What to See in London This Summer

Ed Atkins | Tate Britain, London | 2 April – 25 August 

My drawings came about through the COVID-19 lockdowns. Here in Denmark, kindergartens reopened quickly, so my daughter was back in her routines but I had very little to do with my days. Like a lot of artists, my way to maintain a practice was to shrink everything down. I would do these drawings over breakfast and pop them in her lunchbox. Strange, careless, devotional drawings. The process became an increasingly important routine for me. Post-it notes shriek provisionality, and they afforded freedom.

I’m excited to include a few hundred of these drawings in a room in the Tate survey. It’ll be a relative sanctuary away from the more pummelling video installations. My daughter is not so interested in them now, but I still make them because of the things that come out of them. Life accumulates. – Ed Atkins

Francesca Mollett | Modern Art, London | 5 June – 19 July 

‘Annual Honesty’, Francesca Mollett’s solo exhibition at Modern Art, London, is titled after the flower of the same name. Also known as the ‘money plant’, honesty bears purple blooms in the spring, followed by round, translucent seed pods, resembling a cascade of silvery coins or a cluster of pale, flat moons. It is an apt emblem of the young British painter’s work, which is concerned not only with the way certain forms echo across the living world, but also with what we might call material candour.

While the canvases in this show are her most figurative to date, the insistent physicality of her handling – with its layering and scraping, its creation of almost geological strata and fissures – never lets us forget that they are, first and foremost, arrangements of pigment on a support. The 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza argued that, despite surface appearances, everything in the universe is made from a single, infinite substance, which he termed ‘God or Nature’. In Mollett’s work, paint functions in a similarly monadic manner. From it, all images emerge, and to it they ultimately return. – Tom Morton

Jenny Saville | National Portrait Gallery, London | 20 June – 7 September  

A gunshot wound to the face is often – though not always – fatal. Sometimes, the bullet exits at just the right spot, and although the trauma is immense, the victim survives. Not so in Witness (2009), a 2.7 metre-tall painting of a head by Jenny Saville, currently on view in the artist’s survey at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Painted from a crime scene photograph, the subject – lying flat, eyes shut, mouth destroyed – is, quite evidently, dead. It’s a graphic, violent work. As I was writing this, a colleague walked past my desk, saw the image open on my laptop screen, and simply said, ‘Gross’. But when you see the painting in person – its scale so much larger than life – the violence is abstracted. Standing in front of Witness, what you notice are the sweeping strokes of oil paint – the sensual way the pigment is pushed across the canvas. The mess of blood and tissue around the subject’s exploded mouth, rendered in frenzied strokes, looks more like an abstract expressionist painting by Willem de Kooning than the forensic snapshot it ostensibly depicts. – Lou Selfridge

Huma Bhabha and Alberto Giacometti | Barbican Art Gallery, London | 8 May – 10 August

An array of corporeal forms, decapitated heads and severed limbs fills the new gallery space on the second floor of London’s Barbican Centre. On display are works by the 20th century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti and contemporary Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha, whose oeuvres have an unexpected affinity in their depictions of the effects of warfare and the fragility of human existence.

The works on display here by Giacometti, created largely in the aftermath of World War II, lay bare the physical and psychological traumas of this moment of existential crisis. Figurine Between Two Houses (1950), for example, portrays a body consumed by anguish, its expressionistic bronze surface, the result of fervid mark-making, detailing a gaunt and withered figure. Yet, despite its apparent insubstantiality, the work has an undeniable aura of resilience: the poised body is captured mid-stride, legs marching onwards. – Lara Alake

Alexandra Metcalf | The Perimeter, London | 16 May – 25 July 

Walking through Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, ‘Gaaaaaaasp’, at The Perimeter, London, I was reminded of my most prized possession as a child: a two-storey dolls’ house whose rooms – bathed in lurid colours with brazen geometric patterns – set the scene for countless miniature melodramas. Since the house came unfurnished, I struggled to curate its interior. The plastic furniture I found was always out of proportion; ginormous beds pushed clumsily against towering lamps and garish chairs. The rooms became congested, gradually stifling doll life. Metcalf’s work summons a comparable tension. Though her paintings and sculptures frequently present settings that connote domesticity and care, a sinister layer of institutional confinement and unease lingers beneath the surface. – Ivana Cholakova

^{Main image: Ed Atkins, The worm (detail), 2021, film still. Courtesy: the artist and Cabinet, London}