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.

The Weston Rooms look very different this year. Usually, the larger one is packed floor-to-ceiling with prints; this year, it is distinguished by a refreshingly spare hang, with such paintings as James Hugonin’s lucidly controlled traffic-jam of colours and Stephen Chambers’s feast of cups given room to breathe. There’s a very odd and intriguing Derek Boshier acrylic called ‘Patterns of Fashion’, a cream embossed gas station print by Ed Ruscha, and an unusual pastel by Tom Phillips, always capable of surprising us, entitled ‘Siegfried’s Funeral March’. Also of note are a couple of scruffily evocative interiors by Vicken Parsons, and a cabinet of pots by the ubiquitous Edmund De Waal. In the Small Weston Room the usual hugger-mugger is reduced, but there are good things by the nonagenarian team of Bernard Dunstan (particularly ‘Morning Drawing’) and Diana Armfield (especially ‘Dog on the Beach’), a sensitive depiction of winter-bitten water lily leaves by Michael Whittlesea, and an armorial banana by Robert Dukes. I liked the manic notation of Alexandra Blum’s drawing of Kingsland High Street, and the deft, economical still-life of Ffiona Lewis.

Back through the galleries to the north side of the building and Gallery IV, where work by some of the Academy’s finest sculptors may be found: Nigel Hall, David Nash, Ken Draper (good to see a 3D piece by him, besides his usual pigmented reliefs), John Carter, Ann Christopher and an intriguing group of drawings by Alison Wilding. John Wragg’s paintings are expectedly compelling, with ‘Falling Flowers’ the most memorable. Gallery V is another lucidly arranged room, hung by Tess Jaray (note her own gridded colour panels), with a range of modes from the quiet threaded vertical pulse of Belinda Cadbury’s drawing to the block of Basil Beattie lunettes, via such individualists as Melanie Comber, Tim Hyman, Luke Elwes and the mysterious atmospherics of Philippa Stjernsward.