The Easel

26th August 2025

Beatriz Milhazes’s Labors of Love at the Guggenheim

Shana Nys Dambrot | The Village Voice | 20th July 2025

Milhaze loves colour and the circular form. Add to this her mash-up of Brazilian and European geometric abstraction and the resulting paintings and collages are, says one writer, a “controlled riot of form and colour”. Botanical motifs appear frequently as do textile-like patterning, all represented in the “saturated palette of tropical modernism. This work is beautiful but not contemplative. It’s optically disruptive”.  Milhaze is regarded as Brazil’s most successful contemporary painter.

Re-Envisioning Native American Art at the de Young

Staff | de Young / Legion of Honour Museums | 22nd August 2025

San Francisco’s de Young Museum is tackling a fraught issue – how to display its Indigenous art. Previously such decisions reflected top-down, non-Indigenous views of what was important. Now curatorial decisions involve collaboration and consultation. Greater recognition is being given to geographically different groups. And Indigenous curators are keen to intersperse contemporary works among older pieces. That speaks to their key message – “we are still here … a very living community”.

Picasso: tête-à-tête

Michael Cary | Gagosian Quarterly | 11th April 2025

Phillip Guston was vilified when, in 1970, he changed from abstract expressionism to figuration. Little wonder then that artists usually stick with a single style. Not Picasso though. He thought that sticking to one style simply led to “affectation”. In fact, he celebrated that he had “no style” and even went so far as to deny that his work could be divided into “periods”. “What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists … things always work out.”

19th August 2025

Awe and Reckoning: Edward Burtynsky’s ‘The Great Acceleration’

Samuel Abrams | aei.org | 11th August 2025

Pollution is often photographed to elicit an emotional response. Burtynsky doesn’t take that approach, instead using what he calls a “deadpan aesthetic” that avoids advocacy. He has spent decades revealing the vast production systems that underpin modern life – mines, farms, factories. “His ability to render vast, human-altered landscapes both legible and emotionally resonant sets him apart in a visually overloaded culture. Remarkable.” An interview with Burtynsky is here.

In Touch With the Galaxy

Rachel Hunter Himes | The Nation | 18th August 2025

Starting out as a documentary photographer, Simpson was quickly acclaimed for her conceptual juxtapositions of text and images. Like the Pictures Generation photographers, she focused on the way images sway our views of gender and identity. Now she has a “corner-turning” show of paintings, where meaning is equally opaque. Simpson merges magazine images with images of snowy landscapes, rocks, waterfalls, drawing a link, not so much with Black experience as with vast “time and space”.

Come Back Later When Your Work Isn’t So Human

Yael Friedman | Los Angeles Review of Books | 30th July 2025

The diversity of Fink’s photography reflected someone who was “deeply attuned to the natural choreography of life”. Debutante balls and Hollywood parties were treated just as seriously as civil rights protests. He had a politically engaged viewpoint but, says one writer, what he mostly brought was empathy. “Fink’s gaze is never judgmental, never pitiful or satirical. It barely registers as a “gaze” at all … his photos insist on shared experience.”

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