9 Of The Best London Art Exhibitions This Autumn Daniel Richter at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery
BY JOANNE SHURVELL
Autumn in London is always a cultural explosion. October kicks off with the annual art fairs Frieze and Frieze Masters, the brilliant 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, plus the BFI London Film Festival, followed in November by the EFG Jazz Festival.
This year is no exception, with blockbuster shows at the major art museums, including Philip Guston at the Tate Modern, Marina Abramovic at the Royal Academy, Frans Hals at the National Gallery and the sold out Chanel at the Victoria & Albert. Disappointed fashion fans can instead enjoy the extravagant Gucci Cosmos exhibition at 180 The Strand, an immersive look at the famous brand’s 102 year history.
This colorful new group of paintings portray biomorphic forms in a series of twisting, metamorphic poses. Since 2015, Richter has broken down compositional distinctions between background, foreground and subject to create renditions of the body in metamorphosis. Richter reverses the painting process, doing the background as one of the final stages of the work. While previous series of paintings drew upon visual source material as diverse as pornography and a historic postcard of injured World War I soldiers, this new group of paintings echoes Richter’s observations of the world around him. As he describes, “it’s based on random sketches and notes, [an] old woman passing by, [a] child at the dentist, boys playing basketball, stuff like that.”
