Top 10 art exhibitions in London

Get ready to see Philip Guston implode. Because over the course of this big retrospective of the American artist’s (1913-1980) work, you watch one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century fall to pieces, collapse in on himself, and then be born anew. It’s amazing.

We might just be designing our own doom. With the pursuit of AI, the creation of ultra-powerful machine intelligences, we’re engaging in the kind of uniquely human and hubristic act that just might spell the demise of the species. And American artist Zach Blas knows that when the world starts ending, we pray. 

The whole gallery screams and screeches with fragments of clashing sound. A room is filled with sand and blankTV screens, robotic fingers play dissonant chords on an electric organ, traffic roars as glass shimmers with images of the Empire State building. Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits.

Sometimes, big, clever art is there to make you feel small and stupid. Or at least insignificant. That’s what the best work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto does. His retrospective at the Hayward finds him toying with light and dark, reality and fiction, life and death, all to make you go slack jawed in awe at your pitiful place in the universe. 

A faceless, grey corporate office; patterned carpet tiles, neon strip lights, shredded paper; suffocating, windowless, airless. This is early 2000s corporate America as seen by Avery Singer. But this isn’t just any date in the early 2000s, this is 9/11.

If you get caught smoking as a kid, the best punishment is to be locked in a closet and forced to smoke a whole pack. It’ll put you off for life. Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg is taking that same approach, not for ciggies, but for rampant over-sexualisation and intense female objectification. She’s shoving it so brutally in your face that you might never find anything sexy ever again. 

A teenage guitarist waits for his audience, a gardener waits for his produce to grow, an empty trophy cabinet waits for its trophies. English painter Gareth Cadwallader’s work (last seen in the Hayward’s big ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’ exhibition in 2021) is full of anticipation.

This exhibition starts with a lie. ‘I don’t know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all. I actually do not really care. I just extract and record things around me, without pretence,’ says influential Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (1938-). And he doesn’t mean a word of it. 

Sylvie Fleury is tired of your macho bullshit. Not just yours, but everyone’s: the art world’s, the motorcycle world’s, the sci fi world’s, etc. etc. etc. The Swiss artist is done with it.

Sarah Lucas’s art isn’t big, and it isn’t clever. But who says art needs to be either of those things? Maybe, instead, art can be vulgar, puerile, obscene, grotesque and childish.