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The end of 2023 was a pretty good time for art exhibitions, with major shows of classic painting, cheeky contemporary installation, clever technological wizardry and stunning photography to keep wintry art lovers satisfied.
If you’re a normal person, you may have missed all of that because you were too busy gorging yourself on mince pies and snogging at the office Christmas party. But don’t sweat, because there’s still time to catch these amazing exhibitions. Not a lot of time, admittedly, but enough to motivate to get your tuchus down to the Tate or National Gallery in the next few days and weeks.
Six London art exhibitions closing soon
Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain, closing on Jan 14
Sarah Lucas became one of the leading lights of the YBA (Young British Artists) movement with a body of work focused on knob jokes and tit gags. It isn’t big, and it isn’t clever. But who says art needs to be either of those things? Maybe, instead, art can be vulgar, puerile, obscene, grotesque and childish. Not all of it is good (the YBA urge to make everyday objects out bronze, in this case an Eames chair, is painfully dull) and over the course of the whole show, the joke starts to wear a little thin. But at least it’s a good joke, because the best humour is toilet humour, the best swear words are the rude ones, and it turns out, the best art is satirical, cynical, vulgar, stupid, funny and absolutely full of knob gags. It’s not big, and it’s not clever, but it’s very, very good.
Read the review here.
Frans Hals at the National Gallery, closing on Jan 21
This show of portraits by the great Flemish painter functions as a portrait of seventeenth-century Holland, but more than anything it’s evidence of a brilliant talent, a prodigious, special painter. Seeing this constant stream of faces across this many rooms can get a little dull. If you’re not interested in Dutch Golden Age portraiture there’s nowhere near enough drama, narrative or variation here to hook you in. But if you like your ruffs big, your dandies smirking and your soldiers drunk and hairy then Frans Hals will have you laughing like a cavalier.
Read the review here.
Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern, closing Jan 28
This messy exhibition barely manages to stick to its own concept. But does an exhibition have to make sense? Does it have to be cohesive? Does it have to take you on a ‘journey’ and tell a story? Or is it enough to just chuck a bunch of great artworks in a gallery and hope for the best? If you want to see stunning works by Doig, Freud, Dumas, Richter and Höfer, you’re in luck, that’s all here. But as a snapshot of art and its meaning in the age of photography, it’s all too blurry.
Read the review here.
Daido Moriyama at the Photographers’ Gallery, closing Feb 11
Influential Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (1938-) captured images full of grime and dirt. He says it’s all a quest for the truth, but the ‘truth’ always seems to elude him. And it doesn’t matter. Because in this search for the impossible, this photographic journey towards objective reality that doesn't exist, this trip full of rubbish, dirt and lies, he finds something even more honest: life.
Read the review here.
Zach Blas: ‘Cultus’ at Arebyte Gallery, closing Feb 18
Zach Blas's exhibition about future AI gods is kind of like the set of a BDSM episode of ‘Red Dwarf’, and it’s visually super impressive. But its future gothic techno immersiveness hides a clever heart. The show feels like a very ancient warning against worshipping false idols, against how we blindly kowtow to Silicon Valley occultism. But it’s probably too late, the gods are already here, already being praised, we just haven’t put on our black robes yet.
Read the review here.
Philip Guston at Tate Modern, closing Feb 25
Over the course of this big retrospective of the American artist’s (1913-1980) work, you watch one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century fall to pieces, collapse in on himself, and then be born anew. It’s amazing. Guston was one of the most important painters of the last century, and this show is staggering.
Read the review here.
11 London art exhibitions we can’t wait to see in 2024.
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