Get us in your inbox

Search
bjork exhibition, mouth
'Bjork Digital' at Somerset House

Latest art reviews

Find out what our critics make of new exhibitions with the latest London art reviews

Written by
Time Out London Art
Advertising

From blockbuster names to indie shows, Time Out Art cast their net far and wide in order to review the biggest and best exhibitions in the city. Check 'em out below or shortcut it to our top ten art exhibitions in London for the shows that we already know will blow your socks off. 

The latest London art reviews

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Mayfair

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness.

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Piccadilly

History is unkind to women, and art history in particular. Swiss artist Angelica Kauffman was a hugely popular eighteenth century painter and one of the two female founding members of the Royal Academy, but she’s been largely forgotten. This show is an attempt to correct that oversight. 

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • London

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise.

Advertising
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Spitalfields

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980.

 

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bow

There’s an old Jewish joke about a guy emigrating to America. A friend tells him he’ll never make it in the USA with a Jewish name, so he picks a good gentile moniker. But when he gets to the border, it slips his mind. He says ‘Ach! Shoyn fergesin!’ (Yiddish for ‘I've forgotten!’). The official replies ‘Sean Ferguson, welcome to the United States of America’.

 

Advertising
Advertising
Advertising
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • The Mall

Civil society – according to French philosopher Georges Bataille, as quoted in American artist Aria Dean’s ICA show – can only be maintained if we ignore the existence of abattoirs. Dean, though, has no intention of ignoring them. In fact, she wants to drag viewers, kicking and screaming, through a slaughterhouse’s blood-slicked walls. 

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • South Bank

Can stone flow? Can metal ooze? Can hardness be rendered soft? I mean, generally, no. But artists are alchemists at heart, always trying to enact some kind of magical transformation, so they’re not going to let something like solidity stand in their way. 

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Bloomsbury

Life in the Roman empire was as mundane as life in 2024. ‘Legion’ tells the story of a single Roman soldier, recounting a life of hard work, ambition, disappointment and unreachable goals. Take out all the blood and swords, swap the marching for a commute from Stevenage, and it could be the life of any present day office worker. 

  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Piccadilly

Art isn’t always pretty pictures. Sometimes, art is politics; sometimes, art is power. ‘Entangled Pasts’ places work by contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas alongside paintings and sculptures by Royal Academicians of the past. The aim is to highlight how art has served to perpetuate racism and colonialism, or at the very least profit from it. 

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Aldwych

Imagine coming up with the most important technological innovation in modern history – the internet – and then seeing it used almost exclusively for ordering McDonald’s at 3am, arguing with strangers and sharing funny pictures of cats. This exhibition ignores the burgers and yelling in favour of the kittens, because cute, it turns out, is powerful. 

Cuteness here is presented as a cultural powerhouse, an internet language that’s spread its grammar throughout society, a contemporary aesthetic force with almost no equal. Does that hypothesis work? Not necessarily, but it’s fun to watch them argue it. The exhibition is a mind-melting assault on the senses, a barrage of objects, ephemera, history and artworks that shoves cuteness down your eyeballs until you want to burst (into pink love hearts). It’s complex, tiring, clever, and very good.

It starts with kittens. Louis Wain’s turn-of-the-century illustrations present them as friendly, naughty little things, all big eyed and fuzzy. Contemporary artist Andy Holden shows his grandmother’s collection of ceramic felines, with their long necks and huge ears. This is the crux of cute: lovable, adorable, soft, gentle, unthreatening, childlike, innocent. 

It’s a set of attributes that's safe, but also hugely commodifiable. A display of Hello Kitty dolls and objects (which leads into a ridiculous, cynical and pretty pointless, Hello Kitty disco room) subtly exposes the capitalist heart of the character, its history as a tool of Japanese industry. Basically, cute sells. 

Lovable, adorable, soft, gentle, unthreatening, childlike, innocent

But this isn’t really a proper history of cute, despite the room about kawaii. Instead, the show’s populist, Instagram-friendly facade is an excuse to sneak a load of weird, difficult art past you. Mike Kelley’s teenage mugshot, with his grotty stuffed toy accomplices, dirties the fragile sterility of cuteness. Wong Ping’s brilliant animation uses cuteness to tell an absurd, surreal story about loneliness and anxiety. Rachel Maclean skewers the pressures of consumer beauty standards in trippy, dark, nasty paintings. PC Music's Hannah Diamond’s installation invites you to take part in a slumber party as an act of radical feminist reclamation, all set to a soundtrack of Charli XCX and Katy Perry.

The art here isn’t cute for its own sake. It’s using cuteness to criticise, to question, undermine and rebel. It shows how cuteness is a dangerous mixture of safe and commercial, how it’s paradoxical and conflicting and exploitable.

In among all that is a universe of bewildering ephemera and junk. An ET lunchbox, animatronic plushies,  Grogu dolls, a pink Pussy Riot balaclava, Pokémon cards, Care Bear boots, a whole arcade….a picture of Hitler feeding deer, for some reason. It’s a bit over the top, and some of it badly misses the mark. But it proves the point that cuteness is as pervasive as it is nebulous. 

There are missteps and flubs here. It’s way too full of stuff, some of the art is so tangential to the theme that it’s hard to figure out why it’s there, and at points it goes too far in pandering to what it thinks a non-art audience wants, getting just a little desperate to attract the Instagram crowd.

But at its adorable heart, this is a brilliant exploration of an all-consuming cultural phenomenon, of how cuteness has swept the world, and it does it by neatly combining art and pop culture.

But why? Why do we seek refuge in the safety of cuddly, gentle, cuteness? That’s obvious. Because life is hard, time’s are hard, and sometimes all you need is a little softness. And there's nothing softer than kitten. 

Advertising
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Victoria

Stripped of the fashions of his day, sat bleakly against a plain blue wall, Johannes Froben doesn’t look like a sixteenth-century printer. In Hans Holbein’s portrait, he could be anyone, at any time. He looks to his left, his hair thinning, his cheeks sagging, his skin sallow, his arms tucket miserably into his black coat. It’s so stark, so quiet, so rueful and heavy with years of worry and effort. Holbein was special. 

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Millbank

If anger is an energy, there’s enough here to power the Tate for decades. The gallery is buzzing with the violent ire and shrieking fury of second-wave feminism, because after all the freedom and liberation promised by the Swinging Sixties, British women in the 1970s had to deal with the reality: that not much had changed. And they were furious. This is an exhibition of 100 feminist artists and collectives kicking violently against the system.

 

Advertising
  • Art
  • Euston

Beauty’s a pretty big topic. Almost all of art history, up until postmodernism, dealt with it in some way, whether that’s the divine kind, the physical kind or the ooh-isn’t-that-poppy-field nice kind. But with its usual combination of art, artefact and science, the Wellcome Collection is looking at the physical kind, with diversions into gender binaries, issues of race, the cosmetics industry and what that means for beauty standards.

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • Trafalgar Square

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.

Recommended
    You may also like
    You may also like
    Advertising