Top 10 art exhibitions in London
Our critics' pick of the must-see exhibitions this season
1
Head of a Peasant', 1928-29, by Kazimir Malevich© The State Russian Museum, St Petersburg
Malevich
If you know one thing about Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), it’s that he is the creator of the suprematist ‘Black Square’, the first and last word in abstraction, painting’s absolute zero. Knowing this lends a fair amount of anticipation to the initial rooms of this compelling retrospective. When is it going to come, this avant-garde fetish object?
2
British Folk Art
My wife once painted a sign for a local pick-your-own strawberry farm, and it got stolen within a week. It got stolen because it was good. This is by way of illustrating the very basic transaction at work in this Tate Britain show. It is full of brilliantly executed, unselfconscious works of sublime creativity.
Percy Wyndham Lewis, A Battery Shelled, 1919digitised by Ted Dearberg (IWM)
Truth and Memory: British Art of the First World War
The war was just too big, confided William Kennington after he had completed his masterpiece ‘The Kensingtons at Laventie’ in 1915, one of the first things you’ll see in the ‘Memory’ section of this captivating two-part show. The authorities had hoped that Kennington would make more paintings to rival his pin-sharp, quietly devastating depiction of his unit – knackered, wounded, each soldier caught in a moment of reflection after their march back to billets from the trenches. But he couldn’t do it. The war was just too big.
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4
Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs
When illness took its toll and that giant of twentieth century French art Henri Matisse could no longer paint, he turned to to scissors and paper. The works he created in this very late period become some of his most iconic. Though he may have lost his ability to handle a paintbrush, he lost none of his brilliant vision and compositional know-how. The 120 works on display here will be amongst the best you will see in this country this year. Mad for Matisse: leading contemporary artists pay tribute to the master here. Read about all the reunited masterpieces in London this year here.
5
Gilbert & George: Scapegoating Pictures for London
Never have kisses seemed more self-consciously sardonic than in Gilbert & George’s ‘Scapegoating Pictures for London’. Each multi-panel photomontage bears the artists’ signatures along with a couple of Xs. These are constants in a shifting sea of inflammatory signifiers. It’s the old contemporary art ‘light touch paper, stand well back’ trick, repeated, scaled up and repeated again for good measure.
6
Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920-31
First there were Ben and Winifred, just married, painting the same scenes side by side like proto-modernist peas in a pod. Then along came Christopher, troubled and ambitious, who’d been to Paris to meet Picasso and wanted to be the most famous painter in Britain. Together, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and Christopher ‘Kit’ Wood made the kind of faltering steps towards modernism that render Britain’s early twentieth-century art history such a pleasant if slightly plodding affair. Throw in some biographical detail, some letters and diary entries, though, and you end up with something far pacier.
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7
Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album
Many stars claim that had they not been actors, they’d have been hooligans; by all accounts Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) managed to be both. In 1955 aged 19, he appeared in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’. In 1961, wife-to-be Brooke Hayward gave him a camera and for the next few years, until distracted by writing and directing the 1969 film ‘Easy Rider’, he interspersed his acting roles and drug-related insanity with thousands of black-and-white photographs.
8
Giulio Paolini ESSERE O NO ESSERE Macro - Roma a cura di Bartolomeo Pietromarchi© ph. Luciano Romano 2012
Giulio Paolini: To Be Or Not To Be
Right at the start of this excellent retrospective is a lifesize image of Giulio Paolini, arms folded, wearing some cool shades). He’s facing you, except he stands partially hidden behind the bars of a wooden stretcher. Dating from the mid-1960s, it’s a typically stylish, typically thought-provoking piece by the seventysomething Italian conceptualist, encapsulating ideas that have occupied him throughout his career: that the artist is largely irrelevant; that the only important thing to consider is the object that you see before you.
9
Yvonne Rainer: Dance Works
How do you freeze-frame a moment or capture everyday activities in a dance piece? The New York-based dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and writer Yvonne Rainer might have some top tips, seeing as she revolutionised contemporary dance to do just that. Focusing on Rainer’s output between 1961 and 1972 this exhibition of stunning black-and-white photographs and grainy videos of various performances, along with her writings and diagrammatical instructions, reveals how she successfully expanded the parameters of conventional dance.
10
Installation view of Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2014 c. Benedict Johnson
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2014
This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition feels more than ever like a series of shows within a show. This is a good thing. Just as your appetite, say, for the hot-hued and textured (as in the Hughie O’Donoghue-curated Gallery IV of paintings and sculptures by the likes of Frank Bowling and Phyllida Barlow) starts to wane, you can wander off to the cooler climes of Cornelia Parker’s black-and-white themed gallery, given over to the likes of David Shrigley, Martin Creed, Mona Hatoum and Gillian Wearing in monochrome (though not polite, thankfully) mode.
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