Adrian Searle’s best art shows of 2023
5. Vermeer
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Johannes Vermeer attracted more than half a million visitors to the Rijksmuseum between February and June this year. Not bad for an artist who produced only about 37 known paintings in a twenty-year period between 1654 and 1674. An exhibition of quiet intimacies and domestic mysteries, beautifully appointed and spread across 10 rooms, 28 of which are mostly small, interior scenes and occasionally street views were presented in this intoxicating exhibition, the largest ever of the artist’s work.
Serpentine Galleries, London
A helicopter takes us from the edge of London to the shell of Grenfell Tower, in a slow and stately approach. Finally we linger and circle, turn and circle again, closing in and retreating from the charred exterior and looking out into burned-out apartment buildings where 72 people died. Filmed in 2017, before the tower was hidden behind cladding, this makes us look and remember. A fearless, unforgettable film.
Tate Modern, London, until February 25
Guston’s major traveling retrospective, postponed after the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, finally landed at Tate Modern this fall. This riotous exhibition of socially engaged early work, of beautiful, laborious abstractions and the deceptively cartoonish later work, often populated by stupid, violent Ku Klux Klans men and melancholic images of the painter himself, is not to be missed. Catch it while you can.
Barbican Gallery, London
Alice Neel was a painter of fearless and tender portraits. Her paintings unravel not only the dynamics between her sitters, but also their complicity with the artist. Neel depicted New York’s bohemians, art critics and lovers throughout her long career. She painted demonstrations and street life, police brutality and a young man stricken with tuberculosis. Neel’s portraits are wonderfully shaky assessments of vanities and vulnerabilities, including her own.
Whitechapel Gallery, London, until January 14
This wonderfully strange proliferation of drawings, painting and sculpture overflows with jokes, social observation and sexual frankness. Working in a mixture of styles and manners, the artist continues to find new ways to describe the world. Lesbian life in 1990s New York and sessions with a psychiatrist, the ridiculous mess of the creative life and shifts in the broader political landscape – they’re all there.
Katy Hessel’s 20 Best Art Shows23
Laura Poitras’ moving documentary followed artist Nan Goldin and her struggle to remove the Sackler name from museums. Parallel to the story of the disgraced Sacklers runs the story of Goldin’s life. My favorite quote from the film was: “Nan photographs from the other side” – a movingly accurate description of her work, as it epitomizes her ability to connect with her subjects with such depth and empathy.
White Cube, Paris
Kimeze’s debut solo show demonstrated her incredible ability to carve, through dazzling shades of oil pastel, tender scenes that stand on the threshold between two places – whether indoors/outdoors, in water/on land, or reality/imagination. Fluently rendered, often depicting a female figure amid a jungle of palms, Kimeze’s paintings are quietly powerful and interspersed with specks of glowing light.
Ben Hunter Gallery, London
West Country-based artist Keith-Roach, a former art historian and set designer, is praised for her embellished Grecian-style pots that feel both ancient and surreal. This exhibition, which was a collaboration with her husband who worked in trompe l’oeil but also in painting, focused around a relic-like basin decorated with casts of materials (old telephones, paper bags, sponges, pine wood, hot water bottles – which acted as a cornice) . ) industrial objects (chains, a saw) and debris. A favorite feature was a molded Jean Paul Gautier perfume bottle that referenced the Venus de Milo – a relevant play on the commercialized and idealized female body. Going to a Keith-Roach show always offers surprises and be enraptured by the many layers that go into one work of art.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
I loved looking at Gwen John’s intimate portraits of girls on the cusp of adolescence. Working in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, John depicted the newfound freedoms afforded to women: capturing them in their own rooms – paid for by themselves, and no longer under the watch of men – giving us insight into their private life. world’s. This show reaffirmed the Welsh-born artist as a major player of modernity and showed that painting doesn’t have to scream to make an impression.
Barbican, London
This mesmerizing exhibition brought together the US-born artist’s work in such visionary ways. With elegance and beauty, Weems connected the Baroque to the present through her art – visually and culturally – playing with theater and dance in her exciting, immersive multi-screen films. Addressing pressing issues, her photographs have included erased signage in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and photographs of herself standing stoically in front of glorified Roman monuments, which explored “the construction of power in the Western civilization is materialized through architecture’.
Jonathan Jones’s best art shows from 2023
National Gallery, London
Catholic relics of the medieval saint’s hemp robes, images of 21st century poverty by Andrea Büttner and a stunning homoerotic canvas by Caravaggio made this exhibition moving. Even for a non-believer, it opened up new ways of looking at religious art and showed how ideas can change the world.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to 28 January
Rubens’ baroque energy is difficult to capture in an exhibition, but this one succeeds by opting for a precise, fascinating essay on the ways in which he depicted women: from charismatic portraits to religious theater to nude flesh that is abundantly displayed on canvas. is to see. Rubens reveals himself as an artist who inspires and liberates.
3. Tracey Emin
Counter Editions, London Print Fair
Gory, sexy red ink infuses Emin’s astonishing new series of six giant nude prints, And Everything was Full of Love. The female body in these grand works is electrified by passion. They make you feel her need to exist. Bacon, Freud – talk about boys. Emin is the figurative artist we need now.
Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire
The Portuguese sculptor’s towering wedding cake is both art and architecture, a pavilion you can climb, enter or book for a wedding. Folk ceramics that also inspired Paula Rego’s paintings cover the exterior with joyful abandon. Sex, love and hope make it something special in a dark world.
Kew Gardens, London, until April 7
Malignant flowers sprouting from rancid urban soil, insects imitating flowers and the spirit of a tree are among the strange delights of this exhibition about nature and the human spirit. Collishaw confirms himself as Britain’s most exciting artist working with technology and science in this towering, immersive mystery tour.
Oliver Wainwright’s best architecture of 2023
As production space continues to be pushed out of our cities, if not wiped out altogether, dRMM’s ingenious project in Charlton, South East London, shows how workshops and studios can be cleverly stacked in a tight location. Built from cross-laminated timber, the structure emerges as it rises, creating larger studios on the brighter upper floors, fitting more floor space into a small footprint and creating a striking roadside beacon – making it clear that the production has become indispensable. It houses furniture makers, clothing manufacturers and an electric bicycle workshop, proving to developers that a “mixed-use” development can mean more than just coffee shops and yoga studios.
Inspired by the Elizabethan coaching inns that once lined London’s Borough High Street, this new take on an almshouse, by Witherford Watson Mann, is a tranquil courtyard oasis for the over 65s. The apartments open onto generous communal walkways that surround the timber-lined courtyard, where benches outside each flat provide cozy places to linger. A large downstairs room, with large bay windows overlooking the street, is intended less as a conventional lounge and more as an asset to the wider community. This room is used by local charity groups to energize the place and make residents feel like they are an essential part of Bermondsey life.
At the end of the Young V&A’s expansive hall is a mirrored spiral staircase, like a shimmering kaleidoscope luring you upstairs. This once gloomy Victorian building in London was reborn this year with a dazzling new range of permanent exhibitions, injecting its grimy floors with an unbridled imagination of tactile textures and materials, where rough and smooth collide with things bumpy and scaly, vague and hairy, sparkling and shiny. The work of AOC and De Matos Ryan, the dreamlike playscapes for younger children, are complemented by an upstairs factory-like space, aimed at teenagers, that sheds light on digital design and production processes.
With insulation made from agricultural waste, rammed earth walls made from demolition waste and antibacterial door handles made from salt from the nearby swamps, Atelier Luma in Arles is a living laboratory for creating treasures from waste, by Assemble and BC Architects. Home to the Luma Foundation’s ‘bioregional’ research arm, it is a built essay in locally sourced, ecologically minded construction, with all materials harvested from local waste streams – from the spray-on insulation of crushed fibers from the sunflower industry, to bathroom tiles made from waste clay from the local sand quarry, and the beautiful bioplastic furniture made from algae.
Bubble windows protruding from the bumpy yellow walls, butterfly gardens nestled between classrooms, a rainforest sprouting from the third-floor courtyard – Madrid’s Reggio School, from the Bureau for Political Innovation, is an education building like no other, a building’s multi-storey wonder world where nature seems to have taken over, with plants filling every corner, while lichens and fungi seem to engulf the gloomy cork facade. It stands on a hill like a cartoonish factory and shows how you can do a lot with little money, reducing the structure to the essentials and using cheap, ready-made materials in ingenious new ways.