Annabel Downes

The Royal Academy’s first Summer Exhibition opened in 1769. That was the same year that Captain James Cook began his first voyage to the Pacific. In other words, this open-submission exhibition has been around for a very long time. This year, British sculptor Ryan Gander is at the helm, working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. Elsewhere, Paul Tecklenberg transforms discarded nitrous oxide canisters into a basketball hoop, while Joseph Grigely has constructed a leaning tower of wine-bottle capsules, almost ten metres high, from the foil found around the necks of bottles. It is the sort of exhibition where almost any material, subject, or idea can find a place.  Those looking for some art world bigwigs will find paintings by Frank Bowling, Gary Humes, Anselm Kiefer, and a beautiful

It’s clear from his major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery that Anish Kapoor shares Time Out’s fondness for the colour palette red and black. Although, it must be said, his shades have smarter names: Alizarin Crimson and Vantablack. The latter absorbs 99.965% of visible light, holding the world record for the darkest manmade substance, and Kapoor has purchased the exclusive rights to use it (to the consternation of some of his art world peers).  It's quite a privilege to have a solo show at the Hayward Gallery. Very few artists have been invited back for a second: Kapoor’s last exhibition here was in 1998, long before Chicago’s ‘Bean’ was commissioned, before he won the Turner Prize, and before he became one of the world’s most celebrated sculptors. Nearly thirty years later, this show gathers together many of Kapoor’s greatest hits: concave mirrored surfaces that turn the world upside down; hulking great sculptures caked in thick crimson oil paint, resembling bodies turned inside out. The opening room is dominated by a monumental new work that looks like a bicycle pump has been taken to a Babybel. The jacked-up crimson PVC form bulges against the Hayward’s brutalist concrete, wedged so tightly into the corners that it looks as though, with the slightest nudge, it might pop.  The depthless voids come next; a roomful of works where Kapoor’s Vantablack is put to the test. What appears to be a deep fissure carved into the wall is, in fact, nothing more than a crack-shaped fo

Delcy Morelos spent a month filling the Barbican’s Sculpture Court with earth and clay. Working by hand, the Colombian artist and her team layered more than ten tonnes of the stuff to create origo, a mammoth, multi-sensory installation stretching 24 metres wide and 12 metres high, named after the Latin word for ‘origin’.  For more than a decade, Morelos has asked viewers to rethink their relationship with soil; not just as the brown stuff shaken from boots or scrubbed from under our fingernails, but as the substance from which all life emerges and depends. Growing up in Tierralta, northern Colombia, Morelos is influenced by an Andean view that sees landscapes not as resources to be extracted, but deserving of care and protection.  And so here, in the Barbican’s circular courtyard, we earthlings are invited to burrow through Morelos’ ovular structure, weaving through one of six entrances before arriving in the belly of the beast. Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos’ beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain.   Then you emerge into the centre of the installation: the doughnut’s hole, open to the elements and flooded with light. Here, meditative activities such as tai chi are planned to take place, beneath the Brutalist tower block

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist looks

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear 2D

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through memories, w

If you were to type Michaelina Wautier into the web, the results wouldn’t amount to much. You’d learn she was a painter living and working in Brussels. That she died in 1689 at the age of 75 (pretty good going, given 17th-century Europe’s fondness for endemic infections). And that, since then, she has been largely forgotten. For much of the intervening time, few art historians believed that paintings bearing her signature could possibly have been made by a woman, instead attributing them to her brother or other male artists.  Her altarpiece-sized religious paintings were assumed to be too ambitious for a woman, while nudes posed another problem: how was she meant to accurately paint the human body – let alone the male nude – when the academies that taught such things barred her from entering? You begin to see why Wautier’s authorship was doubted for so long. And yet she did it all: flowers and still lifes, portraits and large-scale history paintings. Twenty-five of them are now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, in the first UK exhibition devoted to the artist. Her works are shown alongside those of better-known contemporaries - Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger - as well paintings by her older brother, Charles Wautier, who she is thought to have shared a studio with. Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas You only have to stand in front of Wautier’s flower paintings to see why she moved

Have you ever swum with a sea snake? If not, you may soon get your chance. Apparently, UK waters are about half a century off becoming habitable to these potently venomous creatures, but if you’re impatient like me, and would prefer your first encounter today, Somerset House has you covered.  Diana-Fiona Armour is the artist responsible: she has scaled up a 3D scan of this endangered sea snake (more professionally known as Aipysurus fuscus), sliced it into three parts, illuminated it with mesh-LED, and set it among the courtyard’s dancing fountains. Projections based on 50 years of data from oceanographic sensors along the British coast suggest that, as seas continue to warm, this slippery species—today at home in the warm shallow coral reefs of north-western Australia—might one day share your New Year’s Day dip in British waters. Sea snakes, after all, are a sign of how the oceans are doing. So while the thought of sharing the water with one may seem alarming, in truth, it’s the scientist’s purple data programmed to pulse through Armour’s LED sculpture that is scarier. ‘Sea snakes are a vital, but often overlooked, indicator of marine health,’ says Armour. ‘By focusing on these animals, and highlighting how their existence is being threatened, I hope to draw attention to wider ocean and ecological issues.’ By day, Armour’s sculpture takes on the dry, armoured shell of shed skin—fitting, as we wave goodbye this week to the Year of the Wood Snake. Or rather, for those parents

The world’s largest space dedicated to illustration is here. More than two decades after celebrated English cartoonist and children’s book illustrator Quentin Blake began championing the idea, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opened this week in Clerkenwell as the UK’s first permanent public home for illustration. More than a museum, the Centre combines three exhibition galleries with a free public library, landscaped gardens, a café, shop and community spaces. Its ambitions extend beyond the gallery walls too, with programmes for schools, families and community groups, alongside plans to resume touring exhibitions across the UK from 2027. The Centre officially opens this Friday 5 June, but Time Out was lucky enough to get a sneak peek inside ahead of its grand opening. Here’s what the Centre has in store. Photograph: © Hufton+CrowExterior of the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration What’s the Quentin Blake Centre like inside? The Centre occupies a former 18th- and 19th-century waterworks at New River Head in Clerkenwell. Led by Tim Ronalds Architects, the redevelopment preserves much of the site’s industrial character, with the former Engine House now home to the public library and the Boiler House transformed into a café overlooking the gardens. The library, the UK’s first dedicated public illustration library, is stocked with more than 1,000 picture books, graphic novels and zines. The shelves range from Quentin Blake’s own books to classics by Maurice Sendak,