Images are here.

12th March 2024

How Peter Blake makes his sculptures Pop

Kirsten Tambling | Apollo | 5th March 2024

Years before Warhol, Pop had emerged (in name and form) in Britain. Blake was an early figure, notable for his record album sleeves and his sculpture. He “slyly” juxtaposes high and low culture – Beethoven standing next to Elvis, or Hogarth prints next to comics. These works don’t cluster around a single narrative but rather “a proliferation of speculative anecdotes [such as] where are the Disney princesses going?” His work may not be heavily intellectual but is “as delightful as an anecdote can be.”

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