Top 5 of 2024
This is the seventh annual round-up of my top art shows of the year. See previous from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, if you don’t believe me. I can hardly believe it myself.
“If I wake up on Sunday morning and the half hour or so it will take to write and add that week’s post seems too much of a chore, then the project will end, entirely unnoticed by anyone who’s not me,” I wrote in my end-of-2023 post. “I’m still enjoying it though, so I’d say odds are that the tradition will be continued this time in 2024.”
Clearly I’m still enjoying it. I saw 281 gallery shows this year, up from 245 in 2023. And actually, that’s the most I’ve ever visited since beginning the project in 2018. Just as before, I wrote 50 more weekly posts about exhibitions that caught my eye.
I did a bit of housekeeping outside of the weekly posting. I shut down the project’s Twitter (sorry, X) account. This wasn’t out of any moral objections I have to the platform’s owner (though I have a few of those), but because I didn’t see the point of promoting Artangled outside of this website. With the exception of the odd validation-seeking mention on my (private) Instagram. Speaking of the website, I also switched the static site generator from Gatsby to Hugo, which is pleasingly, and suitably, bare-bones. No other changes are planned.
As I’ve done since 2018, I begin the main bit of this year’s roundup with five standout shows from the year.
Bomberg - Auerbach | Daniel Katz Gallery
Frank Auerbach died in November, and will surely be the subject of large posthumous retrospectives in public institutions over the years to come. When I heard the news, I remembered this remarkable 1972 scene from Primrose Hill, one of the London locations the painter returned to again and again. I saw it earlier in the year, part of a show that featured Auerbach’s works alongside some more polite and less interesting paintings from his teacher David Bomberg.
On Primrose Hill, pathway, hill, trees and sky are picked out in layer upon layer of impasto. The paint is so thick that individual hairs of Auerbach’s brush are visible. It’s as blustery and rough as a London sky, a deeply-recognisable version of which is picked out above. It’s completely, craggily, unforgettably singular. Rest in peace.
Danielle McKinney: Quiet Storm | Marianne Boesky
A highlight from my spring trip to New York was this painting. It’s called ‘Hold Your Breath’, and formed part of an impressive show by the young artist Danielle McKinney, who lives and works just over the river in Jersey City.
A resplendently orange robe-clad woman leans back in a moment of repose - head tilted up, eyes shut. The background is deep avocado green. Between two fingers of her raised right hand smoulders a cigarette, its burning end picked out in a livid blob of orange. Her fingernails are deep orange too. She’s luxuriating in the moment, somehow. She was placed directly opposite the entrance to the suitably plush Chelsea gallery space. She’d be staring us down as we walk in, if she’d noticed. But she was enjoying the moment with herself, her luxurious robe, her cigarette. We didn’t register.
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine | Hayward Gallery
Just squeezing into this roundup is the first show I featured in 2024. A bit of a cheat since the exhibition opened the previous autumn, but Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Hayward Gallery retrospective was still a standout. In his roughly half-century of active artistic production, Sugimoto became world-famous for his limited subject matter as well as his extreme technical excellence. He photographs seascapes and screens, and that’s pretty much it. At Hayward, I liked the one pictured above, from the latter group, best of all. In Union City Drive-In, Union City, from 1993, the white centre of the screen is an uber-long exposure of an entire movie.
Despite the humdrum setting, all around the screen, there are signs of the sublime. The rim of the horizon glows with sundown. Jet trails - I guess to or from one of the New York City area airports that must be close by - streak the sky, on crazy collision courses. Though of course, that’s just an illusion, a result of the hours-long exposure. And the image as a whole is only made possible by its governing artistic mind.
Memorabilia: Malo Chapuy | mor charpentier
A highlight from my recent trip to Paris. At first glance, Malo Chapuy’s paintings look medieval. They’re small, on panels, executed with egg tempera, with frames that look hundreds of years old and lush craquelure perforating their surfaces. But in fact they were painted this year. We’re tipped off by the medieval-looking landscapes being populated with wind farms, smokestacks and Brutalist architecture, among other anachronisms.
My favourite of all, pictured above, was a modern-ish take on the Renaissance trope of the ideal city. Chapuy’s use of perspective is pure Piero; the atmosphere he casts is as silent and eerie as any di Chirico town square. I got up close and looked at the painstaking cracks in the paint, put there by the artist. For some reason, I felt haunted by this scene. A couple of days later, passing by late at night, I stopped outside the gallery and craned my neck to look back at the ideal city once more.
Hand writing history: 200 years of personal diaries | King’s College
Rounding out the top five is an exhibition that wasn’t really an art show, but still made the cut for sheer memorability. A collector brought together personal diaries from the last couple of centuries and displayed them in unassuming vitrines, in a chapel belonging to Kings College London.
When I think of this show, I’m thinking about a small diary in the very first of the vitrines. In 1899, a woman who lived in the north of Scotland wrote, in a neat hand, about her mother’s death. I went to Elgin to buy mourning [clothes], she wrote. There was snow on the mountains.
Such spare poetry in these terse observations, as this brave woman reflects on the seasons changing, among other inevitabilities. I’ll never forget it.
Other highlights
Here are five other shows I saw that stood out this year for various reasons, to round out a top 10.
- Alex Hank: Several Flames (Richard Nagy Ltd, London)
- Georg Baselitz: A Confession of My Sins (White Cube, London)
- Beryl Cook / Tom of Finland (Studio Voltaire, London)
- Patrick Caulfield & Howard Hodgkin: ‘Painter-Colleagues’ (Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London)
- John Craxton: A Modern Odyssey (Pallant House Gallery, Chichester)
Disappointment(s) of the year
I didn’t write much about exhibitions I didn’t like - life’s too short for that. An exception was a huffy post about visiting a presentation of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1980s ROCI project at Thaddeus Ropac over the summer. Standing for Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Exchange, this was a late-period self-indulgent boondoggle that was effectively an excuse for the artist, whose best days were long behind him, to travel the world. And take lots of photos, go back to his home base in Florida, silkscreen these photos on a grand scale, then exhibit them in the host country. I described the results as an “incoherent, lazy mess” in my post, and stand by this view.
A runner-up from a public collection was Zineb Sedira’s rather hit-and-miss show at the Whitechapel Gallery. Perhaps I’m becoming more puritan in my middle age, because it was again what I saw as the artist’s self-indulgence - ending her show with a boring and mundane film about how she likes to dance - that annoyed me most.
Next year
“The moment it stops being enjoyable, I’ll stop,” I wrote in my year-end post last year.
That’s still what I think. Let’s see if the project makes it to the end of 2025, or quietly stops. Either way, it’ll pretty much only be me who notices. And I feel quite content about that.