Latest art reviews

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.

Your parents told you that if you got too close to the TV your eyes would go square, but no one warns you about what happens when you get too close to a painting. What happens is Mary Ramsden’s show, where everything is blown out, fuzzy and hazy.

It’s grim up north they say, but George Shaw’s paintings prove that it’s not much better anywhere else in this country. This group of six small enamel paintings – and a handful of watercolours of flowers – see Shaw returning to his childhood estate in Coventry to continue documenting its long, slow decline into dereliction.

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. 

Some people spend too much time on the internet. And by some people I mean you, obviously, and me. All of us. It’s just that most people don’t turn that filthy habit into art. Parker Ito does, though.

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.

There’s a limit to how much you can say about Francis Bacon; to how many times you can talk about viscerality, the anguish of existence, the torment of love, etc etc etc, over and over. But we’ve apparently not reached that limit yet, because the National Portrait Gallery’s put on a big show of Frankie’s portraiture, and someone’s got to tell you if it’s worth 23 quid.

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.

The everyday has radical poetic potential in Haegue Yang’s work. The South Korean artist looks at blinds, envelopes, drying racks and paper and she sees dance, sculpture and movement.

Nicola L. is not built for 2024. The Moroccan-born French artist (1932-2018) used her art to push a utopian, subversive agenda that sits pretty awkwardly with progressive modern politics. A film here comes with a warning that it was made back when attitudes towards cultural appropriation were different, the main installation comes with an apology that it’s not wheelchair accessible, and all the radical ideas here have been moved on from.

You know a gallery is absolutely winging it when they say their new show is an attempt ‘to fold or stretch time’ and ‘consider new conceptions of the “historical”’ while also being about climate change, clairvoyance and the ‘plasticity’ of the body. Which is to say that Raven Row is flying by the seat of its incredibly nonsensical pants in this exhibition somehow about all of those topics, curated by Denmark-based theorist and art historian Lars Bang Larsen.

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.

What do you do when your world is falling apart? When regimes are oppressing, corporations are exploiting, society is crumbling and economies are collapsing? Well, you can fight, you can make art, or you can just live. The Indian artists in the Barbican’s big autumn show do all three.

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.

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.

Bodies lie splintered, shattered, in pieces on the floor in Geumhyung Jeong’s installation at the ICA. Skeletal appendages – ribs, femurs, spines and skulls – are abandoned on the concrete, wires and motors and batteries left half connected to tibias and hips.

You know how you get all tongue-tied and stupid, blushing and awkward, in front of someone way too beautiful? Monet will do that to you too. There are 21 views of the Thames here, 21 paintings almost too gorgeous to be real. 

‘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.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum has cast you as an extra in a tense, hazy film about alienation, love and murder. She’s built a series of plywood film sets in the Barbican Curve, and filled them with rough, bare paintings, each one detailing a grim, uncomfortable narrative arc.

Inarguably, octogenarian artist Michael Craig-Martin matters. He taught the YBAs, pushed conceptualism in bold new directions and created one of the most unique, immediately recognisable visual languages of the contemporary era. But he has only really had two ideas.

There’s a crushing, sombre atmosphere of paranoia an bleakness in young English painter Lewis Hammond’s work. In his biggest UK show, he’s filled the gallery with demons, depression and disgust in a despairing meditation on how modern society chews you up and spits you out.

How much light can you pack into a painting? How much love, despair, hope, anxiety? In the case of Vincent Van Gogh, the answer is: infinite. This mesmerising show of kaleidoscopic, emotional art brings together work from the last two years of his life, years spent in Provence turning painting inside out and mentally falling apart in the process.

Like Oppenheimer and the bomb, you've got to wonder if the originators of immersive art ever look at the thing they helped usher into the world and think ‘good god, what have we done?’

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.

There’s a primal urge in us to return to the cave. The cave is where we, as early-humans, once dwelt, and Goshka Macuga is ushering us back home.

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. 

Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy taste. Luckily, Sir Elton John would probably know his art from his elbow even if he hadn’t become one of the world’s biggest, richest megastars. For decades now, he has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, even at the Tate in 2017, and now it’s the V&A’s turn. 

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken led to his immune system attacking itself. He was hospitalised and paralysed from the neck down. But the doctors were wrong: he survived. Those years in hospital, then in recovery, stuck immobile on a ward, lost in his thoughts, awakened a deep creativity in him.

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.