Art

Have we missed your London art highlight of 2007? Let us know

Top of the tree: Mary Martin

Martin Coomer
Tate Britain, which for the first time staged a programme that far outshone its younger sibling downstream, put on a first-rate, if squashed, retrospective of the late, overlooked London painter Prunella Clough. Camden Arts Centre, my gallery of the year, also went local with its dignified survey of Hampstead husband and wife Kenneth and Mary Martin. The increasing might of the commercial spaces was also in evidence for Hauser & Wirth’s punchy show of Paris paintings by the American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell. I could have done without quite so much Gilbert and George, at Tate Modern for what seemed like an eternity.
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Gabriel Coxhead
My highlight of the year was Aernout Mik’s show at the Camden Arts Centre: brilliantly provocative and charged with ambiguities. The Dutch artist revealed the insidious brutality of humanity’s hunger for power – including the power of mass media itself. The low point was the usual, desperate clamour for attention during Frieze week – the nadir probably being ‘Unfinished Symphony’, a group show at the Fine Art Society. An incoherent, listless mess, it turned the potentially interesting theme of uncompleted work into nothing more than a one-liner, a curatorial gimmick.

Sarah Sze

Rebecca Geldard
Sarah Sze’s systematised colonisation of the Victoria Miro Gallery at the end of the summer offered different vantage points on a planet in a flux. Moving and spreading through the gallery like a visual arts virus, Sze’s uncanny constructive ability with very ordinary stuff made the constant vertiginous zoom from galactic to microscopic perspectives a total pleasure. Another summer show – ‘Learn to Read’ in Tate Modern’s level two gallery – explored the visual and semantic possibilities of text in the work of 29 artists and offered a genuinely surprising take on a well-worn theme.

Martin Herbert
I was tempted to get an ‘I heart Tate Britain’ T-shirt made up this year, since it not only mounted the year’s best ‘old’ art – the intricate and splenetic Hogarth – but also Mark Wallinger’s extraordinary mix of calculation and coruscation, ‘State Britain’. Elsewhere, Martin Creed (at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill) and Tacita Dean (at Frith Street) did their usual thing with memorable aplomb, and the consistently thoughtful programming of Ryan Gander’s one-year-only Associates gallery will be missed. Lowlight: the too-much-of-nothing farrago that was Tate Modern’s ‘The World as a Stage’. If you said you liked it, you’re a liar.

Sally O’Reilly
Is it too obvious to claim the highlight of the year as Mark Wallinger’s ‘State Britain’? Notwithstanding the problems faced by artworks that take on politics, his apparently simple gesture may actually have been illegal too – now that’s edgy. The biggest missed opportunity was the series of ‘experiments’ performed in the Serpentine’s Pavilion. Not to knock the ambitious scale of the event – it was the content that was profoundly annoying. Why invite a clutch of well-known artists, few of whom have public speaking skills, to present half-baked or downright idiotic ‘experiments’ that any psychologist, chemist or boy scout could have eclipsed?

Helen Sumpter
The Champagne truffles go to Camden Arts Centre for consistently impressing, but deserving of at least a Terry’s Chocolate Orange are Christian Marclay’s shoot-’em-up video installation ‘Crossfire’ at White Cube and Anita Zabludowicz’s 176 Gallery for taking the Saatchi template of private collector turned-gallerist and creating something intelligent with it.

Alvar Aalto

Ossian Ward
The Design Museum deserves a mention, as does the Barbican’s staging of Alvar Aalto, a tricky but worthwhile subject. The commercials punched above their weight (not least Gagosian’s museum-worthy ‘Pop Art is’); my favourites being Gerard Byrne at Lisson and Thomas Hirschhorn at Stephen Friedman. ‘Stealth’ blockbusters (promising much but delivering little) of Monet and Renoir at the Royal Academy and National Gallery disappointed in comparison with Dulwich Picture Gallery’s wonderful ‘Canaletto in England’.