Free art in London

There’s a primal urge in us to return to the cave. The cave is where we, as early-humans, once dwelt, and Goshka Macuga is ushering us back home.

It’s all material to Lonnie Holley, everything. Past traumas, trash found on a creek bed, shared histories, scrap metal, the news, old padlocks. All of it can be twisted into new shapes by him.

Sex, gore and sacrilege; Penny Slinger knows how to tell a surreal story. The LA-based, London-born artist has been at the forefront of feminist art since the 1970s, and this gothically atmospheric exhibition pushes her ideas deeper into the weird, repressed psyche of society than ever before.

Your taste reflects your personality, so all the art in this gallery full of snark, smut and death can only be Damien Hirst’s. ‘Dominion’, curated by his son Connor in his gallery out of art from his own collection, is a portrait of a man through the art he loves, and it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be.

In 1982, master of modern American conceptualism John Baldessari (1931-2020) was invited to India. On an artist residency in a swanky modernist villa owned by some wealthy industrialists, he set about documenting, sampling and twisting the world around him, just like he’d always done.

Hajime Sorayama dares to ask the questions everyone is too afraid to know the answers to, like: ‘what if there was a sexy robot at the Hindenburg Disaster’ and ‘what if Marilyn Monroe was a sexy robot?’ and ‘what if mermaids were sexy robots?’ and ‘what if Joan of Arc was a sexy robot, but with a genital piercing?’ You’ve always wanted to know, admit it, and now the answers are all right here.

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over.

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories. 

Erased, forgotten, overlooked, subjugated and dominated; Judy Chicago saw what history, what society, had done to women, and she did something about it. The pioneering American feminist has spent decades using her art to call out injustice at the hands of the patriarchy.

Turns out, the line between erotic and bawdy is pretty thick. And right here in Clapham you’ve got Tom of Finland on one side of it, and Beryl Cook on the other.