Skip to main content
Gifts from The Morning Star
Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, Whitechapel Gallery London
Striking images in eclectic exhibition
Tschabalala Self, Koco at the Bodega, 2017; Dana Schutz, Imagine You and Me, 2018

WITH painting, like most art, the less said the better.

That possibly applies to the words of this exhibition's curator Lydia Yee. There is little evidence here that “these artists are challenging and expanding the canonical Western painting tradition,” whatever that may be.

The large paintings assembled in the spaciousness of the main galleries are what paintings have always been — a mix of the familiar and the unexpected, the intriguing and the not-so.

Sanya Kantarovsky, Letdown, 2017; Daniel Richter, Tarifa, 2001
The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
kam
Exhibition review / 22 August 2025
22 August 2025

MICHAL BONCZA highly recommends a revelatory exhibition of work by the doyen of indigenous Australians’ art, Emily Kam Kngwarray

FOTW
Film of the week / 21 August 2025
21 August 2025

Despite an over-sentimental narrative, MICHAL BONCZA applauds an ambitious drama about the Chinese rescue of British POWs in WWII

tanner
Meet the Cartoonist / 18 July 2025
18 July 2025

Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet

MB
Album reviews / 23 June 2025
23 June 2025

New releases from Hannah Rose Platt, Kemp Harris, and Spear Of Destiny

Similar stories
Tower of Babel, 1982
Culture / 10 April 2025
10 April 2025
This is poetry in paint, spectacular but never spectacle for its own sake, writes JAN WOOLF
Daniel Lind-Ramos, Ensamblajes, Nottingham Contemporary
Exhibition review / 20 February 2025
20 February 2025
ANDY HEDGECOCK relishes two exhibitions that blur the boundaries between art and community engagement
Anselm Kiefer, Wer jetzt kein Haus hat (Whoever has no House
Exhibition Review / 14 February 2025
14 February 2025
JAN WOOLF wallows in the historical mulch of post WW2 West Germany, and the resistant, challenging sense made of it by Anselm Kiefer
A panel from the Palestinian History Tapestry
Exhibition Review / 1 October 2024
1 October 2024
MARJORIE MAYO recommends an exhibition that asserts Palestinian history, culture and creativity in the face of strategies to erase them