Adrian Searle’s best art exhibitions of 2023
5.Vermeer
Rijks Museum, Amsterdam
Johannes Vermeer attracted more than half a million visitors to the Rijkmuseum between February and June this year. Not bad for an artist who produced only 37 known paintings in the 20-year period between 1654 and 1674. Beautifully laid out and spread across 10 rooms, 28 of which are mostly small, indoor scenes and the occasional one, it’s an exhibition of quiet intimacies and domestic mysteries. Streetscapes are presented in this dazzling exhibition, the artist’s largest work yet.
Serpentine Galleries, London
A helicopter takes us across London in a slow, majestic approach towards the exterior of Grenfell Tower. Finally we are hovering, turning and turning and turning again, drawing closer and pulling back from the charred exterior to see the burnt-out apartments where 72 people died. This film, shot in 2017 before the tower was hidden behind cladding, makes us look and remember. A striking, unforgettable film.
Tate Modern, London, until 25 February
Guston’s major touring retrospective, postponed following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, finally arrived at Tate Modern this autumn. This riotous exhibition is not to be missed, featuring socially committed early works, beautiful, studied abstractions, and deceptively caricatured later works populated by melancholy images of often foolish, violent Ku Klux Klansmen and the painter himself. Catch it while you can.
Barbican Gallery, London
Alice Neel was a painter of fearless and sensitive portraits. His paintings reveal not only the dynamics between his sitters but also their complicity with the artist. Throughout his long career, Neel depicted New York’s bohemian, art critics, and lovers. He depicted demonstrations, street life, police brutality and a young man suffering from tuberculosis. Neel’s portraits are deliciously risky assessments of hubris and foibles, including his own.
Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 14 January
This wonderfully strange spread of drawings, paintings, and sculptures brims with jokes, social observations, and sexual frankness. Working with a variety of styles and attitudes, the artist continues to find new ways to describe the world. New York lesbian life in the 1990s and sessions with a psychiatrist, the ludicrous mess of creative life and shifts in the broader political landscape; it’s all here.
Katy Hessel’s 20 best art exhibitions23
Laura Poitras’ touching documentary followed artist Nan Goldin and her fight to remove the Sackler name from museums. There is also Goldin’s life story, which runs parallel to the story of the infamous Sacklers. My favorite quote from the film was: “Nan takes pictures from the other side” – a poignant and accurate description of her work as to how she embodies the ability to connect so deeply and empathetically with her subjects.
White Cube, Paris
Kimeze’s first solo exhibition demonstrated his incredible talent for carving, in dazzling oil pastel tones, delicate scenes that sit on the threshold between two places, whether inside/outside, water/land, or reality/dream. Often depicted fluidly with a female figure among palm trees, Kimeze’s paintings are quite powerful and interspersed with bright spots of light.
Ben Hunter Gallery, London
West Country-based artist Keith-Roach, a former art historian and set designer, has been praised for his decorated Greek-like vessels that feel both ancient and surreal. Twinned with her husband, who works in trompe l’oeil but painting, this exhibition focused on a reliquary-like basin decorated with casts of materials (old telephones, paper bags, sponges, winding pine, hot water bottles – which served as cornices). ) industrial products (chains, saw) and debris. One of the favorite aspects was the cast Jean Paul Gautier perfume bottle, referencing Venus de Milo, an apt play on the commercialized and idealized female body. Going to a Keith-Roach show always yields surprises and leaves you mesmerized by the many layers in a single work of art.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
I loved looking at Gwen John’s candid portraits of girls on the cusp of puberty. Working in Paris at the dawn of the 20th century, John painted a picture of the newfound freedoms available to women: he photographed them in their own rooms – paid for by themselves and no longer under the protection of men – giving us an insight into their private lives. worlds. This exhibition once again demonstrated that the Welsh-born artist is a major player in modernity and showed that painting does not need to shout to make an impact.
Barbican, London
This fascinating exhibition brought together the US-born artist’s work in a visionary way. With elegance and beauty through her art, Weems visually and culturally united the baroque and the present day, and played with theater and dance in her exciting, immersive multi-screen films. Touching on pressing issues, the exhibition explored “how the construction of power in western civilization is embodied through architecture,” with photographs of signs erased in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and photographs of people standing stoically in front of glorified Roman monuments.
Jonathan Jones’ best art exhibitions 2023
National Gallery, London
Catholic relics from the medieval saint’s hemp robe, Andrea Büttner’s paintings of 21st-century poverty, and Caravaggio’s stony homoerotic canvas helped enliven this exhibition. It opened up new ways of seeing religious art, even for a non-believer, and showed how ideas could change the world.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, to 28 Fireplace
Rubens’s baroque energy is difficult to capture in an exhibition, but this exhibition succeeds by opting for a precise, fascinating essay on the ways he depicts women, from charismatic portraits to religious theater to the abundant bare skin on canvas. Rubens emerges as an inspiring and liberating artist.
3.Tracey Emin
Counter Editions, London Print Fair
Bloody, sexy red ink saturates Emin’s astonishing new series And Everything was Full of Love, a collection of six massive nude prints. The female body in these magnificent works is electrified with passion. They make you feel his urge to exist. Bacon, Freud – step aside, gentlemen. Emin is the figurative artist we need right now.
Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire
The Portuguese sculptor’s towering Wedding Cake is both art and architecture; It is a pavilion that you can climb, go inside or book for a wedding. Folk ceramics, which also inspire Paula Rego’s paintings, cover its exterior with delightful abandon. Sex, love and hope make it something special in a dark world.
Kew Gardens, London, until 7 April
Demonic flowers sprouting from stinky city floors, insects mimicking flowers, and the ghost of a tree are among the strange delights of this exhibition about nature and the human mind. Collishaw confirms himself as Britain’s most exciting artist working with technology and science in this massive, fascinating tour de force mystery.
Oliver Wainwright’s best architecture of 2023
As manufacturing space is being pushed out of our cities or destroyed entirely, dRMM’s ingenious project in Charlton, south-east London, shows how workshops and studios can be cleverly stacked on top of each other in a tight space. Constructed of cross-laminated timber, the structure stands out as it rises, providing larger studios on lighter upper floors, packing more floor space into a small footprint and creating a striking roadside sign, declaring production to be here to stay. Home to furniture makers, clothing manufacturers and an electric bike workshop, this area is proving to developers that a “mixed-use” development can mean more than 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, Designed by Witherford Watson Mann, this home is a quiet courtyard oasis for over-65s. The apartments open onto wide communal walkways that wrap around the timber-lined courtyard, where benches outside each apartment provide social spaces for lingering. On the lower floor, a great room with large bay windows overlooking the street was designed as an asset to the wider community rather than a traditional hall; It has been used by local charitable groups to inject energy into the space and make residents feel like a vital part of it. Bermondsey life.
At the end of the Young V&A’s voluminous hall stands a mirrored spiral staircase like a glittering kaleidoscope beckoning you upstairs. This once dreary Victorian building in London has been reborn this year with a dazzling new range of permanent exhibitions; its bleak backdrops are injected with an unbridled fantasy of tactile textures and materials, where the hard and smooth collide with the bumpy and scaly, the furry and furry, the glittering. and bright. AOC and De Matos Ryan’s work is complemented by dreamy play areas for young children, with a factory-like indoor space for teenagers upstairs that sheds light on digital design and production processes.
With insulation made from agricultural waste, compressed earth walls made from demolition debris, and antibacterial door handles made from salt from nearby marshes, Atelier Luma in Arles is a living laboratory on how to make treasure from garbage, by Assemble and BC Architects. Home to the Luma Foundation’s “bioregional” research arm, this building is an experiment in locally sourced, ecologically minded construction, where all materials from local waste are obtained from the spray-on insulation of crushed fibres. sunflower industry, bathroom tiles made from waste clay from the local sand quarry and beautiful algae bioplastic furniture.
Bubble windows protrude from lumpy yellow walls, butterfly gardens dot the classrooms, a rainforest bursts from the third-floor atrium; By the Office of Political Innovation The Reggio school in Madrid is a one-of-a-kind, multi-storey educational building. A world of wonders where nature has taken over, filling every corner with plants as lichens and fungi prepare to engulf the overhanging fungal façade. Standing on a hillside like a cartoonish factory, it shows how you can do a lot with little by stripping the structure down to basic foundations and using cheap, off-the-shelf materials in ingenious new ways.