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You'd need to spend a very long time in the Royal Academy if you wanted to really take in everything in this year's, the 250th, Summer Exhibition. There are 1,352 works on show and they cover the walls and floors of each and every room you enter. Some you will undoubtedly agree are 'a piece of shit' but it seems unlikely you'd be in total concordance with the disgruntled punter I overheard about every single work on show. That seems very unlikely.
Of those 1,352 works some are so high you can't see them properly, some are so low you nearly crick your back leaning down to see them. It seems to me the only rational approach is to treat the whole shebang like a pick'n'mix, or some kind of fairground, and just head straight for the things that catch your eye.
After all, that is surely what the curators have done. This year those curators are headed up by the likeable, witty, erudite, articulate, and let's be honest, fun Grayson Perry. Grayson's not afraid of sacrificing a few sacred cows but, also, he doesn't seem to choose to do that just for the sake of it. He clearly loves art, both new and old, whether or not it's been created by an acknowledged artist, a struggling painter, or an enthusiastic part-timer.
One of the joys of the Summer Exhibition is that it's a great leveller. The vast majority of the exhibited artworks are by artists I'd never heard of before but they were hung, with no great fanfare, alongside pieces by David Hockney, Anselm Kiefer, Tracey Emin, Frank Bowling, and Bill Viola. Even Harry Hill and Vic Reeves have got works hanging alongside the David Shrigleys and Martin Parrs.
Many of the works on show are for sale, or, by the time I visited, had already been sold, and the prices range from the reasonably affordable (say £150) to the eye wateringly prohibitive (there's a Jim Dine piece weighing in at £120,000 and if you want a Mimmo Paladino it'll set you back nearly double that).
Les Deacon - Peggy
Sir Anish Kapoor - Symphony for a Beloved Daughter 2018
Anish Kapoor's huge Symphony for a Beloved Daughter greets you in the courtyard (as with much of Kapoor's work it's the size that's the main feature) and as you enter the Wohl Central Hall you're confronted with an almost full on assault of the senses so vivid are the colours, so many are the artworks, and so crowded is the gallery. As if to seek out safety in the familiar I was drawn immediately to Les Deacon's unicycling Jack Russell, Peggy. It's not familiar in that I see Jack Russells unicycling down Piccadilly every day but it kind of felt so.
The Central Hall is dominated by a huge hand knitted and crocheted sculpture by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos but it's flanked by all manner of delights. Jenny Wheatley's In Between the Islands is a masterful exercise in colour and perspective, it manages to look both hectic and restful at the same time, whereas Max Reneissen's The Swing, quite apart from showcasing a very fine body indeed, appears to both hark back to, and bring forward (chiefly because of its nudity), the Rococo stylings of Jean-Honore Fragonard and Francois Boucher.
Elsewhere, the visitor can marvel at Fipsi Seilern as he tips his cap to Mexican muralists like Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Lisa Rigg's almost nuclear coloured We Could Use a Little Bit of That Good Old Global Warming, the first of many many digs at the incumbent disrupter-in-chief, or try to work out if Frederick Cuming has something to say about global warming or was just taken by the sparse, foreboding landscape of Dungeness.
Jenny Wheatley - In Between the Islands
Max Reneissen - The Swing
Fipsi Seilern - Love at First Sight
Lisa Rigg - We Could Use a Little Bit of That Good Old Global Warming
Gallery III is the busiest of all the galleries and, it too, has the most to say about Donald Trump and the current shitstorm of global politics. Bob and Roberta Smith is worried about how it affects art and Katy Wix, as if rendered senseless by months of untruths, downright lies, and completely unreconstructed bullshit, has given up and simply made a weak joke about the double meaning of the word trump.
It's understandable in the circumstances. Equally so it's perfectly logical that some artists have turned their back on politics altogether. Natasha Zavialov and Amanda Ansell have both gone for a pure, if dreamy, abstraction while Heather Nevay, with her wonderfully discomfiting The Party, has tapped into some kind of primal fear or even primal desire. It's a glorious car crash of a painting and one you keep finding yourself going back to.
Bob and Roberta Smith - Left Right and Centre People are Worried
Katy Wix - A Little Trump
Frederick Cuming - Dungeness Moonrise
Heather Nevay - The Party
Natasha Zavialov - Window
Amanda Ansell - Liquid Gold
David Tindle - Eve, Her Father and a Passing Shadow of Her Mother
David Tindle, too, taps into the awkward sexuality of everyday encounters, there's something of the Stanley Spencer or even the bawdy seaside postcard with his painting of a young bikini bottomed girl sat on an older man's trunked bum. Will she eat the apple? Will he eat the apple? Is this the start or the end of a story?
If Tindle raises questions then Sheila Wallis's Well Walk is simply somebody showing off how brilliant a painter they are. I looked at this several times utterly convinced it was a photograph but it isn't. The bench, the weeds, the brick wall, and, most of all, the shadows that loom over the scene. All of them are things we see, and take for granted, almost every single - but by painting them so vividly, so realistically, Wallis has brought this scene utterly to life.
Sheila Wallis - Well Walk
Julian Game - Number 256
Nobody is going to think Julian Game, Melissa Scott-Miller, or Roxana Halls are dealing in hyperrealism. Game's Number 256 could belong on a King Crimson album cover or perhaps in the fevered dreams of Frank Sidebottom, Scott-Miller's Islington view could be from the brush of David Hockney or Frank Auerbach, and Halls's Laughing While Leaving has something of the rebellious spirit of Thelma and Louise about it.
Melissa Scott-Miller - View of Islington from a Tenth Floor
Roxana Halls - Laughing While Leaving
Eleanor Green - Does My Bum Look Big In This?
Yolanda Crisp is another artist who has painted an extraordinarily vivid depiction of quotidian suburbia. Like Sheila Wallis she's put the poetry into the prosaic via the medium of paint and like Wallis her work is utterly joyous.
But if it's a chuckle you're after then Eleanor Green's vain aubergines and Michael Kirkbride's murdered teddy bear are there to tickle your laughter muscles. These are totally the kind of works you can imagine Grayson Perry absolutely insisting must be in the show and they're also the kind of works you can equally imagine previous curators would've dismissed as mere novelty. When you're looking at more than a thousand artworks some novelty is not necessarily a bad thing.
Yolanda Crisp - Hunstanton Night I
Michael Kirkbride - Love
Julia Abele - Steve's B&B (Four Windows, Three Doors)
Juliet James - The Garden of Venus
In fact the more I went round the more I realised that novelty was one of the things that drew me to individual paintings. That and nudity. Yes, a pair of tits and a bush and I was over there with my camera like a shot. Not that Juliet James's The Garden of Venus looks particularly realistic, imagine if you met a woman who actually looked like that, but it wasn't without a certain naive charm.
Ken Howard's views of St Mark's Basilica in Venice reflected in a puddle was equally charming, and more realistic to boot, and even had the benefit of being hung near Tim Hall's portrait of the artist, looking for all the world like Brian Sewell, nearby. Both paintings caught my eye before I even made the link between the two of them.
Ken Howard's views of St Mark's Basilica in Venice reflected in a puddle was equally charming, and more realistic to boot, and even had the benefit of being hung near Tim Hall's portrait of the artist, looking for all the world like Brian Sewell, nearby. Both paintings caught my eye before I even made the link between the two of them.
Ken Howard - Aqua Alta, Venice
Tim Hall - Ken Howard OBE RA
Michael Roberts - Happy Days
Linda Burrows - Bottycelli Does Glasto, Toothbrush, Condom, Lighter and a Packet of Mints
Other galleries were curated, under the aegis of Perry, by the likes of Humphrey Ocean, David Mach, Cornelia Parker, Conrad Shawcross, and Pyllida Barlow but with such an abundance of art it's really hard to work out, except in the case of the architecture room, what individual motivations these sub-curators may have brought to bear on their rooms.
From Linda Burrow's renaissance inspired bums to Kosmo Vinyl's mocked up headlines via Matthew Wilson's scribbly memento to his father and Lisa Milroy's delightful rainbow and record player featuring Memory it starts to feel like all life is here, certainly all types of art.
Lisa Milroy - Memory
Kosmo Vinyl - For Jock Scot
Matthew Wilson - The Measure of a Man (My Father)
Michael Hayter - Old Woman Picking Up a Hat
Fabian Peake - Move the Shadow
Some works almost literally jump out at you. Debbie Lawson's three dimensional carpeted bear disturbs as much as it amuses and Cathy Lewis's Mainly Porcelain I disturbs more than it amuses.
So far, so fairground but Jock McFadyen's huge skies and tiny Dutch houses can't help but entrance and seem well placed in the room that leads us into the Piers Gough curated salon of architectural models. I love a good architectural model but, as with the art, there's simply too much in this room to take it all in. I take a deep breath and, again, pick out a few favourites.
Debbie Lawson - Red Bear
Cathy Lewis - Mainly Porcelain I
Jock McFadyen - Le Village Hollandais
Michael Landy - Not Fit For Purpose
Laurie Chetwood - Xiaowan Bay, China - Green City
Laurie Chetwood - Forbidden City
alma-nac's Upside Down House with its little slide that takes you down (or is it up?) to a blue sky dotted with little fluffy clouds guarantees a smile on one's face while the skyscrapers of Jacob Riman, Koln Pederson Fox, and AHR/PCKO would, if and when completed, stand as awesome monuments both to man's quest to build into the sky as well as humanity's less impressive urge to accumulate vast amounts of wealth while others starve to death. Ugly and beautiful at the same time. Like so much architecture. Like so much art. Like so much in life.
alma-nac - The Upside Down House
Jacob Riman - Tower of Bimbel
Kohn Pedersen Fox - China Resources Headquarters
AHR/PCKO - Al Bahr Towers:Al Bahr Investment Council HQ
El Anatsui - Change in Fortune
Lisa Milroy cropped up again with a work, Weaving (Brown), that could hardly be more different to Memory and if it's still good it's not as good. It's overshadowed by the Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui's Change in Fortune, Lee Cutter's minimalist soap sculpture (reminiscent of a Mona Hatoum work I saw in Tate Modern back in 2016), and Nicholas Allan's almost perfect rendering of a couple of light switches. Placed where you'd expect the light switches to be in the room. It was enough for me not to try and turn the lights off. If he'd drawn a dimmer switch the temptation may well have been too great to resist.
Lisa Milroy - Weaving (Brown)
Lee Cutter - Prison Culture
Nicholas Allan - On
The late Gillian Ayres - Maritsa
Whereas the architecture gallery had paid tribute to the recently deceased Will Alsop later rooms took their hats off for Gillian Ayres who passed in April of this year. It wasn't, and it couldn't be, a particularly sombre tribute, that's not the style of either Grayson Perry or the Summer Exhibition, but a tribute it was nonetheless.
Certainly their exhibited works were far more impressive than Allen Jones's rather pretentious, and cold, video Eyes Front which sat near Daniel Hogg's rather dull Mis-Spent Youth and Carl Godfrey's rather lame attempt at social satire Unaffordable Housing. This was, luckily, a dip in a show that, for the most part, kept up a pretty decent level of entertainment. To stretch the fairground analogy to almost breaking point it was one of those moments when the rollercoaster doesn't seem to be really doing anything. Jones was another one of Perry's co-curators so it's a pity he didn't choose a more interesting contribution of his own.
Allen Jones - 'Eyes Front' (15 Minutes)
Daniel Hogg - Mis-Spent Youth
Carl Godfrey - Unaffordable Housing
Richard C Smith - The All Seeing
After a section that managed to somehow be both pretentious and boring at the same time it was almost a relief to return to some abstraction. Hey, even Katie Walker's Fragile caught my eye and that was just a pallet that appeared to have been spray painted blue.
It worked alongside the geometric forms of Rana Begum and Alexander Lewis and the bold, almost Bridget Riley, colours of Vanessa Jackson. Even better was Bill Jacklin's Singer in the Square. The painting had drawn a small crowd in much the same way the titular singer has done in the painting.
Rana Begum - No. 755 2017
Alexander Lewis - Harlequin
Katie Walker - Fragile
Vanessa Jackson - Inhale
Bill Jacklin - Singer in the Square
Anselm Kiefer - Gehautete Landschaft
I'd seen Anselm Kiefer's works many times before, often in the White Cube in Bermondsey, and I've felt a little indifferent about them but put him in a room full of other artists and he shines. His Gehautete Landschaft managed to be monumental, imposing, and yet delicate at the same time. It even looked a bit like a robot face though no face in the exhibition could discombobulate in the same way as Samantha Parkhouse's Fortitude. Both its high hang and the sitter's slightly sinister smile seemed to follow me round the room. It was almost as if those eyes were looking at Terry Setch and Tracey Emin's paintings as much as I was.
Samantha Parkhouse - Fortitude
Terry Setch - She Moon
Tracey Emin - Open Heart
Talking of Emin I was glad she was represented by a rather bloody looking Open Heart instead of one of her lightbulb pieces which are starting to look tired. Open Heart was anything but tired. As raw, as visceral, and as violent as David Tindle's Man and Woman was relaxing, soft hued, and gauzy. These are the kind of juxtapositions that make the Summer Exhibition a pleasure to amble around aimlessly.
David Tindle - Man and Woman:Adam and Eve Series
John Wragg - The Last Cigarette
Dene Leigh seems to have adapted the Black Flag logo by adding an extra stripe but to what purpose? and Dave Buonaguidi has made a very lazy sixth form attack on both money and the US. They're both overshadowed by Samantha Cary's pretty Snow Fall, Eileen Carey's Mysteria, and the puerile but tittersome, literally, Lovely Eyes by Cathie Pilkington.
Dave Buonaguidi - Trash
Dene Leigh - Stripes and Faces
Samantha Cary - Snow Fall
Cathie Pilkington - Lovely Eyes
Eileen Cooper - Mysteria
Even better they've bunged in some photographs by Boyd & Evans that reminded me of my recent trip to the Ashmolean in Oxford to see the work of Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, and Ralston Crawford. Boyd & Evans's Tower, Dayton WA would've fitted in just as well in that show as they did here alongside Hugh Hamshaw-Thomas's washy Swan (Blue) and Yinka Shonibare's talking point book sculpture.
Hugh Hamshaw-Thomas - Swan (Blue)
Boyd & Evans - Tower, Dayton WA
Boyd & Evans - Tower, Cherry Creek NV
Yinka Shonibare - Young Academician
It wasn't just the Sackler Galleries that had been opened up to the Summer Exhibition for the first time but also the McAulay Gallery. A new area (to me at least) and one that is open, for free, to the public so they can get a taste of what the Summer Exhibition, the Royal Academy even, is all about.
Perry has tried to tempt people in by offering some of the more humorous, and more ribald, offerings in the entire show. He's also included quite a few portraits of himself and even one of his teddy bear, Alan Measles. Is he that easily soft-soaped or did he just enjoy the bare-faced cheek of up and coming artists having the gall to think painting a picture of the curator would get them included in the show? I'd wager some could hardly believe it actually worked.
Perry's called the McAulay Gallery his 'Room of Fun' and as such it's no surprise to see a selection of David Shrigley's mocked up newspaper headlines and Andrew Lee's Gangland Caff menu hanging next to the Andrew Wyeth inspired, or mocking, Christina Takes Alan Measles for Tea at Julie's House by Susan Donnelly. That's certainly the best of the Grayson inspired works. Others, like Jean Samtula's Grayson for example, lack the level of imagination employed by Donnelly, even if you can't help smile at them.
Andrew Lee - Gangland Caff
Susan Donnelly - Christina Takes Alan Measles for Tea at Julie's House
Jean Samtula - Grayson
David Shrigley - Untitled
David Shrigley - Untitled
As I left the gallery the last thing I saw was the smiling face of 1970s Space Hopper. Somehow both sinister and playful at the same time it seemed a very apt way to end this Grayson Perry curated experience. I could've gone back several times and I'm sure my take on this show would be different each time. Even in this review I've not mentioned Fiona Rae, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rose Wylie, Gary Hume, Sean Scully, Ed Ruscha, Isaac Julien, Marina Abramovic, Chantal Joffe, Bill Woodrow, Alison Wilding, Tony Cragg, Tal R, Michael Craig-Martin, Anthony Gormley, Julian Opie, and Paula Rego.
All of whom had works hanging in the Summer Exhibition. I've tried to write a bit differently to normal about it, a bit freer - because that was the way I took it in. Hopefully it wasn't too dull because if it was I've done neither the show, nor Grayson Perry, credit. Same time next year?
Garry Martin - Spaced (Version 2)
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