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This year’s RA Summer Exhibition is less awful than usual. It’s still full of some of the worst art you’ve ever seen – way too many Michael Craig-Martins and Bob and Roberta Smiths – but its awfulness is definitely a bit less awful.
This relative less-awfulness is partly thanks to Ryan Gander, the conceptual artist who is the coordinator of this year’s exhibition. He’s brought a little bit of strangeness to this stuffy old show, a bit of weird discomfort to the world’s oldest open submission exhibition, where amateurs get to have their tiny drawing of a flower totally eclipsed by a massive Tracey Emin nude. What a privilege.
Off in the Small Weston Room, the cupboard space off the main galleries usually reserved for video work, Gander’s built an odd little living room. A video of a bloke doing Bowie karaoke blares into the room, a disembodied corpse sits on a chair, a pair of silver boots have been dumped on a plinth. None of the work is great, but at least it’s a change from the usual tidal wave of paintings of gardens.
Don’t worry though, Summer Exhibition fans, there’s still plenty of that about: the opening gallery, selected by printmaker Katherine Jones, is an explosion of still lifes and landscapes, absolutely loads of them. Are any of them good? Hard to say, you almost immediately go Summer Exhibition-blind, overwhelmed by the floor to ceiling coverage of endless figuration.
The rest of the show is calmer and more restrained, which is a relief. The room selected by Humphrey Ocean is colourful and fun, Goshka Macuga’s is sombre and serene and the first of the three Eileen Cooper rooms is the best hang I’ve seen at the Summer Exhibition for years.
But who cares about the curation? Once you’re packed in here with thousands of other punters you’ll barely be able to see the art, let alone notice any themes. Because this isn’t an art experience, it’s a buying opportunity. It’s all for sale, even to schlubs like me or you. And there’s plenty here I’d take home if I had any money.
For a start, there are two paintings of cars on fire by Harry Hill – yes that Harry Hill – which are both bleak and silly. A Louis Loveless painting of a drone’s eye-view of a pickup truck captured in the moments just before an attack plays on similarly bleak, but much less fun, ideas of vehicular destruction.
Of the hundreds of portraits here, David Gamble’s thick, gloopy, gross self-portrait is my favourite. Of the hundreds of cat paintings, Jill Feld’s manic, panicked little black kitty is the weirdest and most arresting. Of the multiple paintings of brutalist buildings, Peter Wylie’s image of Alexander Fleming House is the best. Gray Wielebinski’s ink drawing of a terrifying screaming head with fangs and four mouths will haunt my dreams, as will Alison Friend’s portrait of a poodle cradling a portrait of another poodle.
But for pure painterly excellence, you won’t get much better than Glen Pudvine and Harriet Porter. The former’s image of two hands unfolding a piece of paper is stunningly executed. The latter’s painting of a small, silver pot is beautiful, hazy, minimal, serene. She’s an artist I’ve only ever seen at the Summer Exhibition, and every year she’s the best thing in it.
A lot of this is about what your eye is naturally drawn to. But some things here are also objectively rubbish. Tracey Emin contributes a vast, half-arsed nude. There’s also a giant Antony Gormley structure – a model of the artist himself crouching on the floor that you’re encouraged to enter from what I can only imagine is meant to be his backside. Worst of all, I counted at least two works by Sean Scully, the modern master of tossed off, ugly abstraction.
But look, it’s the Summer Exhibition. It’s an anachronistic exercise in cramming as much art and as many viewers into a space as possible. A mix of the awful and less awful is exactly what you’d expect.
English (US) ·