The Easel

25th April 2023

At the ICA, a breathtaking ‘Simone Leigh’

Murray Whyte | Boston Globe | 6th April 2023

Having starred in Venice last year, Leigh is now getting a career survey. It highlights her longstanding interest in the intersections of different cultures. She spotlights racial equality but also honours the work of women, their inner lives, their agency. The symbolic quality of her pieces gives them a quiet eloquence, a quality emphasized by the use of humble materials like clay and raffia. “Walking from room to room, I had the sense of watching greatness unfold.”

18th April 2023

Cecily Brown Destroys Time—Throughout Her Life and Now at the Met

Kat Herriman | Cultured | 4th April 2023

1990’s London had little interest in “retrograde” painting, so Brown moved to New York. Meteoric success followed including, now, a prestigious mid-career survey.  What has caught the eye of critics and the market is how, reminiscent of de Kooning, she combines abstraction and figuration. Further, her paintings address themes that were of interest to the Old Masters – still life, the nude, memento mori. Says the writer, Brown is an “aesthetic omnivore”.   Brown discusses the show here (5 min).

Stop making sense: Why a new Art Institute show on Dalí revisits surrealism at exactly the right time

Christopher Borrelli | Chicago Tribune | 2nd April 2023

Dali was hugely famous for decades, based on his 1930’s work that explored Freud’s “superior reality of dreams”. But even in  the 1940’s, relentless self-promotion and celebrity seeking were making surrealism an “art world freak show”. A Chicago museum is attempting a rehabilitation by focusing on Dali’s early achievements. The above piece is a decent review of this show but to get a much fresher sense of Dali as an art world conundrum, it is well worth reading this piece, written in 1945.

Evelyn Hofer: Eyes On The City

Jessica Skwire Routhier | Antiques and the Arts | 11th April 2023

Camera equipment matters. Street photography requires a camera that is easily handled. Hofer, in contrast, used a large format camera on a tripod, “slow photography” that needed collaborative subjects. It gave her portraiture a reflective, classical feel although acclaim was limited because she was an early user of colour. Today, Hofer’s reputation rests on photobooks of cities – London, New York, Florence and Dublin – mostly done in the 1960’s. More images are here.

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