1. Pregnant White Maid (Elmgreen & Dragset)
    Elmgreen & Dragset
  2. Guy Montagu-Pollock
    Guy Montagu-PollockWhitechapel Gallery facade, with the Tree of Life by Rachel Whiteread.
  • Art | Galleries
  • Whitechapel
  • Recommended

Whitechapel Gallery

Eddy Frankel
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Time Out says

What is it? 

Since 1901, Whitechapel Art Gallery has built a reputation as a pioneering contemporary institution, giving early, important exhibitions to artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Frida Kahlo. It got a big refurb in 2009, when it was transformed into a vibrant, holistic centre of art complete with a research centre, archives room and café.

Why go? 

This place has been an art hotbed for over a century, and it’s still doing sterling work, giving space and attention to artists that other institutions might overlook.

Don’t miss

Its main exhibitions are often great, but it’s the more experimental stuff in the archive and library areas that are usually the most interesting. 

When to visit

Open Tue-Sun 11am-6pm; Thu 11am-9pm.

Ticket info

Ticket prices vary, and some shows are free. Check the website for details. 

Time Out tip

The downstairs cafe is an atmospheric, intimate place to have a coffee while browsing through your latest art mag purchase from the gallery’s bookshop.

Details

Address
77-82 Whitechapel High St
London
E1 7QX
Transport:
Tube: Aldgate East
Price:
Free
Opening hours:
Tue-Sun (except Thu) 11am-6pm; Thu 11am-9pm.
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What’s on

Lygia Clark: ‘The I and The You’ and Sonia Boyce: ‘An Awkward Relation’

Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce, two artists separated by decades and continents, but brought together at the Whitechapel Gallery to explore their aesthetic connections and similarities. Does it work? Are they linked in some deep, profound, interesting way? No. Clark was a Brazilian modernist, who over the course of her career moved away from 2D geometric abstraction towards artworks you could touch and interact with, artworks that could shape your emotions. There are some beautiful examples of her clever abstract paintings and drawings here; a clash of white and green triangles, a piercing composition of sharp red and black spikes. But her ‘bichos’ are the real draw, neat little metal structures you can fold and reshape, allowing you to become an integral part of the art-making process. Later, Clark would get into psychology, creating artworks that had therapeutic uses; bags of ping pong balls that act as sensory toys, multiple jumpsuits sewn together forcing six people to function as one body. It might work as therapy, but it’s not great art. Then there’s a not-quite-successful attempt to show how Clark’s participatory artworks relate to English artist Sonia Boyce, who has also co-curated this show and whose work takes over the upstairs galleries. A 2006 video piece comes first, showing a white man and a Black woman having their hair braided together. It’s an incisive, tense metaphor for the awkward relation of the show’s title, people forced to find a way to share uncomfortabl

Peter Kennard: ‘Archive of Dissent’

4 out of 5 stars
Peter Kennard is outraged, irate and angry. Because when the British artist and professor of political art looks at the world around him, he sees nothing but injustice, greed, violence and pain. But rather than shouting pointlessly about it or collapsing into a powerless heap like the rest of us, he channels his ire into art. His stark photomontages have been a visual diary of corporate greed and state warfare for decades. Here at the Whitechapel, posters from throughout his career attack nuclear proliferation, the Gulf War, Thatcher, British imperialism, Nato’s involvement in Yugoslavia, privatisation and countless other charged, sensitive, volatile topics. His best work is instantly recognisable: minimal, funny, shocking, filled with skulls and gas masks and bombs and barbed wire. Peace symbols disarm warheads, the earth wears a gas mask, hands crush missiles. Kennard is screamingly, heatedly anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-imperial. These vicious, confrontational images represent the despair of the powerless. The same images appear repeatedly – gas masks and clocks and bombs – but here updated in a recent installation with Palestinian flags, their red running like blood. The final installation combines his original montages with newspapers in which they were reprinted. This is art for dissemination, messages to be spread, not something pretty for your wall.  Kennard’s influence today is obvious and widespread, and his visual language has been latched onto by countless younger
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