Yesterday I went to fifteen free art exhibitions. Here, very briefly, is what I thought.
Serpentine Gallery
☆☆☆ Albert Oehlen (until 2 February): Canvases of jumbled colour, plus several huge charcoals themed around a single 1940's surrealist painting, plus an almost inaudible soundtrack by Steamboat Switzerland. I haven't enjoyed an exhibition at the Serpentine since 2017.
★★☆ Luchita Hurtado: I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn (until 20 October): However, over at the Sackler there's some proper art for once. Luchita's first painting in 1938 was of a gas ring, after which she eschewed objects and struck out into pattern and self. Her favoured viewpoint appears to be looking down at her unclad body, so many of her works are perhaps best described as breastscapes.
National Portrait Gallery
★★☆ Redacted Oil Company Portrait Award 2019 (until 20 October): A roomful of contemporary portraits, as good as you'd expect, and far more diverse than would ever have been the case 20 years ago. If you're thinking of contributing next year, wrinkles add a lot of character.
White Cube (Bermondsey)
★☆☆ Mona Hartoum - Remains To Be Seen (until 3 November): Mona scores a point for her perspex mobile of the Earth's continents, which drew admiring glances, which her roomful of skeletal bunkbeds didn't.
☆☆☆ Harmony Hammond (until 3 November): Minimalist, abstract and monochrome. Rarely do I walk out of a gallery less than 15 seconds after walking in, but I felt like I'd seen it all.
☆☆☆ Dóra Maurer (until 3 November): That said, I spent less than 10 seconds with Dóra's overlapping planes of colour. Technically splendid, emotionally meh.
White Cube (Masons Yard)
★★☆ Damien Hirst: Mandalas (until 2 November): Welcome back to the sheepslicer, who on this occasion has appropriated thousands and thousands of butterflies and arranged their wings in colour-coordinated concentric circles. The suite of works is undeniably gorgeous, both individually and collectively, because nature's splendour is unmatched and their assembly has been impeccable. But it did feel somewhat distasteful to be admiring death on such a scale.
Newport Street Gallery
★☆☆ Reason Gives No Answers (until 10 November): Meanwhile, over at Damien's actual gallery, 50 of his acquired works have come out of storage for a rare showing. Three bins and six kettles. A tyre in a box. Two massively oversized biros. Several canvases of varying interest. I did love the Francis Bacon, but overall more miss than hit.
☆☆☆ John Squire : Disinformation (until 10 November): Two of the six galleries instead feature big glitchy portraits. I would have preferred more bins and kettles.
Whitechapel Gallery
★★☆ ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art (until 5 January): It's quite bitty, this Spanish curation, but the absolute winner was Eve Sussman’s random video of an unnamed central Asian oil town. A separate screen to one side shows how each scene is being algorithmically selected from a database of short clips, linked by keyword, hence any perceived sense of meaning is entirely unintentional.
★★☆ Eileen Simpson and Ben White: Once Heard Before (until 5 January): Scratchy records, 1950s vinyl and contemporary sampling, all transferred from Salford. Was being enjoyed by the youngest, hippest crowd I've ever seen here.
★★★ Sense Sound/Sound Sense (until 2 February): A small exhibition celebrating Fluxus, a 60s movement with an avant garde view of musical composition. Water dripped into a bucket. Notes held for a very long time. Building a fire. Music derived from the numbers in train timetables. 4’33” of silence. It's all nuts, but the sheer density of creativity exhibited is inspirational.
Victoria & Albert Museum
★★★ Robin Hood Gardens (until tomorrow): Poplar's iconic concrete tenements are being demolished, but before they went the V&A commissioned this monumental half hour fly-through tribute. We rise through floors, snoop in kitchens, glide along walkways and admire the gridded homeliness. At one point a large yellow claw is seen through the window smashing apart the building opposite. If we must lose this icon, Do Ho Suh's mesmerising video is a worthy memento.
★★☆ Beatrix Potter's Art: 'drawn with design' (until 17 November): Childhood sketches of ducks, pigs and rabbits, proving that Beatrix was a better artist at the age of eight than we will ever be.
★★★ Into the Blue (until 19 April): The Architecture gallery's sideroom houses yet another winning exhibition, concerning "the origin and revival of pools, swimming baths and lidos". Skip around the country from spa towns to coastal dips, admiring Victorian design and Art Deco features through photographs, plans and contemporary film clips. Can't go wrong with that.
Royal Academy
★★☆ Antony Gormley (until 3 December): This one's not free (it's twenty quiddish) and I went today (not yesterday). Expect a full retrospective, from waxed sliced bread to dangling metal fruit, plus a heck of a lot of trademark humanoids in multiplicitous forms. The most interesting rooms are exuberant assault courses (picking through spiralled cable or negotiating a gloomy hardboard cave), the dullest is crossed by three wires at right angles. Nobody's here for the small paintings. Four decades of sketchy notebooks intrigue. The penultimate gallery is flooded with seawater, so visitors can only stare. If nothing else, varied enough to be a memorable experience.
Also on my 7 mile perambulation, I observed the following...
Kensington Gardens
★☆☆ Junya Ishigami: Serpentine Pavilion 2019 (closed 6 October): After celebrating a social summer in a shady slate cave, the time has come to disassemble the annual pavilion's roof. I watched three workmen removing the last slates from a wire mesh, less carefully than the artist had slotted them together, and piling them onto a suspended pallet.
★★☆ The Hay Wain (11 October): A horse and trap pulled up outside the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, then a man hopped off and started forking grass into the back of the trailer. Far more bucolic than one expects in W2.
Trafalgar Square
★★★ Extinction Rebellion (until 19 October): A tented village filled half the square on one side of the fountains. Flags waved. Banners had been draped. Some kind of plant-based meal was being doled out into reusable tubs. Fake flames lapped up the base of Nelson's Column. A pink octopus wobbled theatrically at the foot of the steps. A conga was launched ...and a line of police watched everything from the roadway.
