Royal Academy Summer Exhibition promises ‘sensory overload’

The Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy will for the first time spill out beyond the traditional first floor galleries as the artists’ club celebrates its 250th anniversary at its recently redeveloped home on Piccadilly.

The Summer Exhibition mingles the work of Britain’s most prominent artists with lesser known names and amateurs, who submit their work annually to the Hanging Committee.

Co-ordinated every year by a different member of the Academy, this year’s show is organised by Grayson Perry, the British ceramicist. Eschewing an overarching theme, he said he wanted to subject visitors to a “sensory overload” in celebration of the joy of making art, “the rough and tumble of it all”.

Much of the entrance hall is taken up by an enormous lobed structure by Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, which is suspended from the ceiling and decorated with felt, crochet and hanging decorations. “It’s like a spaceship landed in a haberdashery,” said Mr Perry, speaking at a press event to launch the show.

On the canary yellow walls of the biggest gallery, Mr Perry has included some provocative political works among the hanging. A painting of Oswald Mosley and fascist blackshirts sits alongside a portrait of a black girl, while another work shows Sean Scully departing from his typical abstract style to depict a black American flag with the stars replaced by a handgun.

“I like putting paintings next to each other that fire off each other,” said Mr Perry. “I’ve enjoyed all the political connections, particularly in this room.”

Mr Perry also found room for “Vote to Love”, a Banksy image spray-painted over a UK Independence party placard that originally said Vote to Leave, as well as a portrait of former Ukip leader Nigel Farage, its conventional treatment marking it out from its neighbours. “I did give Farage extra space. None of the other paintings want to be too close to him,” he said.

Mr Perry took a robust approach to those artists who questioned his positioning of their work on the crowded walls of the Academy. “Suck it up, I say to them. Since the day of Turner and Constable they’ve been bitching about not being hung in the right place. It’s the tradition of the summer show.”

A second show, The Great Spectacle, tells the story of the Summer Exhibition, which has run for 250 years, even through two world wars. As well as masterpieces by artists from RA history — including notorious “frenemies” Turner and Constable or Gainsborough and Reynolds — the show includes documents, catalogues and letters from its earliest years.

The Summer Exhibition 2018 and The Great Spectacle run from June 12 to August 19.