The Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition has this year been coordinated by the British sculptor, former Turner prize nominee and Royal Academician Richard Wilson.
The 248th edition of the annual exhibition – the world’s largest open submission show – features a wide range of different artworks, providing a platform to showcase emerging and established artists and architects. There are over 1,200 works on display.
However, in a special addition for 2016, Wilson has invited a group of more than 15 international artistic duos, whose work he has long admired and which also reflects his interest in the making process, to exhibit throughout the Royal Academy’s main galleries.
Highlights include Jane and Louise Wilson‘s atmospheric photographic installation, created using a number of large-scale images from the artists’ series Chernobyl. The work is displayed around the Royal Academy’s main staircase leading up to the Summer Exhibition.
There ar also two hand-coloured etchings from Jake & Dinos Chapman’s Human Rainbow II series.
Other featured duos include Pierre et Gilles, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, EVA & ADELE, Boyd and Evans, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Langlands and Bell, and Heather and Ivan Morison, among others.
Wilson has also invited Turkish filmmaker and artist Kutluğ Ataman to display the monumental multi-image video installation The Portrait of Sakip Sabanci. Consisting of hundreds of LCD panels, the work is part of the Sabanci University Sakip Sabanci Museum Collection, Istanbul.
In addition, architect and sculptor Ron Arad RA has created a new site-specific installation for the RA Courtyard. Spyre is a 16-metre high corten steel oval cone, hiding motors, cogs, and slew-rings. Each segment of Spyre will move at different speeds, ensuring that the unpredictable acrobatic postures of the installation are never repeated.
Other featured works include Bath Spa University student Daisy Dixon’s Untitled (War Club), which is featured in this year’s a-n Degree Shows Guide. Dixon’s piece can be found in the Royal Academy’s Lecture Room.
Photorealist painter Roland Hicks, who last year was featured in the Jerwood Drawing Prize, is exhibiting his works OSB3 and OSB5.
The hanging committee for the Summer Exhibition 2016 includes Royal Academicians Stephen Chambers, Louisa Hutton, Bill Jacklin, Jock McFadyen, David Mach, Cathie Pilkington, David Remfry, Ian Ritchie and Bill Woodrow. This year’s architecture room is curated by Louisa Hutton and Ian Ritchie.
The RA Summer Exhibition is open until 21 August 2016. www.royalacademy.org.uk
Images:
1. Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Copyright: Stephen White / Royal Academy of Arts
2. Jane and Louise Wilson, Atomgrad, Nature Abhors A Vacuum VII, c-type print on aluminium, 180 x 220 cm. Copyright: Jane & Louise Wilson
3. Jake & Dinos Chapman, Human Rainbow II (Coloured)
4. Pierre et Gilles, Marie Antoinette, le hameau de la reine (Marie Antoinette, The Queen’s Hamlet), 2014. Hand-painted photograph on canvas, 154 x 139 cm. Photo courtesy of the artists and Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris â Brussels
5. Kutluğ Ataman, The Portrait of Sakip Sabanci
6. Ron Arad, Spyre
7. Daisy Dixon, (Untitled) War Club
8. Roland Hicks, OSB5
9. Richard Wilson
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