Everything Everywhere All At Once:Summer Exhibition 2024.

Man, there are a lot of artworks to look at the Royal Academy's 2024 Summer Exhibition. 1,710 in fact. That's way too many to take them all in. If you looked at each one for thirty seconds you'd need to spend at least fourteen hours in there and the Royal Academy isn't even open that long so me and Mark, who kindly used his RA membership card to get me in for free, decided we'd take a more carefree approach than normal and just pick a few favourites in each room.

It turned out to be a good plan. We spent about 2-3 hours in there and that was probably the right amount of time (though if we'd been tempted by the predictably expensive gin bar halfway round - which we weren't, many were) - we may have found ourselves staying in there even longer. Various curators have overseen the show this year and most (Hughie O'Donoghue, Ann Christopher, Hurvin Anderson, Anne Desmet, and Veronica Ryan) I'd never heard of. Cornelia Parker was the one exception.

It was busy. The Summer Exhibition (and I'd not attended since 2018), I get the impression, always is. We'd gone along on a Saturday afternoon but I bet if we'd gone at 10am on a Tuesday morning it wouldn't have been anywhere near empty. That means a lot of craning of the neck, brushing past people, and lots of very polite 'excuse me's but it was all very manageable - and the art was of a very high standard. This is just a selection of my personal favourites and some of the bigger names in the show didn't even make the cut.

Carol Hodder - The Found House

John Walker - Black Pond

Carl Hodder's The Found House had an eerie, dreamlike quality as if a still from a yet to be made horror film, John Walker's Black Pond reminded me a bit of Paul Klee, and the late Mick Moon (all works have been made in the last year or so but some artists will have also died in that time) had an appealing abstract expressionist quality that jumped out at me and caught my eye.

The first couple of rooms in the show seemed to have something of an on/off nautical theme. Lots of boats, sea, harbours, and ports (later on cats would take over, after that cars) and my favourite maritime musings included John Ferry's evocative Journey and another by Mick Moon. Outward Bound shows a small boat almost camouflaged against a vast grey sea. Oh, how we sometimes long to merge into the background.

The late Mick Moon - Old Power

John Ferry - Journey

The late Mick Moon - Outward Bound

Sir Michael Craig-Martin - Picture In Picture (Stilleto)

A few big names did stand out. Michael Craig-Martin (no need for honorifics here) and his simplified, geometric, colour fields depicting everyday items always look good. You can buy a lot of the work (some of it is very expensive) and you can buy prints of other works. Mark Denton's puerile (in the best way) Directions To The Chocolate Factory ("milk, milk, lemonade, round the corner chocolate's made) was selling very well in its print form.

I imagine art loving parents were thinking that their smutty minded children would love seeing this. I've never been much of a fan of Gavin Turk in the past but I was very impressed with his Metaphysical Bottle, I couldn't really work out who Paul in Ackroyd & Honey's work was supposed to be but it was quite a looming piece that was hard to ignore, and Richard Chivers' deconstruction of a Hornsey gas holder had me thinking of Bernd and Hilla Becher and wondering if any of the big London galleries will ever get round to doing a large retrospective of their work. I'd be there like a shot.

Mark Denton - Directions To The Chocolate Factory

Gavin Turk - Metaphysical Bottle

Ackroyd & Harvey - Paul/Lawyers For Nature

Richard Chivers - Hornsey Gas Holder, Deconstruction

Joshua Leigh - Still Life With Lemons

Tracey Emin - Did It Ever Get Any Better

Joshua Leigh's Still Life With Lemons could almost be by Chardin and there were a few of Tracey Emin's scratchy works on show. I like them and I like their obscure yet somehow confessional titles. Ignoring the gin bar I found myself confronted by a Richard Serra work that doesn't work quite as well in photographic reproduction and wasn't as much as fun as the sculptural works of his I saw during a visit to Seattle back in 2016.

Frank Bowling's abstract works are always good, Rebecca Salter seems to be riffing on Rorschach tests, and Wolfgang Tillmans has done a picture of a naked man bending over so you can get a good look at his arse and his dangling nutsack. Not so many people were taking photos of that one.

Richard Serra - Casablanca #2

Sir Frank Bowling - Silver Slipper

Rebecca Salter - Untitled JF2

Wolfgang Tillmans - Neuer Ruckenact

Rana Begum - No. 864 L Reflector

David Grinaway - RRS Sir David Attenborough Moored At Greenwich

The more figuration there was in the room, the more I was drawn to the abstract works. But the more abstraction there was in the room, the more I was drawn to figuration. Sometimes of the most simple kind. Like, for example, David Grinaway's RSS Sir David Attenborough Moored At Greenwich and, far more quotidian, Richard Castor Jeffery's cashpoint machines. That could be almost anywhere any of us know - although it's a little bit cleaner than the areas around most cashpoint machines near me.

I kept finding myself attracted to works by Jock McFadyen (who I declare my personal 'winner' of this year's Summer Exhibition) and the first of these was the work where he somehow managed to make a branch of Homebase look like the rising sun. Although, to be fair - and as Mark pointed out - he is actually painting the sun in this too. In its reflected form. There'll be more McFadyen soon.

Richard Castor Jeffery - Cashpoint

Jock McFadyen - Homebase

Peter Uka - Uncle Johnbull

Chris Orr - Cargo

Peter Uka's Uncle Johnbull was the dominant painting in the room it was in, Chris Orr's work reminded me a bit of Where's Wally and demanded closer inspection. There's a lot of detail that my photo can't capture but if you get a chance go and check out some Chris Orr.

McFadyen appeared again with the first of his many paintings of a world, or a London at least, that seems to be slowly disappearing under water. A comment on climate change and rising tides, surely? Architectural studies featured highly in this part of the exhibition. Cathedral interiors c/o Ben Johnson (a topical name to crop up during the Olympics), a slightly haunted metaphyiscal quay side from Katarzyna Chapman, and a vision of Kings Cross that makes it look as it it's made of Meccano from Martin Kirby.

Jock McFadyen - City Life:Goodfellas 2

Katarzyna Chapman - Quayside2

Ben Johnson - Grundtvig I

Martin Kirby - Metal Construct, Kings Cross

Tony Feld - Cuban Car

Tony Field's Cuban Car could almost be something you'd find for sale in Athena (and that's not, in this case, a diss - I like it), Claire Douglass has rendered Birmingham as a futurist dystopia, and Mandy Payne has managed to make London's Golden Lane Estate remind me of Basingstoke town centre in the 1980s. It used to have giant concrete bins like that. 

Melissa Scott-Miller is another who's been drawn to King's Cross (though she prefers an apostrophe) and Google's massive new London HQ there, James Condon has made Oxford Street look like something you'd imagine if listening to a Burial album, and Bill Jacklin's NYC queue doesn't really have anything in it to tell us it's New York but is compelling nonetheless.

Claire Douglass - Souvenir From The Anthropocene

Mandy Payne - Golden Lane Estate

Melissa Scott-Miller - King's Cross With Canal Boats And Google Landscraper

James Condon - Oxford Street

Bill Jacklin - The Queue, NYC

Emily Allchurch - Mirrored Cities II

Amy Dury - Marked Card

Eileen Cooper - Pink Moon

Mick Rooney - The Dream Cupboard

Eileen Cooper's Pink Moon stood out simply because there weren't that many works of that nature on show and I thought Mick Rooney's Dream Cupboard looked like a minor surrealist masterpiece. A last Jock McFadyen (Estuary) made me realise just how much blue paint I'd seen during my visit and Nicholas Archer's beaten up Beetle caught both mine and Mark's eyes as we started to think about resting our feet and getting some food and drink. Lisa Milroy, it seemed, was on hand to remind us about just that.

There's a temptation to list my top three works but I don't think I could fairly narrow it down. There are just over forty works in this short(ish) review and they are pretty much my favourites. Even that feels like belittling all the other fantastic works on show that I've not included here. It must be such a thrill for an artist to be picked for the Summer Exhibition. Most of them, I imagine, will never enjoy such heady days in their artistic career ever again. For that alone, and for the celebration of British creativity in all its weird and wonderful iterations, the Summer Exhibition is an institution that will surely last for longer than most us will be around. Art outlives us.

Jock McFadyen - Estuary

Nicholas Archer - Shattered

Lisa Milroy - Plates No.2

Thanks to Mark for joining me at the exhibition, getting me into it, and debriefing with me over a cup of tea and very sweet red velvet cake in the RA members' cafe afterwards. It was nice also to bump into Jack, Katie, Mat, Penny, and Eddie across the course of the day and walk over 25,000 steps. Less nice was to be confronted with about 40,000 Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) supporters in Leicester Square who were 'enjoying' a six hour rally, moaning about Islam, woke culture, and democracy and singing the praises of Elon Musk and Nigel Farage. Obviously they want to take their country back but the meatheads don't seem to have any idea what that actually means. They could have visited the Summer Exhibition, took in some culture, and realised we never lost our country in the first place. Art 4 Fascism 0.