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Digital doilies kaleidoscope drawing11/7/2023 The works in this room vie for eye-space many compete and most fail. Exceptionally compactly hung, this space shows the greatest diversity of artworks in all senses: small studies of plants and figures merge into surreal and fantastical landscapes pastel effects are overtaken by acrylic boldness, and monochrome by almost neon hues canvas shapes jump from rectangular to triangular and back again. The dark rectangles of Sean Scully’s enormous Full House are reiterated in Cornelia Parker’s fragile-looking, black patinated bronze cast of pavement cracks – although Parker’s piece is displayed on a plinth rather than directly on the floor, numbing its connection to the physicality of walking.Ĭontrast this with the tessellated patchwork of Room I, curated by Gus Cummins. Room II emphasises geometry and bold tones. Particular highlights include Donald Sultan’s Aqua Button Flower June 30 2015, Mick Moon’s three paintings, At Sea, Dusk and Pause, and Georg Baselitz’s upside-down drawing of a seated nude. Room III, which is curated by artists Eileen Cooper and Bill Jacklin (and, confusingly, precedes Rooms I and II), is filled with light, allowing the bright, abstract paintings on its stacked walls to sing. It is as if the curators saw, following the confusion of the Wohl Central Hall, that playfulness, colour and broad aesthetic affinities were an acceptable way to hang an exhibition space after all. Thankfully, the zigzagging tensions between the political, the emotional, the picturesque and the humorously futile disappear in the following few rooms, and the atmosphere lightens. As if to summarise what we are all thinking, a dizzying coloured dot painting by Tom Phillips emits the desperate Beckettian cry: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” The women are not “to go” after all, but are to be admired, consumed, bought and sold. Yet its provocation is muffled by its inclusion in the visual melee and by the fact that the postcards can’t be taken away and treasured by visitors as in previous installations of the work, owing to the £12,500 price tag. ![]() ![]() Meanwhile, a profound political statement is made by Mathilde ter Heijne’s Woman to Go – a rack of postcards depicting anonymous female subjects, each inscribed on the reverse with biographies of other little-known but high-achieving women from history. A group of pleasant, cloudy landscapes cluster on one of the walls, while two of Tracey Emin’s anxious neon utterances face off across the room (“I Did Not Say I Can Never Love You / I Said I Could Never Love” “Never again!”) and Yinka Shonibare’s Angel (Red) reflects the distorted visage of Jim Dine’s Poet Singing, First Version. A clunky, two-wheeled vehicle bearing precariously balanced glass bottles takes a central plinth, its Duchampian uselessness echoed by a suspended spinning bicycle wheel adorned with peacock feathers. ![]() The love-hate absurdity of the Summer Exhibition’s dense format is reinforced this year in its first room, the Wohl Central Hall. ![]() And it is no wonder that space continues to be at a premium, with 12,500 submissions from artists both emerging and known whittled down to a “mere” 1,092 works by the show’s selection and hanging committee. Granted, a few of the 14 spaces in this year’s exhibition give their inhabitants (the gallery-goers as well as the artworks) a little more room to breathe. What has probably not changed is the sprawling, chock-a-block nature of the layout. There is certainly more abstraction, more stylistic and thematic variation and possibly more colour – and film, photography and digital art have (just about) permeated the grandiose classical corridors. Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2017 The RA’s annual open submission exhibition presents a shifting ‘kaleidoscope’ of contemporary art – but what does it show us about art now?Īs London’s Royal Academy teeters on the precipice of its 250th anniversary next year, one wonders how its Summer Exhibition has changed from year one to year 249.
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