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].”

Whitney Biennial 2026 Review: The Revolution Will Be Cute

Jjenny Wu | ArtReview | 7th March 2026

Britain’s Tate Prize is a regular target for scorn. It seems that the Whiteny Museum’s Biennial plays a similar role in the US. This year’s show has no unifying  theme – something that one writer calls “incoherent” but another says reflects its thankless task of “capturing the zeitgeist”. Perhaps it is simply copying the “moods and maladies” of US culture and politics. If so, “that knockoff quality is precisely what gives art its shabby charm.”

Inside the Enigmatic Mind of Photographer Larry Sultan

Miss Rosen | AnOther | 23rd February 2026

Sultan’s interest in photography was sparked by billboard imagery. Later, his career turned to another piece of Americana – the suburbs of Los Angeles. These houses were often depicted, wrongly in Sultan’s view, as “generic structures for generic lives”. What he saw was “the complex and often dark and bewildering world of suburban life.” His images of bedrooms, backyards and fences, capture this ambiguity. Said he, “I don’t know what to make of things, and I like to give a viewer the same kind of openness.” 

Bird-Shaped Promises and Life After War: ‘Dagobert Peche: Ornamental Genius’ at the Neue Galerie

Valeria Salvin | The Science Survey | 3rd February 2026

Paris has dominated the history of modernism, thus obscuring achievements elsewhere. Vienna Werkstätte was born out of the Arts and Crafts movement and emphasised simplicity and (geometric) clarity of shape in decorative arts objects. Peche, an Austrian designer, changed that with imaginative and opulent designs, inspired by the rococco. His creations ranged across metalwork, ceramics, textiles, wallpaper and jewellery. Peche was “the greatest ornamental genius Austria has produced since the Baroque”.

3rd March 2026

Jasper Johns: between the clock and the bed

Alison McDonald | Gagosian Quarterly | 6th February 2026

An interview with an obvious commercial slant, but interesting, nonetheless. When Johns started making “crosshatch” paintings in 1972, they were abruptly different from his previous work. These “fraught and fidgety” patterns bore no relation to pop art but neither did they have the emotional drama of artists such as Pollock and Rothko. Some speculated that he was referencing Picasso and Munch. Mostly though, they showed that Johns “didn’t just know how to paint, he knew how to make a painting do more.”

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