RA Summer Exhibition: Less Awful, Thanks to Ryan Gander
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Ryan Gander coordinates this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, transforming the Small Weston Room into an 'odd little living room' installation featuring a Bowie karaoke video, a disembodied corpse on a chair and silver boots dumped on a plinth
- Harry Hill (the comedian) contributes two paintings of cars on fire that the reviewer calls both 'bleak and silly' — and a highlight of the show's hundreds of works
- Harriet Porter's painting of a small silver pot is singled out as the best thing in the show — 'beautiful, hazy, minimal, serene' — despite the reviewer having only ever encountered her work at the Summer Exhibition
- Tracey Emin contributes a 'vast, half-arsed nude' and Antony Gormley installs a giant crouching figure entered through what 'can only be meant to be his backside,' with Sean Scully delivering 'at least two' works of 'tossed off, ugly abstraction'
- Katherine Jones selects the opening gallery as 'an explosion of still lifes and landscapes,' while rooms curated by Humphrey Ocean (colourful, fun), Goshka Macuga (sombre, serene) and Eileen Cooper (called the best hang in years) provide calmer counterpoints
- The reviewer notes every work in the show is for sale, and the overall verdict lands on 'anachronistic' — a crowd-cramming mix of the awful and less awful that's exactly what you'd expect
Why it matters: For art buyers and gallery-goers, the review flags specific works worth pursuing — Harry Hill's burning cars, Harriet Porter's silver pot, Glen Pudvine's hands unfolding paper — while steering them clear of Emin's nude, Gormley's backside-entrable figure and Scully's abstraction, all crammed into the world's oldest open-submission show where amateur flower drawings share walls with famous names.
Ask SkimNews
