The Easel

24th February 2026

Yoko Ono’s Art Is an Exercise in Hope

Debra Brehmer | Hyperallergic | 20th January 2026

Ono is one of the world’s “most generous artists,” says the writer, because she incorporates the viewer into her work. By the mid 1960’s she was well known in the art avant garde through works such as Cut Piece (1964) where audiences snipped pieces from her dress. Compared to her work after meeting John Lennon, the early work seems “more radical … collaboration diminished [her] female brazenness”. Says one writer “That tension—between doing and thinking—is where Ono’s art lives.”

The Worst Show of 2025

Travis Diehl | Spike Art Magazine | 31st December 2025

When Johnson’s show opened at the Guggenheim, a critic wondered whether his work was “activism or just décor”. Those doubts persist. Johnson is “just okay” as an artist – so how did he get this prestigious retrospective? Perhaps it’s because his “post-black” work is “citation heavy”, meaning that evaluation of his art is deflected into discussions of “biography and identity”. Palm trees have been hung in the museum’s central void, perhaps “a way to nervously fill that famous space, as if the art itself isn’t enough”.

How Kaari Upson turned her world upside down

Alice Godwin | Apollo | 11th June 2025

About to open in Germany, Upson’s retrospective celebrates a promising career cut short by early death. She came to prominence with her “Larry” series inspired by exploring the abandoned house of an unknown neighbour. It’s a commentary on masculinity but, more importantly, an example of how her art blurs boundaries. She blurs individual identities, but also the boundary between fact versus fiction, between what is public versus private. This retrospective “will surely not be her last.”.

Between Worlds: Visitors to 37-08 Utopia Parkway

Sarah Lea | Gagosian Quarterly | 20th October 2025

Cornell’s studio has been re-created in a Paris gallery, bringing many reminiscences of this unusual artist. He lived in suburban New York and dreamed of travelling to Paris. His collages, box assemblages and films were made with materials from bric-a-brac stores. Inspired by surrealism his boxes are exercises in “urban reverie”. Despite friendships with many notable artists, he was a loner – or as a friend called him, a monk. Says a curator, Cornell was “born on the wrong continent at the wrong time”.

17th February 2026

The Bedazzling, Wild Designs of Modernism’s Forgotten Genius

Michael Kimmelman | Breaking One | 4th February 2026

Architects are now supposed to be multi-disciplinary collaborators rather than isolated creatives. If true, that makes Goff thoroughly modern. Mid-century America saw him as a polymath and a visionary, yet he is now little remembered. What marked him out were his daring designs and use of everyday materials and objects. He designed a church in the oilfields, for example, with a roof structure made from surplus oil pipes. Said one critic “the most provocative manifestation of American architectural genius”.

Eugène Atget, Readymade Icon

Julia Curl | Hyperallergic | 30th January 2026

As Paris modernised, Atget had the idea of photographing the old cluttered parts of the city.  It turned into a 30-year project. He didn’t think of himself as an artist, describing his images merely as “documents”. They were utilitarian is style, notably views of buildings taken around dawn when the streets were empty. Somehow those quiet images felt unsettling. Few of his photographs were printed in his lifetime but Atget is now regarded as a “precursor of modern photography”.

“Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture” Goes on View At The Frick Collection

Celia McGee | Galerie | 10th February 2026

When Gainsborough moved to Bath, his studio was next door to an upmarket health spa where he could observe the latest fashions. Those fashions can now be seen to have reflected important social changes. Britain’s wealth accumulation in the later 1700’s was immense, due to slavery, plantations, banking and factories. A new middle class wanted what the aristocracy had, including beautiful clothes and flattering Gainsborough portraits. It seems he tired of all the “upward striving”, calling it “the curs’d Face Business”.

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