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Time Out
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Gold rats, inflatable balls and community photography: inside the Royal Academy's 2025 Summer Exhibition
If looking at more than 1,700 pieces of art isn't enough for you, there are some great games you can play with yourself while walking around the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. Spot the famous artist. Guess the price of a painting. Or, my personal favourite: channel interior designer and pick works to 'imaginary decorate' your overpriced rented basement flat in Clapton. The RA Summer Exhibition has been held every year since 1769, and in 2025, it's been coordinated by renowned British-Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi. You'll see architectural drawings, models and nods to our built environment dotted throughout the exhibitoin, not bound by one room. There will be no bright yellow or turquoise walls this year – it's all cleanly white – and the whole thing feels calmer, less cluttered, with more space for works to breathe (and less craning of your neck to see the stuff up top). It is, as usual, open to all. There's plenty of the big dawgs here: you'll see scribbled heads by Quentin Blake, a (Juergen Teller) photograph of Marina Abramović looking all witchy, a warm, washed-over Frank Bowling canvas, a collaged photographic face by Cindy Sherman and much more. But there also is, undoubtedly, a lot of shit art. Horrid, boring geometric neon stencils. Cats. Flat, unfinished-looking canvases. Sculpture which looks like it belongs in Primark's home section. But getting hung up on the crap is not really the point: it's about the spectacle, the discovery, the loose themes you can trace between seemingly randomly placed works. And there is some genuinely great stuff, too – stuff that will stop you in your tracks, from well-known artists, unknown artists, and from artists in between. Here are five of our favourites. 1. Ryan Gander's inflatable balls Before you even enter Burlington House, you'll come face to face with big, black, blow-up balls, which have been set up in the courtyard to look like they've been halted, mid-roll. They're squishy and shiny, and each is adorned with a child-like, hard-to-answer question: 'When do you know you're right?' 'How much is a lot?' 'Do all doors open?' and so on. One is wedged on the roof, another is inside the exhibition, blocking one of the main room's three arches, giving you only two routes to take around this year. These are not only really fun to look at, but they also question your routine and the way you look at art, prompting you to be inquisitive and open-minded before you even enter the building. 2. 101 white rat pelts, Zatorski + Zatorski These are objectively naff, but I appreciate deep, inescapable discomfort these 101 hollowed-out rats bring. Their insides and eyes are brushed with 24ct gold, and they're all arranged, standing up in an outwards-facing circle, as though watching you, or about to attack. It instantly made me think about animal testing, and about the extremes people will go to, for riches. You can't help but feel sorry for the things. 3. Community Dialogue, John Waine There's something about this modest photograph of a Frome community notice board, all posters overlapped and peeling, offering Spanish lessons, flea markets, festivals, short-term lets and fundraisers, which filled me with nostalgia, despite the dates only the flyers only reading 2023. Not sure about the frame though. 4. Rock Pool, Terry Setch This mixed media piece looks like the debris of fishing baskets washed up on the beach, or the rusting rainbow colours of corroded metal rubbing on clothing. The texture is brilliant. Crucially, it makes me want to ask: can I touch it? 5. 'You remained always beautiful', Tracey Emin This is one of two of Emin works in the show: she also has the more prominently placed pastel-painted 'The Crucifixion', but it's this moody, melancholy portrait, tucked away in one of the top corners in the entrance room, which stuck with me. The eyes look downwards and the shoulders are hunched, almost blending into the background; the facial features imperfect, only just distinguishable. The whole thing is uncomfortable to look at and as a result, it carries a real a sense of dread. Moving, memorable portraiture. The 2025 RA Sumer Exhibition is on from June 17 until August 17, 2025. Find out more here.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The RA's Summer Exhibition: Britain's most ridiculed show is back with a vengeance
In the clammy heights of June, London's art critics curl their toes in anticipation of an invitation to review the Royal Academy's annual Summer Exhibition. Over the past decade it has been written about as the object of ridicule, scorn, and pity, and has been used, intermittently, as a vessel for questionable political mission creep. While this year's show, which has been curated by Farshid Moussavi, is worthy of the Summer Exhibition's mission to celebrate the individual's right to an aesthetic sensibility, it is still as frenzied as ever. I think it's safe to say that the 257th edition hasn't unearthed the next big star of the British art market. The core of the Exhibition since 1769 has been and continues to be an offering of works by members of the Royal Academy, their protégés, and artistically inclined members of the public, most of which are up for sale. This set-up demands very little from the viewer beyond casual immersion into the 1,729 works on show and a sense of humour as one's guide through the bizarre backwaters of the contemporary art complex. This year huge, inflated black balls with banal questions pasted on them in white font lie strewn across the Annenberg Courtyard, as if a very large child had just cast them out of a Burlington House window. 'What do animals dream of?', 'Does abstraction have rules?', 'Will time tell?'; these are some of the questions British artist Ryan Gander's balls pose to the unsuspecting public. The only question I could ask myself is, if I managed to unchain one of these giant balls and roll it in front of a bus on Piccadilly, how loud a POP would it make? The usual artistic smorgasbord awaits entrants to the main galleries: Tamara Kostianovsky's suspended carcasses embroidered out of fabrics fit for Little House on the Prairie, Tony Brook's ultra-depressing still life of AirPods, Juergen Teller's raunchy shot of former porn star Mia Khalifa hiding her face behind a nondescript mounted mammal and Lena Krenokova's vase which resembles a mass of molten breasts with multi-coloured nipples. There are also some unexpected guests at this feast, namely 101 gold-lined taxidermied rats, perched up on their hind legs and arranged in concentric circles on a platform in the final room of the exhibition. I (the name of this installation) by the collaborative duo Zatorski + Zatorksi is supposedly meant to prompt the viewer to ask themselves whether, in an age of artificial intelligence, we have become the experiment. But again I found myself battling with a different question: if I were to spend £85,000 on fur and bullion, would it be in the form of 101 rat pelts lined with 24-carat gold? At last, acknowledgement must be given to the Academicians and their annual offerings onto the sacrificial pyre: Marlene Dumas, who set the new record for a living female artist last month when her painting Miss January (1997) sold at Christie's for $13.6 million, contributed her print and ink drawing Let's Talk to the Dead; Tracey Emin made a double donation, her interpretation of The Crucifixion (2025) the more impressive of the two; and Grayson Perry coughed up his usual votive urn. Although Emin's Crucifixion is strikingly harrowing and could even be, dare I say, quite good, seeing some of these masters in the wilderness of the contemporary art collective, looking sheepishly unremarkable, makes you wonder who, deeming them to be worthier (literally) objects of artistic expression than their amateur counterparts, has elevated them to the illustrious white cubes of the elitist contemporary art scene.
