Best Art Shows of 2009

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5 April 2012

For most of us it's the start of just another year, but as far as contemporary art goes, it's the beginning of a whole new era. For art, this is Zero Hour, the phrase the Germans use to describe 8 May 1945, when the Nazi regime capitulated.

The contemporary art boom is over and now the reputations of some of the biggest names will collapse and the collecting efforts of the world's gazillionaires — from Abramovich to Saatchi — will come to look like impulsive bets that went wrong. You can see it happening already: the Damien Hirst auction market has more or less collapsed and in the influential Baerfaxt poll, Richard Prince was voted the worst exhibition of the year in London and New York.

Oh, happy day! Now undervalued talents will rise to the fore, public galleries will become less subservient to their billionaire donors, and old values of originality, honesty and personal struggle will return. My predictions: historical conceptualism™ — artists who integrate in their works scientific devices and artistic processes from the Renaissance to the 19th century; altermodernism, a new "ism" from French curator, Nicholas Bourriaud, who gave us relational aesthetics; and a great year for female artists.

Alice Anderson: The Doll's Day
8-31 January, Artprojx Space, SW3 (020 7584 0717, www.artprojxspace.com)
I'm highlighting this small private gallery show because Alice Anderson, for my money, is one of the five most interesting artists working in Britain today. Anderson explores female violence and vulnerability —psychological waters that have been rarely chartered in art.

Often using her long red hair as a motif, her beautifully made films tell weird, dark fairytales of her own invention and reinvention. Her most recent film, in which she dissects a
doll of herself, is mesmerisingly disturbing.

She also makes neat maquettes, often mostly ghostly white, like models for a film that hasn't been made. This is intense and difficult art, with intimations of autobiography, which is actually about something that hasn't been done to death by a thousand other artists already.

Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009
3 February-26 April, Tate Britain, SW1
(020 7887 8008)
Nicholas Bourriaud is the super-trendy French curator who invented the term "relational art" (that which makes the spectator part of it) and thereby defined much of the most arcane contemporary art of the past 15 years, including Carsten Höller's slides at Tate Modern.Now he has a whole new "ism" for us, which he will unveil in this show.

Bourriaud tells us that the postmodern era is "over" — which I am rather pleased about because it went on for quite a long time — and that we are now in the age of "altermodernism" which is "based on the intertwining of space and time in a multi-layered world". Oh, so we never had that before?

The Tate Triennial used to be a survey of British artists; this year's show includes work by Tacita Dean, Bob and Roberta Smith, Simon Starling and Mike Nelson, but there is also work by artists who pass through Britain, the easyJet-set of the art world. It may or may not be good, but whatever it lacks in quality it will make up for in entertaining art theory silliness.

Van Dyck and Britain
18 February-17 May, Tate Britain, SW1
(020 7887 8008, www.tate.org.uk)
Nowadays Britain is lucky enough to have a couple of decent artists of its own, but only a few hundred years ago, we had to hope and pray that one of the good ones from Europe would come over and stay. The Dutch painter Van Dyck settled in Britain in 1632, and in less than 10 years produced a set of portraits that defined the "look" of the British court in the run-up to the Civil War.

Van Dyck's paintings of kings and dukes, with their long tousled hair, flowing silken clothes and impatient steeds, showed the British state how it wanted to see itself, and gave Vivienne Westwood some ideas three centuries later, but — and perhaps this is just the effect of knowing what came next — the wan nervousness in the eyes of his classic portrait of Charles I shows that Van Dyck also knew how to hint at the weaknesses of his sitters.

Tala Madani
15 January-21 February, Pilar Corrias Gallery, W1 (www.pilarcorrias.com)
Another little show to while away the no-man's-land of the art world in January: the elegant, yet impulsive paintings of Tala Madani make it worth a trip to this small new West End gallery.
Madani, only 28, is an Iranian artist based in Amsterdam whose work combines a cartoonish mise-en-scène with calculatedly sloppy brushwork and strong graphic patterns — that's a lot of contradictory elements to get onto a canvas. Her quirky new series of paintings is based on the graphic "dazzle" camouflage painted on ships in the First World War.

Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy
31 January-13 April, Royal Academy, W1 (0870 848 8484, www.royalacademy.org.uk)
Time to learn the difference between your plinths, pedestals, podiums, porticos and pediments, as the Royal Academy stages a blockbuster show of the most influential architect in the history of human civilisation (slight exaggeration).

In the 16th century Palladio built villas, churches and palaces in the Venice region, and his neoclassical style and harmonious proportions influenced the construction of almost every white-stuccoed British country house and terrace in the 18th and early 19th century. The London architecture of Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones — from St Paul's Cathedral to the terraces around Regent's Park — would be unthinkable without him, and his Four Books of Architecture, published in 1570, are still essential reading for architects today.

The exhibition will include large-scale models and computer animations along with Palladio's original drawings and notebooks.

The Russian Linesman: curated by Mark Wallinger
18 February-4 May, Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0871 663 2519, www.haywardgallery.org.uk)
Shed a tear for the freelance curator. They are about to be made extinct by the contemporary art bust, and, as if that wasn't enough, there is a new fashion for artist-curated shows. Even worse news: artists often turn out to be great curators.

Following Grayson Perry's excellent Unpopular Culture, it's Mark Wallinger's turn to curate a Hayward touring show that begins in London. Like his own work, this exhibition bears Wallinger's trademark philosophical depth and proletarian wit. Thus the Russian Linesman takes its name from a controversial ruling in the 1966 World Cup final between England and Germany, and this becomes a departure point for a show about truth and artifice, which ranges from 18th-century trompe l'oeil paintings to Wallinger's own mirrored Tardis. Alternative title: Conceptual Art — The Prequel.

Mircea Cantor
20 February-19 April, Camden Arts Centre, NW3 (020 7472 5500, www.camdenartscentre.org)
Important contemporary artists started popping up in Eastern Europe around the same time those countries gained membership of the EU, which makes one wonder if that was one of Brussels' convergence criteria.

Among the most interesting is 30-year-old Romanian Mircea Cantor, whose show, evocative of Balkan myths and fairytales, arrives in London next month. Cantor produced one of the most arresting works of video art of the past five years with Deeparture, in which a deer and a wolf walk in a state of heightened tension inside a white-cube-style gallery space. But this show is a real installation featuring peacocks installed in large golden cages, plus a flying carpet.

Shah Abbass: The Remaking of Iran
19 February-14 June, British Museum, WC1 (020 7323 8299, www.britishmuseum.org)
Following China's Terracotta Army and the exhibition about the Roman Emperor Hadrian, the British Museum turns its attention to the less well-known but fabulously opulent Iranian Court of Shah Abbass. This 17th-century ruler presided over one of the golden ages of Islamic art and the glittering exhibits will include gold-ground carpets, Chinese porcelain, illustrated manuscripts, watercolour paintings, metalwork, silks and calligraphy.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
25 Feb-25 May, Tate Modern, SE1 (020 7887 8888; www.tate.org.uk)
The American sculptor-turned-painter Roni Horn, born in 1955, is one of the great artists of recent times whom the contemporary art boom has mostly ignored. Now she finally gets her due with a large retrospective at the Tate.

Like Donald Judd on a country walk, Horn makes gentle and poetic minimalist photos, sculptures, installations and drawings based on natural forms and substances, marked with a sense of fluidity and transparency — the changing weather, the ebb and flow of tides, sculptures of glass, which connect her to British artists like Ian Hamilton Finlay and Richard Long. Look out for her marvellous book of photographs of the Thames.

Constable Portraits: The Painter and His Circle
5 March-14 June, National Portrait Gallery, WC2 (0207 312 2463, www.npg.org.uk)
Britain's greatest landscape artist was also a skilled portrait painter. This is the first exhibition devoted to this side of his work and will consist of around 50 oil paintings, drawings, watercolours and sketches, with self-portraits from youth to old age, and romantic portraits of his wife and friends.

Brian Sewell is recovering from a back operation and aims to return in the spring.

More Art for the Spring
Le Corbusier 19 February-24 May, Barbican Art Gallery (08451 120 7550, www.barbican.org.uk)
The first survey of the definitive modernist architect in London for 20 years.

Gerhard Richter Portraits 26 February-31 May, National Portrait Gallery (020 7306 0055; www.npg.org.uk) Richter's remarkable paintings of blurry photographs of portraits.

Rodchenko and Popova 12 February-
17 May, Tate Modern (020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk)
Two of the primary artists of Russian constructivism in the early 20th century.

Annette Messager 4 March-25 May, Hayward Gallery (0871 663 2519,
www.haywardgallery.org.uk)
Retrospective of one of France's great female artists. Hey, Tracey — this is how it should be done!

Isa Genzken April, Whitechapel Gallery (020 75227888, www.whitechapel.org)
Germany's most-admired female artist in the enlarged and long-awaited gallery.

Baroque 1620-1800: Style in the Age of Magnificence 4 April-19 July, Victoria and Albert Museum (020 7942 2000)
Baroque was the original bling. Sure to be full of gold leaf, gold thread, gold plate and all-over shininess.

William Blake 20 April-14 October, Tate Britain (020 7887 8008, www.tate.org.uk)
An intriguing restaging of Blake's 1809 exhibition, which was panned by critics at the time.

Michael Raedeker 1 May-28 June, Camden Arts Centre (020 7472 5500, www.camdenartscentre.org)
Exhibition of the Dutch London-based artist who combines paint and embroidery on his canvases.

Best Art Shows of 2009

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