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How’d you spend your January and February? Going out exploring the city, living a healthy cultural life, seeing the sights, painting the town red? Or did you, like all sensible people, cloister yourself away, wrapped in a thousand blankets, to wait out the end of winter like an agoraphobic hermit?
Well, if you did the latter you might have missed some amazing art exhibitions. Massive audiovisual installations, feminist ire, conceptual cleverness, classical painting and loads of adorableness, there’s something for everyone. But be quick, you’ve only got a few weeks left to catch these shows.
Five London art exhibitions closing soon
’Impressionists on Paper‘ at the Royal Academy, closing Mar 10.
At some point, we’ll all realise that there’s just nothing left to say about impressionism and we’ll stop trying to reframe this one tiny window of art history in a million different ways just to sell more tickets to ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’ listeners from Surrey. But today is not that day, because the RA is looking at how that revolutionary group from nineteenth century France used paper. Unnecessary? Hugely. But, begrudgingly, quite good, because this show is full of intimate, small-scale beauties.
Read the review here.
Douglas Gordon at Gagosian, closing Mar 16.
The walls are covered in text in countless languages, half-remembered aphorisms gouged into the plaster, fractured sentences in neon, semi-palindromic rhymes in vinyl. ‘I’m the architect of my own addictions’ is carved into the wall as you walk in, surrounded by phrases like ‘where does it hurt’, ‘rotting from the outside in’, ‘how much can I take’. In one room, a hundred screens show every film he’s ever made. None of this is pretty, approachable or cohesive. But it’s so emotional that it doesn’t matter. It feels like a man grasping at a past he can’t get a grip on, trying desperately to grab a steady hold as life slips through his fingers.
Read the review here.
Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine, closing Mar 17.
Barbara Kruger has a lot to say. The American artist has sloganeered her way to the very top with a combination of sans serif text and sampled imagery that’s as instantly recognisable and influential as it is widely copied. And her show at the Serpentine is a lexical assault, a torrent of word play and semantic shenanigans. It’s not the greatest expression of Kruger’s aesthetic, but it’s still a heady, immersive celebration of one of the few artists around who you can genuinely call iconic.
Read the review here.
‘Women in Revolt!’ at Tate Britain, closing Apr 7
If anger is an energy, there’s enough here to power the Tate for decades. The gallery is buzzing with the violent ire and shrieking fury of second-wave feminism, because after all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed. And they were furious. This is an exhibition of 100 feminist artists and collectives kicking violently against the system. This is art made on the margins, in an attempt to kick back at an unjust society. It’s not meant to look good on a millionaire's wall, it’s meant to change the world. And it did.
Read the review here.
‘Cute’ at Somerset House, closing Apr 14
Cuteness here is presented as a cultural powerhouse, an internet language that’s spread its grammar throughout society, a contemporary aesthetic force with almost no equal. Does that hypothesis work? Not necessarily, but it’s fun to watch them argue it. The exhibition is a mind-melting assault on the senses, a barrage of objects, ephemera, history and artworks that shoves cuteness down your eyeballs until you want to burst (into pink love hearts). It’s complex, tiring, clever, and very good.
Read the review here.
Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now.
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