Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts | Exhibition review
The annual open submission Royal Academy exhibition returns with 1,613 works chosen by David Remfry RA on the broad uniting theme of “Only Connect”, taken from a quote from Howards End by EM Forster. As ever, it is a wild mix of the intriguing, the bad, the baffling, the derivative, the vaguely disturbing and the inventive. Those who are very sensitive to the involuntary feelings engaging with someone else’s creative process and worldview can incite may find it a little overwhelming – but that’s sort of the point. It’s exciting to be presented with a panoply of expression and to feel your way through to things that suit you.
Several favoured subjects emerge: lots of cats and dogs, naturally, because we love them, along with lots of other animals like snow leopards, birds and horses. Many celebrities, some neon, many nudes, but also, bizarrely at least two paintings of toilets and one of a urinal, in case anyone needs reminding about what they look like.
The sheer volume of art on display means that anyone who visits will probably pick out different things as highlights. Shin Egashira’s Double Globe – Time Machine According to Alfred Jarry mixes fantasy, poetry and science. Taking his inspiration from Alfred Jarry, a French symbolist writer who lived at the end of the 19th century and who invented his own philosophical concept no less (pataphyiscs, “a science of imaginary solutions”) and his book of proto science-fiction, Practical Construction of the Time Machine (1899), Egashira has drawn up blueprints and then built a contraption. It consists of two globes that look like armillary spheres on a stand, made from wood, steel and cable, with lines of text chasing around the wooden circles. It was made in collaboration with the astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe. There’s something delightful about dragging an idea from the world of another’s imagination into tangibility. It is both an absurd flight of fancy and a meticulously constructed machine.
Ron Arad’s Big Easy Mixing Red and Transparent is a sumptuous-looking armchair rendered in fissured crystalline resin, its transparency warping its surroundings as you look at it. Amanda Levete RA’s Testing Options for Belgrade Philharmonic Hall uses layered acrylic to create layers of lines of light that could almost be a futuristic city seen from above.
David Stewart’s chromogenic print Sisters in Scarves Eating Pimlico Chips features two dyspeptic-looking women who could have been captured at any time in the last 50 or so years, the scarves lending an old-fashioned feel. You want to know, why do they look so angry, they have chips? Spriggan Party, an etching by Frederic Morris, is gleefully pagan, flames licking up around figures with faces like carved pumpkin heads.
Jake Garfield’s woodcut Man Wrestling an Angel is a singular vision, the angel imbued with a Frida Kahlo-esque monobrow, the man wearing boxing gloves with, perhaps unwisely given the unforgiving look of the angel, his tackle dangling out. Alison Atkin’s plaster and polymer sculptures Curios VII and VIII are stark white with a densely spiky texture that appears to have been taken directly from the alien landscape-like peaks of a Romanesco cauliflower.
There isn’t even time to mention properly the inflatable beetle scurrying up the cornices like Gregor Samsa having his worst day, or the late Queen made of thumb tacks or an eerily warped sculpture of Donald Trump. The last word is given to Irish fashion designer Richard Malone’s poem in the dark about sadness, filíocht faoi bhrón, as an dorchadas, a hanging sculpture in swags of royal blue fabric swaying delicately in the central atrium of the display space, a suitably impressive showpiece for an exhibition as erratically democratic as ever. It’s a fun collection that shows the heart of the nation through what we choose to create.
Jessica Wall
Summer Exhibition is at the Royal Academy of Arts from 13th June until 20th August 2023. For further information visit the exhibition’s website here.