A Homage to London’s Artists: The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition
One of the city's longest-running artistic traditions returns to The Royal Academy...
By
Rhea Mathur
July 9, 2024
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
The Summer Exhibition has been taking place in London since 1769. Though it now resides at the Royal Academy of Arts' Burlington House, its history spans numerous locations, from rented rooms on Pall Mall in the 1970s to the National Gallery on Trafalgar Square from 1837 to 1868. The LVMH Great Room at the Courtauld Gallery still boasts its history as London’s oldest purpose-built exhibition space and a former home of the Summer Exhibition. With tall ceilings, wooden floors and exquisite mouldings, these distinguished venues across London have showcased this celebration of volume, grandeur and British artistry. This annual exhibition, a significant pillar in the British art calendar, ultimately serves as a tribute to emerging artists, providing them with a prestigious platform to display their work. Beyond the legacy of William Turner's famous red stroke added on Vanishing Day, this year’s exhibition is London's homage to its artists, who continually strive to prove their worth.
The theme or rather, the central idea of the 2024 Summer Exhibition is ‘making space’. Here, making space is understood as both taking or giving space, open to a long list of interpretations. Ann Christopher, the coordinator of the exhibition, elaborates by stating that “to make space can mean openness - making space for something or someone, also making space between things”. Reading this statement in the catalogue by the entrance of the first room, viewers are drawn to notice not just the large canvas paintings, but also the positioning of each work. With the exhibition featuring 1,700 pieces of art, the interplay between each piece becomes crucial to understanding the work itself. Taken aback by the golden and white moulding on the ceilings that command their own presence, the rooms are filled with a variety of works, making the spaces between each painting more and more significant. It is in these gaps that we can understand how these different forms of artistry converse with one another.
One of the most enchanting works in the exhibition resides in the first room: Number twenty-eight is Lee Maelzer’s Considerate Construction, an oil and latex painting displayed unframed on the wall. The artist and Royal Academician, Hughie O’Donoghue, selected the paintings in this room. His focus on physicality imbues each piece with a sense of vitality which extends beyond the canvas. Central to the works here is a dynamic sense of movement achieved through layered paint and a play between light and dark shades of the same colour. As the shades deepen, the artwork conveys an increasingly underlying disturbance lurking beneath the surface. In Maelzer’s depiction of a building under construction, the scaffolding is draped with a vivid cover gleaming in yellow, orange, and red hues. The thick application of paint evokes a sense of motion, resembling live flames spreading across the canvas. Maelzer’s Considerate Construction vividly brings O’Donoghue’s vision for the room to life.
In the seventh room, Maelzer’s second painting, Keeping it Together is displayed. Made from oil paints and plastic, this canvas painting uses hues of blue and yellow. It also features plastic, painted black and stuck over the canvas in thin, vein-like strokes. Growing all over the painting, like the roots of a tree, this is again an image of a building under construction layered with scaffolding. The layered paints and use of black marks the presence of something insidious taking over this building; perhaps this is a reference to the impact of over-industrialisation, buildings replacing the roots of magnificent trees, reminiscent of Kim Cheng Boey’s renowned poem, The Planners. The focus of the room, decided by printmaker, Anne Desmet, is on urban living, architecture, dystopia and the Anthropocene. Highlighting humankind’s impact on the planet, while Maelzer’s scaffolding does feel like it belongs in this room, it is disappointing to see her works so far apart, taking away from their impact. However, this desire to see more from an artist, to learn about them and to provide an opportunity for budding artists to reach a wider audience is exactly the purpose of the Summer Exhibition.
This year’s Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy is a fascinating opportunity to discover emerging and established artists. With works by artists such as Frank Bowling, Cornelia Parker and Andrew Pierre Hart, the exhibition presents the viewers with the possibility of finding a new favourite piece of artwork in London. It allows them to look through rooms and rooms of oil paintings, copper, aluminium and steel sculptures, to look through giclée prints and coloured photographs. Full of artworks from the floor to the ceiling in every room, this two-month annual exhibition is a fun and exciting place to view contemporary art, without fixating on the past and thinking about Turner’s strokes. It is a place to celebrate artists and understand their fixations that represent our society today.
The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition 2024 is running until 18th August.
