I didn’t expect to be so moved – galleries reopen

I’m in Mayfair and I’m boarding an airplane. Or rather, I’m boarding an approximation of an airplane. In the centre of Hauser & Wirth, there are airplane seats, organised into a formation that resembles a section of economy, and dislocated windows, hung on the walls where paintings might normally be. The seatbacks are stuffed, and a spring/summer 2012 edition of Sky Shop magazine is splayed across one of the seats. We are frozen in time and space.

Like most of us in recent months, this plane — an installation by German artist Isa Genzken — isn’t going anywhere. It remains perpetually rooted. Its windows open on to white walls. The work — ‘Untitled’ (2018), the centrepiece of a larger exhibition called Window — connects aircraft space with the sterilised placelessness of a white-cube art gallery, spaces that have always been highly controlled but perhaps never more so than now. Since galleries reopened in London last week, appointments must be booked in advance. Capacity is limited, masks and hand sanitiser are required, and some have signs directing foot traffic around the gallery.

It’s perhaps not a surprise that when I visited, the art objects on display seemed to be speaking directly about conditions of life during the pandemic. Art often refracts back to us a new version of some unarticulated thought or feeling, some submerged element of our own experience; this is perhaps what we mean when we say that a painting ‘speaks to us’. There’s some narcissism, certainly, in this response to objects that were not created with us in mind — this plane predates the pandemic — but it is also one of the most primal elements of the experience of looking at art.