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[title]Picking the best London art exhibitions of 2022 is a little like picking your favourite child, if you had hundreds of kids and nearly all of them were awful. Sadly, 2022 will not go down as a great year for art: the pickings were slim. Galleries emerging from the pandemic had big bills hanging over their heads, and nothing pays off bills like boring painting, so we were treated to a whole year of incredibly dull canvases filled with images of absolutely nothing. It was peak banker art. There was also Damien Hirst. And Kaws. Honestly, it was more traumatic than the actual pandemic. I have never been to so many bad, cynical, tedious exhibitions in such a short space of time.
So these good ones are the exception, the few ugly ducklings who blossomed into art swans, or something.
Mike Nelson at Matt’s Gallery
Master of sombre discomfort Mike Nelson returned to London (after his incredible Tate Britain installation in 2019) for a tiny show at Matt’s Gallery. The installation was just a small, suffocatingly claustrophobic bedroom filled with travel books. You got locked in and left to rot with your dreams of escape and freedom. Dreams that would never be fulfilled. The perfect post-pandemic punch in the face.
Read the review here.
Francis Bacon: ‘Man and Beast’ at the RA and ‘The First Pope’ at Gagosian
The Royal Academy’s Francis Bacon show was staggering, ambitious, huge, amazing – filled with violence, angst, and gorgeous painting. Exactly what you want from a blockbuster exhibition. But also in Mayfair, Gagosian hung just a single Bacon painting, his first pope, in a pitch-black room, and it was somehow even better. There were no distractions, no lights, no fuss, just one single, brilliant, terrifying painting staring at you right in the face. Intimate, brutal, awesome.
Read the review of the RA show here and the Gagosian show here.
Lydia Blakeley: ‘The High Life’ at Southwark Park Galleries
If you’re going to do painting in 2022, you’ve got to do it well, and you’ve got to do it smart. Lydia Blakeley managed both of those in her excellent show at Southwark Park Galleries. Alongside works on canvas depicting dreamy holidays and idyllic swimming pools, Blakeley painted directly on sunloungers, and filled the gallery with rocks and cacti, creating a cynical exploration of the internet’s hold on our psyches.
Read the review here.
Cezanne at Tate Modern
Cezanne. That’s it. That’s the tweet.
Read the review here.
Walter Sickert at Tate Britain
Across a long, sinuous career, Walter Sickert painted the grime and filth of north London, the landscapes of France and the stars of the stage, all alongside some hugely controversial murder scenes. Fascinating, complicated art by a fascinating, complicated man. But most amazing are his late paintings based on news clippings, presaging the media-obsessed work of countless contemporary artists by over half a century. A truly modern painter.
Read the review here.
Luyang: ‘Luyang Neti Neti’ at Zabludowicz Collection
Deeply complex but hugely emotional, Luyang’s work at Zabludowicz Collection explored Buddhist philosophy, disease, death and gender through hyper-colour film installations and a whole, real-life, actual, functioning games arcade. It was over-the-top, ambitious and totally built for Instagram, but also dealt with some properly moving concepts, and did it subtly and with a hefty dose of vulnerability.
Read the review here.
Anne Imhof: ‘Avatar II’ at Sprüth Magers
In a labyrinthine installation of lockers, German artist Anne Imhof turned Sprüth Magers into an immersive, heady, sexual world, pulsating with sweat and hormones. There were scratched paintings and films of a nude woman screaming in the snow, an actual gym, and lots of heavy metal logos. Very teenage, very po-faced and not very self-aware, but that’s also what made it so good.
Read the review here.
Richard Mosse: ‘Broken Spectre’ at 180 The Strand
Not content with documenting the migrant crisis and wars across Africa, Irish photographer Richard Mosse turned his scientific imaging cameras on the rampant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest to devastating effect. The main film in this 180 The Strand installation was ear-splittingly loud, eye-burstingly immersive and soul-destroyingly depressing.
Read the review here.
‘Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965’ at the Barbican
War, what is it good for? Art, apparently, as this show of harrowing, grim, mournful post-war British art proved. It was filled with steel, craters, blood, violence, pain and trauma. Not nice, but absolutely essential.
Read the review here.
Olivia Sterling: ‘Manslaughter’ at Guts Gallery
The severed limbs, chopped-up livers and decapitated bonces of white men were all laid out to be feasted upon in young English painter Olivia Sterling’s show at Guts. It was gory but cartoony, comic but scary, fun but also terrifyingly serious. Don’t worry, it wasn’t real, it was all cake, but it was still the best exhibition by a young painter in London by a bloody mile.
Read the review here.
Marcus Coates: ‘The Directors’ for Artangel
Coates created five films about the experience of living with psychosis, each one directed by someone affected by the condition, and placed the films around Pimlico, a GP surgery, a flat and an old Indian restaurant. Each space invited you into the life of someone dealing with profound mental hardship, and it was properly harrowing, but also incredibly moving.
Read the review here.
And… the worst shows of 2022
KAWS: ‘New Fiction’ at the Serpentine
I have run out of words for my hatred of this terrible sub-art nonsense, I only have sound: bleeeuuuuurrrgggggghhh.
‘Back to Earth’ at the Serpentine
An entire exhibition about the environment that did nothing for the environment, just room after room of back-patting and lecturing. Given the choice between ecological disaster and being told to recycle by a tote bag, I’d welcome the apocalypse tbh.
‘Radio Ballads’ at the Serpentine
The Serpentine’s third appearance in this list! Congrats, lads. This exhibition was based on community projects run in Barking & Dagenham, and it was a patronising, cold, unemotional, badly thought-through, self-congratulatory shitshow.
Cecilia Vicuna at Tate Modern
Imagine having the whole Turbine Hall to work with, and then just hanging up your old washing.
Damien Hirst at Newport Street Gallery
Oh God, Damien Hirst found out about NFTs.
‘Universal Everything’ at 180 The Strand
A whole exhibition of high-tech ads for absolutely naff all. I guess the hope was that if it’s shiny enough, no one will realise it’s terrible art.
‘The Horror Show!’ at Somerset House
It wasn’t horrifying. It was horrible.
Want some good art? Here are the top ten exhibitions you can see in London right now.
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