Exhibition of the week Summer Exhibition 2020
Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 3 January
The Royal Academy has held its showpiece Summer Exhibition every year since 1769, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Daily Telegraph. There hasn’t been a single interruption: neither Hitler nor Napoleon could stop it, and nor, it turns out, can Covid-19. It’s a pity, because the 252nd iteration of the event is “unacceptably” poor. Opening four months late on account of the pandemic, the show has been “coordinated” by the video artist twins Jane and Louise Wilson and, as ever, it mixes more than a thousand works created in all mediums with submissions by members of the public hanging side by side with contributions from world-famous artists. In this case, neither category is up to much. From some inert paintings of brightly coloured everyday objects by Michael Craig-Martin, to an amateur’s deeply silly painting of “the Prime Minister with his head in an EU-made washing machine”, what we see here is almost uniformly dire. Worse still, the jumbled hang is “a catastrophe” that only serves to drown out the small minority of decent works. This “hopeless” show is final proof that this annual embarrassment should be put out of its misery. “Sooner rather than later, it should end.”
True, there’s a lot of “execrable” art here, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. It’s not all bad, though. The first few rooms, in particular, are brilliant. Every artist featured in this section is black: “a dark yet shimmering wall hanging” by El Anatsui is juxtaposed with a “luminous” Frank Bowling painting and a “huge” and impressive collage painting by Njideka Akunyili Crosby; in the next room, meanwhile, “sinuous, magical” sculptures by Wangechi Mutu stand within view of a “stunning” triptych of pairs of lovers by Chris Ofili. Altogether, it forms “the most distinctive opening to a summer show I can remember”. The standard slips thereafter, but there are highlights elsewhere, too. A room dedicated to sculpture curated by Richard Deacon, for instance, embraces the perennial “chaos” of the summer show to some effect.
Best of all are two “blazingly sublime” new works by Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The latter presents “a colossal golden canvas with real scythes fixed to it”, creating the illusion that they are “moving towards you with lethal inevitability”. For her part, Emin gives us a painting that initially looks abstract, but turns out to contain two pictures: “an intimate private scene”, and “a ship in a storm” adrift on a “huge encroaching ocean of black”. Both are pieces perfectly pitched for these troubled times. Highlights aside, however, it’s business as usual – that is, lots of indifferent pictures of Venice, “wishy-washy” skies and fields, and landscapes of “suburban gardens”. It’s thoroughly disappointing that the upheaval of the pandemic is barely acknowledged in the works here. Yet by the standards of previous Summer Exhibitions, this one is a more or less “decent” effort.