How’d you spend your January and February? Going out exploring the city, living a healthy cultural life, seeing the sights, painting the town red? Or did you, like all sensible people, cloister yourself away, wrapped in a thousand blankets, to wait out the end of winter like an agoraphobic hermit?
Well, if you did the latter you might have missed some amazing art exhibitions. Massive audiovisual installations, feminist ire, conceptual cleverness, classical painting and loads of adorableness, there’s something for everyone. But be quick, you’ve only got a few weeks left to catch these shows.
Five London art exhibitions closing soon
’Impressionists on Paper‘ at the Royal Academy, closing Mar 10.
Douglas Gordon at Gagosian, closing Mar 16.
The walls are covered in text in countless languages, half-remembered aphorisms gouged into the plaster, fractured sentences in neon, semi-palindromic rhymes in vinyl. ‘I’m the architect of my own addictions’ is carved into the wall as you walk in, surrounded by phrases like ‘where does it hurt’, ‘rotting from the outside in’, ‘how much can I take’. In one room, a hundred screens show every film he’s ever made. None of this is pretty, approachable or cohesive. But it’s so emotional that it doesn’t matter. It feels like a man grasping at a past he can’t get a grip on, trying desperately to grab a steady hold as life slips through his fingers.
Read the review here.
Barbara Kruger at the Serpentine, closing Mar 17.
‘Women in Revolt!’ at Tate Britain, closing Apr 7
‘Cute’ at Somerset House, closing Apr 14
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.
Read the review here.
Want more? Here are the top ten exhibitions in London right now.
Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.