by The best Adrian Searle art shows in 2023
5. Vermeer
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Johannes Vermeer attracted over half a million visitors to the Rijkmuseum between February and June this year. Not bad for an artist who only produced around 37 known paintings over a 20 year period between 1654 and 1674. A display of quiet intimacy and domestic mystery, beautifully installed and spread over 10 rooms, 28 of which are mostly small scenes , indoor and casual. street scenes were presented in this amazing exhibition, the largest ever of the artist’s work.
Serpentine Galleries, London
A helicopter takes us from the outskirts of London towards the crest of Grenfell Tower, in slow, majestic fashion. Finally we maneuver and circle, turn and circle again, going in close and pulling back from the outside and scenes into burnt apartments where 72 people died. Filmed in 2017, before the tower was hidden behind a shroud, this makes us look and remember. Free movie without registration.
Tate Modern, London, until 25 February
Guston’s major tour, postponed after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, finally landed at Tate Modern this autumn. This riotous exhibition of socially committed early work, beautiful sage abstractions, and the later cartoonish, often violent mutes of Ku Klux Klansmen and melancholy images of the painter himself, is irresistible. Grab it while you can.
Barbican Gallery, London
Alice Neel was a fearless and tender portrait painter. Her paintings focus not only on the dynamics between her sitters, but also on their compatibility with the artist. Neel portrayed New York bohemians, art critics and lovers throughout her long career. She painted performances and street life, police violence and a young man suffering from tuberculosis. Neel’s portraits, including her own, are brilliant critiques of error and vulnerability.
Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 14 January
This fascinating spread of drawings, paintings and sculptures is interspersed with witty stories, social observation and sexual honesty. Working in a mix of styles and methods, the artist continues to find new ways to describe the world. New York lesbian life in the 1990s and sessions with contractions, the elegant mess of creative life and changes in the wider political landscape – they’re all here.
Katy Hessel’s top 20 art shows23
Laura Poitras’ poignant documentary follows artist Nan Goldin and her fight to remove the Sackler name from museums. Running parallel to the story of the disgraced Sacklers is the story of Goldin’s life. My favorite quote from the film was: “Nan’s photographs from the other side” – a very accurate description of her work in how it embodies her ability to connect with her subjects so deeply and empathetically.
White Cube, Paris
Kimeze’s debut solo show showcased her incredible ability to carve tender scenes that stand on the threshold between two places, through dazzling oil pastel prints – be it indoor/outdoor, water/land, or reality/imagination. Kimeze’s paintings are fluidly rendered, often featuring a female figure amidst a desert of palms, quietly powerful and dappled with moonlight.
Ben Hunter Gallery, London
A former art historian turned set designer, West Country artist Keith-Roach is best known for her decorated Greek pots that feel both ancient and surreal. This exhibition, linked to her husband who worked in trompe l’oeil but in painting, focused on a relic-like basin decorated with material projections (old phones, paper bags, sponges, rolled pine, hot water bottles – at act as cornices. ) industrial goods (chains, saws) and debris. A favorite feature was Jean Paul Gautier’s cast perfume bottle that referenced the Venus de Milo – a material play on the idealized and commercialized female body. When you go to a Keith-Roach show you are always in awe, and that leaves you stunned by the many layers that take place in a single work of art.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
I loved looking at Gwen John’s intimate portraits of girls on the brink of adolescence. Working at the beginning of the 20th century in Paris, John painted the newly established freedoms afforded to women: she captured them in their own rooms – paid for by themselves, and no longer under the protection of men – giving insight us on their private. lives. This show reaffirmed the Welsh-born artist as a key figure in modernity, and showed that painting does not need to shout to make an impact.
Barbican, London
This exciting exhibition brought together the work of the US-born artist in such visual ways. With elegance and beauty, through her art, Weems connected the baroque to today – visually and culturally – and played with theater and dance in her colourful, immersive multi-screen films. Confronting pressing issues, her photographs of destroyed signage were seen after the Black Lives Matter 2020 protests, and photographs of herself standing stoically in front of Roman monuments of glory explored “the construction of power in western civilization is accomplished through architecture “.
The best Jonathan Jones art shows for free, 2023
National Gallery, London
Catholic relics of medieval saint’s hemp robes, images of 21st century poverty by Andrea Büttner and a stony Homeric canvas by Caravaggio helped to move this exhibition. Even for the non-believer it opened up new ways of seeing religious art and showed how ideas can change the world.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, until 28 January
The baroque energy of Rubens is hard to find in an exhibition but this one manages to choose an accurate and interesting essay on the ways in which he depicted women from charismatic portraits to religious theater to nude flesh galore on canvas. Rubens emerges as an artist to inspire and liberate.
3. Tracey Emin
Counter Editions, London Print Fair
Gory red ink permeates Emin’s stunning new series of six huge nude prints, And Everything was Full of Love. The body of the woman in these great works is electrified by passion. They make you feel driven to be there. Bacon, Freud – move over ladies. Emin is the figurative artist we need right now.
Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire
The Portuguese sculptor’s Wedding Cake is both art and architecture that you can climb, enter or reserve for a wedding. Country ceramics inspired by the paintings of Paula Rego cover the exterior with joyful abandon. Sex, love and hope in a dark world is something special.
Kew Gardens, London, until 7 April
Among the oddities associated with this exhibition about nature and the human spirit, there are evil flowers that grow from flat urban land, insects that imitate flowers and ghost trees. Collishaw proves to be Britain’s most exciting artist as he works with technology and science in this exciting mystery tour.
Oliver Wainwright’s best architecture of 2023
As manufacturing space is pushed further out of our cities, or destroyed altogether, dRMM’s ingenious project in Charlton, south-east London, shows how workshops and studios can be cleverly combined on a tight site. Built from cross-laminated timber, the structure steps out as it rises, providing larger studios at the lighter upper levels, fitting more floor area into a small footprint, and creating a striking roadside beacon – trumpeting that manufacturing is here to stay. Housing furniture makers, clothing producers and an electric bike workshop prove to developers that “mixed-use” development can be more than coffee shops and yoga studios.
Inspired by the Elizabethan coaching inns that once lined London’s High Street, this new tale of an almshouse., by Witherford Watson Mann, a tranquil courtyard oasis for the over 65s. Apartments open onto generous communal walkways that cover the wood-lined courtyard, where benches outside each apartment provide social spots to hang out. A large room downstairs, with large bay windows on the street, is not conceived as a normal lounge and as an asset for the general public, which is used by local charity groups to inject the place with energy and make residents feel a vital part. of the life of Bermondsey.
A mirrored spiral staircase stands at the end of the Young V&A’s voluminous hall, like a shimmering kaleidoscope watching you from above. This gloomy Victorian building in London was revived this year with a new range of stunning permanent exhibitions, injecting its wedge-shaped floors with an unrestrained fantasy of tactile textures and materials, where rough and smooth collide with lumpy and scaly objects, fuzzy and fresh water and shiny. AOC and De Matos Ryan’s work is complemented by his dreamy playscapes for younger children in an upstairs factory-like enclosure, aimed at teenagers, which provides insight into digital design and manufacturing processes.
With insulation made from agricultural waste, rammed earth walls made from demolition debris, and antibacterial door handles made from salt from the nearby marshes, Atelier Luma in Arles is a living laboratory of how to make treasure out of trash, at Assemble and BC Architects. Home to the “bioregional” research arm of the Luma Foundation, it is an essay in locally sourced, ecologically minded construction, where all materials are sourced from local waste streams – from insulation to spray pressed fibers from the sunflower industry , with bathroom tiles made from waste clay from the local sand quarry, and the beautiful algae bioplastic furniture.
Bubble windows flowing from the yellow brick walls, butterfly gardens nestled between classrooms, a rainforest growing from the third floor courtyard – the Reggio school in Madrid, at the Office of Political Innovation, is an educational building like no other another. a wonderful world where nature seems to have taken over, and plants fill every corner, as the lichen and fungi seem ready to swallow the face of the gloomy cork. Standing on a hillside like a cartoon factory, it shows how you can do a lot with a little, stripping the structure back to its bare basics and using cheap scrap materials in ingenious new ways.
