Conflicting demands

This year, the sequence of galleries has been subtly altered, and for a change we enter the fabled Summer Exhibition (sponsored by Insight Investment) through the Octagon rather than Gallery 1.

This year, the sequence of galleries has been subtly altered, and for a change we enter the fabled Summer Exhibition (sponsored by Insight Investment) through the Octagon rather than Gallery 1. This brings the visitor straight into the heart of the show, and it’s quite a good idea at this point to turn right into the Lecture Room for a gallery dedicated entirely to RA members, hung by that éminence grise, Michael Craig-Martin. Of course this is Craig-Martin’s choice, so the more traditional practitioners are excluded, but the Lecture Room nevertheless looks better than it has done for years.

A big tattooed head by Tony Bevan keeps company with Humphrey Ocean’s ‘Windscreen’, a roughly massed urban landscape. An open-structure wavy wooden sculpture by Richard Deacon stands on its side, an unexpectedly modest Anish Kapoor nearby. There’s a rather evocative and romantic oil called ‘Belvedere’ by Christopher LeBrun, chief hanger of the exhibition, a column of Tacita Dean photographs and a shamanic china clay hand print by Richard Long. A wriggly laminar bronze by Tony Cragg hovers like a dust-devil. A classic Joe Tilson Venetian relief hangs next to one of Allen Jones’s cool but perky androids emerging in pink from a crumple of electric blue. Gary Hume’s painting nearby is remarkably luscious in a restrained and elegant way, contrasting nicely with the imprisoned fervour of Michael Sandle’s blocked-in submarine.

Richard Wilson makes typically witty reference to The Italian Job with a coach see-sawing over the top of the De La Warr Pavilion. Cornelia Parker contributes a clump of suspended flattened silver plate — an old idea for her, but not ineffective. Craig-Martin himself is represented by a candy-coloured pink garden gate on a turquoise ground, over-stencilled with the word ‘Fate’. He may be leading us up the garden path, but it’s an enjoyable journey: this room on its own is a substantial exhibition.

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