I don’t think there is anything quite like the Summer Exhibition. Held at London’s Royal Academy of Arts every year, it’s the world’s longest-running staged exhibition of contemporary art. It’s also an open exhibition, meaning the artists on display range from the established and famous to the up-and-coming and complete unknowns.
Some people find the scale and diverse range of rooms of the Summer Exhibition all a bit too much. But although I don’t always love everything I see in it, I like seeing which submissions have made the cut each year. And picking out my favourites from the smorgasbord of 1,700 pieces of art laid out before me.
To start with there’s always something unique and interesting in the courtyard entrance. This year it was a large Nicola Turner installation based around the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds. It was very impactful, though also smelly as the materials included horsehair!
Once inside, the exhibition is spread across a number of galleries each of which has been hung by a member of the Summer Exhibition selection committee. There’s an explanation of their approach both in the rooms and in the List of Works which is free with a ticket. I find this little book invaluable while walking around the exhibition. So I was pleased to find it hasn’t yet been replaced by a digital version.
One of the earlier rooms you come to is the Large Weston which this year was curated using the seven colours of the rainbow. That included a bright blue backdrop which worked well for some of the exhibits and maybe less so for others. In here, we found a woodcut submission from a friend’s brother Philip Smyth, which had sold for £150 along with almost all of its edition of £110 prints. He’s in the up-and-coming artist category, while in the next room was a collection of four Tracey Emin pieces. A couple were for sale for £54,000 each. Quite the contrast!
Every year there is a theme for the Summer Exhibition which in 2024 was Making Space. The coordinator Ann Christopher said it could be interpreted in various ways, e.g., openness can mean making space for something or someone, or making space between things. To me, it seemed a less obvious theme than in previous exhibitions. There were certainly some rooms where there was very little space left on the walls!
Some of my favourite pieces were collages that were so intricately made they must have taken a huge amount of time to create. ‘The Destruction of Jericho’ by David Mach was on sale for £96,000. It was made with mixed media and has so much going on that people were continually examining it up close to try and work it out. Another simpler but beautiful collage ‘Bass Rock’ was made with a woven music score, while ‘Queen for a Little While’ was made from 1950s and 60s magazines and sheet music.
There’s always a section of architectural models in the Summer Exhibition which were effectively displayed in a gallery themed like an industrial warehouse. And all kinds of pieces just catch the eye like ‘Bored with the Patriarchy’ and ‘Tunnocks Maneki-Neko’, a sculpture of the iconic Japanese waving cat covered in Tunnocks tea cake wrappers!
The most expensive piece I spotted was ‘The Quartet’ by Ron Arad. It was made from wood, steel, copper, silicon and cotton and had a £300,000 price tag. In the same room were pieces priced at £200, £300 and £425. And that is the uniqueness of the Summer Exhibition, which I think was summed up pretty well in the next room by a distinctive Bob & Roberta Smith piece titled ‘ART IS IN ALL OF US’.
This year’s Summer Exhibition runs for just one more week until 18 August, but it will undoubtedly be back at the RA next year.