Privates on parade | 28 February 2019

‘Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ If there’s an exception to prove Shaw’s rule, it’s Phyllida Barlow. The 40 years the sculptor spent teaching at the Slade, where her pupils included Rachel Whiteread, have not only left her creative energies intact, but completely failed to keep a lid on them. After turning Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries into a cross between a lumberyard and an enchanted forest in 2014, then filling the British Pavilion to bursting point at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the septuagenarian who can conjure a sculptural wonderland from the contents of your local branch of Travis Perkins has been let loose on the Royal Academy’s Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries.

Unusually for Barlow, it’s not a jungle in there. For her new show in this airy suite of galleries renovated by David Chipperfield, she has cleaned up her act. The effect is sparser and less overwhelming, but none the less joyous for that. Along with her usual mix of workaday materials — timber, concrete, steel, plaster and polystyrene — she has burst out into brightly coloured fabrics. In the first room of this show, titled cul-de-sac, a huddle of canvas drapes roughly coated in glowing oranges, greens and yellows — ‘Do the paint like you’re cleaning windows,’ she tells her assistants — greets you with an infusion of Indian colour. Instead of the usual jumble, there’s a sequence to this exhibition: the second room feels more classical in mood with its monumental concrete column and wonky stack of pallets carved into the semicircular form of an auditorium, while the third is a Golgotha of white crosses and scaffolds supporting huge rectangular blocks on rickety, bandaged legs: part cathedral, part condemned adventure playground.