The Spirit of Summer | Alon Zakaim Fine Art
I pointed out last week that galleries are beginning to shut their doors for the summer, and of course the trend is continuing as we move into August. But in among the locked doors and drawn blinds in Mayfair is this seasonally-themed group show. Alon Zakaim Fine Art represents a real grab bag of artists - I featured its excellent exhibition on Marc Chagall earlier in the year, though it’s also shown many more contemporary pieces - so is well equipped for this kind of thing.
The conceit for the exhibition is pretty loose. The spirit of summer could mean many things to many people, so accordingly this show mixes together styles and eras, from the cubist stylings of Ukrainian contemporary artist Ivan Turetskyy, to an almost pointillist street 1920s street scene from Achille Laugé. A couple of Chagalls appear too, of course. They’re unified, I suppose, by a sort of shared brightness and breeziness, a sense of light and heat; the show notes claim the focus is on “sun, pleasure and excursion”.
The work pictured above is the one that stood out to me as the very brightest and breeziest. It’s a simple composition, executed with household gloss paint, which provides a shiny, blank carapace, reflecting the gallery lights. It’s called Wet Rainbow for David, and was painted in the late 1970s by the British artist Patrick Hughes.
A rainbow banner has connotations with the pride flag, or maybe for a London audience, COVID-era support for the NHS. It didn’t mean that for Hughes at the time. But he meant us to look at his flat blue sky, his bold colours, the little visual joke of embedding a small wooden peg in the board, and smile. It’s playful and bright. It’s the spirit of summer, when we have fewer options to coop ourselves up indoors, in art galleries, and instead have the opportunity to go outside in the sunshine.
The Spirit of Summer is at Alon Zakaim Fine Art (London). 18 June - 16 August 2024