Free art in London

Like a weed growing through a crack in concrete, Anne Hardy is finding ways to survive in this hard, inhospitable world.

Britain is littered with symbols of death and exploitation; not hidden away shamefully, but raised up, celebrated and gloried. Public sculptures of controversial historical figures are everywhere, and now they’re in the Serpentine too, because Yinka Shonibare CBE has put them there. 

In case you weren’t already aware, you are small, pitiful and insignificant. And if you should ever forget that, all you need to do is go find one of Richard Serra’s vast, deep-black, monumental drawings.

It’s a nice day for a white wedding on the Cambridge Heath Road. In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms. 

Unholy desecration, heathenistic violence, sacrilegious iconoclasm; the very flames of hell are licking the walls and ancient wooden beams of this church in Islington (the new home of Castor Gallery), and it’s all because of Fabian Ramirez. This is the Mexican painter’s act of revenge, this is how he gets back at the colonisers for using Christianity as a weapon of conquest and oppression.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, at 2:54pm, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were being told that he had only a few years to live. 

London is crumbling, but not for long. In Matthias Groebel’s printed ‘paintings’ – made in Whitechapel in the mid-2000s – the city is bleak, derelict, graffiti’d. But it’s slowly being torn down and rebuilt, too; its greying brickwork tidied, sanitised, gentrified in a process of ceaseless, careless renewal.

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness.

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise.

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980.