Latest art reviews

‘Where did it all go wrong’ is a question I ask myself almost daily. American ecologist David Abram, whose 1996 book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ is the inspiration for this group show at Edel Assanti, thought he knew the answer: it all went to shit when we figured out how to write.

Standing in front of ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ is like slipping down a water slide. The most important painting by sixteenth century Italian maestro Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, aka Parmigianino, is an exercise in sinuous, surreal psychedelia, and it’s stunning.

While the big, imposing, hefty men of mid-century American abstraction were trying to reshape the course of art, Joan Snyder was doing something quieter, but no less important. Now 84, Snyder has spent her life using abstraction not for grand gestures, but for smaller, personal ones. Written across the walls of this career-spanning show is a lifetime of emotions and feelings, of memories and experiences, in big bursts of shape and colour.

This huge, complex, ambitious show looks at the artists who were present at the dawn of the computer age, artists filled with hope and creativity, long before that tech became fridges that can spy on you and an internet good for nothing but trolling and doomscrolling.

Like a blast of hairspray to the eyes, the Tate is about to blind you with the ’80s. This expansive, exhaustive and exhausting exhibition features dozens of photographers and hundreds of photographs depicting all the turbulence of that most turbulent of decades.

Back in the mid-1960s, pure abstraction still just about meant something. We’d already had Malevitch and Kandinsky and all the abstract expressionists, but art hadn’t yet been totally blown to pieces by conceptualism. And at the precipice of all that came Patrick Heron and Victor Pasmore, showing up to represent the UK at the 1965 São Paulo Biennial with a load of experimental paintings that were still – just – fresh enough to feel experimental. The show is semi-recreated here, with a few works from the Biennial mixed with others from the same period. 

Everyone in 1970s Lagos was cooler than you. At least they were on the evidence of this show, which collects together the best work of Abi Morocco Photos, a husband and wife duo who documented life in Nigeria as prosperity blossomed and the economy boomed.

The camera is meant to be a tool of truth, an instrument that captures reality. But it captures something else in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work: fantasy. The Nigerian-born artist lived in Brixton until his early death in his 30s in 1989. In the privacy of his studio, he was able to use the camera to explore ideas of difference, identity and a whole lot of desire.

According to a bloke called Giorgio Vasari, sixteenth century art lovers queued for days just to catch a glimpse of the Leonardo da Vinci drawing that the RA’s got on show. It was the Renaissance equivalent of a Yayoi Kusama infinity mirror room. Leonardo was a blockbuster renaissance artist, and so were Michelangelo and Raphael, two younger artists who were in the same city at the same time, competing for the same attention (and big money commissions).

Picasso never stopped. He was relentless, prolific, voracious. He apparently produced 50,000 artworks in his lifetime, including thousands of paintings, countless drawings, tons of ceramics and – as this show at the British Museum proves – a vast amount of prints.

Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there. She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera.

Why go: This is what photojournalism is all about: the truth.

No object is just an object: everything is a symbol. And in Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s excellent exhibition of items from the British Museum’s endless archives and stores, every object is a symbol of power, dominance and exploitation.

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space.

If you like GDPR training, you’re in for a treat at the Serpentine. Tech experimenters Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s series of mediaeval church altars and choral compositions is actually a deep dive into the intricacies and legal frameworks of AI modelling. The quasi-historical approach helps to make you feel safe in the uncomfortable, scary waters of new technology.

Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed.

‘Know thyself’ it says in thick red letters on a wall at this year’s Turner Prize exhibition. Those words, a directive from Ancient Greek priestess Pythia, are a common thread running through all four artists’ work: this is art about the urge, the desperate need, to figure out who you are.

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid.

‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture. An earlier incarnation of the exhibition in 2020 fell prey to Covid restrictions after only five weeks and in the intervening time its narrative has grown, reflecting Muholi’s importance as a creative force for change.

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories. 

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.