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Royal Academy of Arts

  • Art
  • Piccadilly
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
  1. Royal Academy of Arts ( John Bodkin)
    John Bodkin
  2. Royal Academy of Arts
  3. Royal Academy of Arts ( Jonathan Perugia / Time Out)
    Jonathan Perugia / Time Out
  4. Royal Academy of Arts (Jonathan Perugia / Time Out)
    Jonathan Perugia / Time Out
  5. Royal Academy of Arts (John Bodkin)
    John Bodkin
  6. Royal Academy of Arts (Jonathan Perugia / Time Out)
    Jonathan Perugia / Time Out
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Time Out says

4 out of 5 stars

For 250 years, Britain’s first art school has been a hotbed of artistic talent. You name ’em, they were an Academician. But the RA’s also got serious pedigree when it comes to putting on big shows, like 2016’s totally incredible ‘Abstract Expressionism’ show and 2022’s magnificent Francis Bacon retrospective. These days that RA also has been extended and has a sizeable free permanent collection display. This place is just as important as it’s ever been.

Written by
Time Out editors

Details

Address:
Burlington House, Piccadilly
London
W1J 0BD
Transport:
Tube: Piccadilly Circus
Price:
Some exhibitions free, ticketed exhibitions vary
Opening hours:
Mon-Thu, Sat-Sun 10am-6pm; Fri 10am-9pm
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What’s on

‘Entangled Pasts, 1768–Now’

  • 3 out of 5 stars

Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it.  It opens with depictions of Black figures by Gainsborough and Reynolds, portraits of former slaves, abolitionists, attendants and illegitimate children. There weren’t a lot of Black people in Britain at the time, and most of those who were here struggled to escape lives of subservience. In among those paintings; a gorgeous, quiet, contemporary portrait of the Black painter Scipio Moorhead by Kerry James Marshall, a fleet of model ships by Hew Locke. Already, at the start of the show, the balance favours old, tricky, problematic art over brilliant new work. It’s uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the point.  Elsewhere there are paintings of the pale-skinned children of plantation owners, portraits of the families of colonial governors. John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) was the only academician to own slaves, but the other artists here are implicated because they would have had patrons who owned plantations or profited off the slave trade.  Again, there are contemporary works by the likes of Yinka Shonibare and Sonia Boyce here and there, but they’re left as background material to a foreground of histo

Angelica Kauffman

  • 3 out of 5 stars

History is unkind to women, and art history in particular. Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman was a hugely popular eighteenth century painter and one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy, but she’s been largely forgotten. This show is an attempt to correct that oversight.  It does so by trying to reframe Kauffman’s work in a modern light, reimagining her self-portraiture as a tool she used to formulate, manipulate and craft her own identity. She’s quietly confrontational in traditional Austrian garb, she’s poised and soft with a stylus, she’s young and fresh, being pulled in two different directions by figures representing art and music. In self portraits, she could define who she was to the world, project an image, shape an identity. It’s not all me me me though. Her approach to history paintings sees her foreground female characters and narratives. Cleopatra lovingly adorns Mark Antony’s tomb in a dark, brooding work, Penelope sits wistfully at her loom, Eleanora sucks venom out of King Edward I’s wound. Women are centred, celebrated. This is neoclassicism from a feminine perspective, a view that we’re so rarely given, and that is so rarely made the main attraction. That’s the appeal here.  But some of the painting here is incredibly dodgy. Her portrait of Martina Cocks twists the sitter’s head into lopsided bulbosity, Penelopoe has been given a face that’s 80 percent schnoz and the figure on the left of that afore-mentioned music and art self-portrait is so

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