perks!Latest art reviews
Find out what our critics make of new exhibitions with the latest London art reviews
From blockbuster names to indie shows, Time Out Art cast their net far and wide in order to review the biggest and best exhibitions in the city. Check 'em out below or shortcut it to our top ten art exhibitions in London for the shows that we already know will blow your socks off.
Art
Aktion: Conceptual Art And Photography (1960 - 1980)
Time Out says
Forget how many words a picture is worth; what about how many ideas it’s worth? This neat little show is filled with art where ideas are captured in images. The thing you see isn’t necessarily the work, but a representation of the concept… which is the work. You follow?
Fitzrovia
Art
Vile Bodies
Time Out says
In general, summer group shows are just half-arsed attempts to hock some leftovers. Come up with a concept, whack some art on the walls and hope for sales even though most of the rich bozos who normally buy your stuff have jetted off to St Tropez for the season. This Michael Werner group show is one of the better ones.
Mayfair
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Art
Christopher Le Brun
Time Out says
Christopher Le Brun paints paintings about painting. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that he paints paintings that aren’t about anything. He just paints.
Lisson Grove
Art
Angela de la Cruz: Bare
Time Out says
If you spent your formative years in the type of school where you wore a sweatshirt and not a blazer, then chances are your memories of educational architecture involve two things: fluorescent strip lights and white, plastic blinds bashed-up and half-hanging from the window.
Lisson Grove
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Art
Richard Prince: Early Joke Paintings
Time Out says
Richard Prince isn’t a subtle artist. Smart as a whip, sure, and often infuriatingly complex, but where other artists may ease you into their ideas and aesthetics, Prince comes diving in off the top ropes, body slamming you and jabbing you in the ribs over and over again.
London
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Art
Michael Jackson: On the Wall
Time Out says
HIs every crotch grab sent jolts of ecstasy across the globe, his every spasmodic hip thrust left the world reeling. That’s an inhuman level of power for one human to have. It ended up being too much for Michael Jackson, and maybe too much for the rest of us too, which may explain how the National Portrait Gallery can put together a whole show of art inspired by MJ and without it being mega-cheesy or ultra-dull.
Leicester Square
Art
Christo & Jeanne-Claude
Time Out says
Cresting out of the Serpentine lake is some prehistoric, mythical, yet perfectly geometrical creature. It looks like the Bauhaus designed the Loch Ness Monster; like Malevich dreamed up the Kraken. This is Christo and his late wife Jeanne-Claude’s first real attempt at their ‘Mastaba’ – a project dreamed up in the ’70s, but so ambitious as to be impossible to realise.
Knightsbridge
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Art, Photography
Dorothea Lange: ‘Politics of Seeing’
Time Out says
You can see why the Barbican is running these shows of Dorothea Lange and Vanessa Winship together. There’s plenty of overlap in their work: dislocation, displacement, the way that women, children, buildings, landscapes and even cars reflect societal collapse. But I would seriously advise that you buy your ticket, check out one of them, then go and play crazy golf with a few beers or something before you come back and tackle the other.
Barbican
Art
Tish Murtha: 'Works 1976 - 1991'
Time Out says
‘As far as most strippers and peep-show dancers are concerned, audience is too elevated a term for the men who watch. They are punters and bloody wankers to boot,’ wrote Karen Leslie, the writer and stripper who Tish Murtha collaborated with on ‘London by Night’, a project documenting the London sex industry in 1983.
Soho
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Art, Photography
Cindy Sherman
Time Out says
For 35 years, Sherman has been the subject of her own work. She’s transformed herself into an endlessly rotating series of characters. She mocks, twists and undermines femininity and gender roles, and in this show of recent work, she’s become a bunch of fictional pre-war film stars.
Mayfair
Art
Petra Cortright: Pale Coil Cold Angel
Time Out says
The splodgy, stuttering, textured, joyfully colourful surfaces of Petra Cortright’s paintings are single frozen moments of digital time. Get up close and you see repeated, copy-pasted imagery – you then realise that all these ‘brushstrokes’ are pure Photoshop, that those textures are just digital effects.
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Art
Alex Prager: Silver Lake Drive
Time Out says
You get an eerie sense of déjà vu in this show of American artist Alex Prager’s photography. Seeing the drunken parties, suspicious faces and elaborate beach scenes she meticulously stages, you’re certain that each scenario is familiar.
Soho
Art
BP Portrait Award 2018
Time Out says
Immediately on entry to the 39th year of the Portrait Award, you’re faced with a photorealistic painting – it’s amazingly impressive, and a bit dull. Exactly what you’d expect from the Portrait Award. But this year’s prize isn’t entirely filled with the usual same-y works, the ones we all gawp at for their makers’ ability to use paint like a camera.
Leicester Square
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Art
Luiz Zerbini: Intuitive Ratio
Time Out says
If you’re still haunted by memories of maths class, the paintings of Luiz Zerbini might make you break into a cold sweat. The Brazilian artist paints colourful, bombastic landscapes – but nothing here is an accident. Everything looks as though it’s placed according to a precise geometry, like he’s trying to segment the wildness of Rio de Janeiro around a Fibonacci spiral.
Camberwell
Art
Julie Becker: I must create a Master Piece to pay the Rent
Time Out says
A filthy chunk of Sunset Boulevard lies on the floor in a gallery on The Mall, thousands of miles from home, utterly isolated, totally displaced. American artist Julie Becker (1972-2016) was a displaced child herself, and a displaced adult, moving and being moved constantly. That slab of concrete of hers makes a lot of sense.
St James'
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Art, Contemporary art
Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire
Time Out says
Made more than 20 years apart, the works here paint a portrait of a shapeshifting city (Los Angeles, Ruscha’s home), a city in the constant, ceaseless throes of change.
Trafalgar Square
Art, Painting
Thomas Cole's Journey
Time Out says
The future is scary – ecological disaster, the technological singularity, destruction, annihilation… But the future’s always been scary. Back in British-born American painter Thomas Cole’s day (1801-1848) it wasn’t AI or atom bombs that struck fear, it was the unstoppable force of industrialisation. His body of big, bold, adventurous landscape painting is a warning against greed, modernism and unchecked industrial progress.
Trafalgar Square
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Art
Tomma Abts
Time Out says
There’s nothing wrong with being old fashioned, and something about German artist Tomma Abt’s art feels like it’s from another era entirely. Her work is pure, simple, direct abstraction.
Knightsbridge
Art
True Colours
Time Out says
We no longer get upset at the idea of art being more interested in colour tones than, for example, historical accuracy. In fact, times have changed so much that Newport Street Gallery – the exhibition space owned by Damien Hirst – has programmed an exhibition of three contemporary artists, Helen Beard, Sadie Laska and Boo Saville, united through their creation of crackling chromatic artworks.
Lambeth
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Art
Howard Hodgkin: Last Paintings
Time Out says
Hodgkin, considered one of Britain’s most important artists when he died in 2017, abandoned painting on canvas way back in 1972, switching instead to wooden panels, some of them with slightly raised ‘frames’ around the edges. Presented here are Hodgkin’s last works, including six he painted in India just before his death.
Mayfair
Art
Lee Bul
Time Out says
A huge, gloopy, multi-limbed, fleshy monster stares you out as you enter Lee Bul’s exhibition. And it’s not alone. Suspended from the ceiling are more of its blobby buddies and a battalion of pure white cyborgs. In the corner sits a silver and black behemoth among a landscape of shattered mirrors and blinking lights. It’s up to you to figure out if the Korean artist’s sci-fi dreamscape is actually a nightmare.
South Bank
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Art
Aftermath: Art in the Wake of World War One
Time Out says
Wars have a way of never ending. Long after the weapons have been dropped, the wounds in society continue to fester for decades. The waves of war ripple throughout time, and each war feels like it happens in the wake of the last one, part of some endless continuum of brutality.
Westminster
Art
August Sander
Time Out says
In the fake news era, a time when obvious lies can sway elections, it seems odd to think that the truth might actually be the most powerful weapon. But it was threatening enough in inter-war Germany to get August Sander’s photographs banned by the Nazis.
Mayfair
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Art
Spiegelgasse (Mirror Alley)
Time Out says
Turns out, it’s not all cuckoo clocks, chocolate and ruthless efficiency over in Switzerland. The tiny European nation is also funny, surreal, sexy, weird and very creative. This show of Swiss art from surrealism through to today – named after the street where Dadaism was invented in Zurich – paints a bizarre, twisted and hugely expressive picture of Swiss visual culture.
Mayfair
Art
Edward Bawden
Time Out says
Bawden (1903-1989) had many fave topics: the gorgeous greenery of the British landscape and famous London landmarks being just two. Much of his work was created for commercial commissions. He designed everything from Christmas cards to menus, and you can still see his tiles prettifying the walls at Tottenham Hale and Victoria tube stations.
Dulwich Village
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Art, Contemporary art
Tacita Dean: Landscape
Time Out says
Tacita Dean’s many-headed art beast has sprouted its third and final bonce: after a show of portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery and one of still life at the National Gallery, Dean now opens the doors of the Royal Academy’ new building with a show of landscapes.
Mayfair
Art
Katharina Grosse: Prototypes of Imagination
Time Out says
German artist Katharina Grosse is best known for her monumental painty interventions: chromatic collisions where colour covers whole walls, buildings, trees, patches of grass, roads, possibly the odd dozing pensioner. She’s not some street-art saddo just territorially pissing paint, though. Her abstractions transform environments, teasing the eye, dramatically refiguring the landscape.
St Pancras
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Art, Photography
Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art
Time Out says
This isn’t your average summer blockbuster. The basic idea is to show the link between the greats of abstract art (your Braques, Mondrians, Kandinskys etc) and the type of no-selfie-sticks-allowed photography you’d have no trouble calling ‘art’.
South Bank
Art, Painting
Art Now: Lisa Brice
Time Out says
John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ is the unofficial poster girl of Tate Britain. Most recently her soggy image was slapped on the cover of the book of Tate ‘highlights’ overflowing on the gift shop stands. Lisa Brice, a South African-born artist now living in London, was commissioned to paint a response to the famous pre-Raph portrait as part of her ‘Art Now’ exhibition.
Westminster
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Art
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece
Time Out says
One look at Medusa would turn flesh to stone. Auguste Rodin was sort of the opposite, dedicating his life and radical art instead to somehow turning stone into living, breathing, rippling flesh. His revolutionary sculptures feel quiveringly close to bursting alive and writhing with movement.
Bloomsbury
Art
Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman
Time Out says
London is currently home to two exhibitions of art by British painter Cedric Morris. The first, at the Garden Museum, concentrates on his dual identity as an artist and an award-winning gardener. Floral still lifes and the English countryside don’t exactly set the world on fire as the subject of an art exhibition. But ‘Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman’ turns this tranquil topic on its head.
Lambeth
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Art
Monet and Architecture
Time Out says
How much can anyone be bothered to say, let alone bloody listen to, about Claude Monet any more? The impressionist master is one of the great names of art history, a revolutionary, a game-changer, yada, yada, yada. He’s the defining nineteenth-century French artist, a man who has had so much written about him and whose art we have seen so many times that most sane people must be pretty bored of him by now.
Trafalgar Square
Art, Sculpture
Anthea Hamilton
Time Out says
Imagine you’re a squash – as in, a butternut squash. Now imagine what kind of art you would most like, based on your squashy-brained characteristics. For her 2018 Tate Britain Commission for the Duveen Galleries, Anthea Hamilton has created a squash-human hybrid, performed each day by an individual dressed in one of seven outfits inspired by various strains of curcubita (that’s for you, ‘Gardeners’ World’ fans).
Westminster
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Art
Joan Jonas
Time Out says
Thunder cracks, kites are frozen in the wind overhead, giant drawings of birds line the walls and videos show performers dancing in forests. This is Joan Jonas world, a thriving maelstrom of sound, movement and vision, cut through with myth that’s indistinguishable from reality.
South Bank
Museums
The Great British Seaside
Time Out says
With summer beckoning like a mermaid in a sailor’s wet dream, the Royal Maritime Museum in Greenwich has turned its main gallery over to an exhibition of photographs taken at the seaside resorts of Britain. Four major names in coastal snapping are represented: Martin Parr, Tony Ray-Jones, David Hurn and Simon Roberts.
Greenwich
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Art, Painting
Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy
Time Out says
This exhibition focuses entirely on 1932, a pivotal and prolific year for Pablo. In its summer, a major retrospective of his work was held, but instead of feeling like he’d made it, he fretted about being past it.
South Bank
Art
Somewhere in Between
Time Out says
Semen straws are used to artificially inseminate cattle as part of a process to breed the best and beefiest bulls. But artist Maria McKinney has another use for them: building sculptures. The artist’s photos of moody-looking bulls wearing these sculptures make up the first room of ‘Somewhere in Between’. McKinney’s stud-farm snaps, titled ‘Sire’, are part of an exhibition that looks at the point where science and art meet.
Bloomsbury
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Art
All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Life Painting
Time Out says
There are two main characters in this big show: the human body, and London. Both of them come across as lonely and isolated; bitter, violent and lost. This is an exhibition of figure painting through the twentieth century – a time of upheaval and pain – and the art made in response to all that is as tortured as you’d expect, and hugely influential.
Westminster
