RA Summer Exhibition 2026

Flat Tyre, by Gavin Turk (Sculpture | Painted bronze)

I gave up on the RA Summer Exhibition some years ago, both as a potential exhibitor and as a visitor. Despite its reputation as one of the traditional peak art-viewing experiences of the year I had never actually been to one before 2017, when on impulse I had successfully submitted a couple of my own digital prints to the show, and naturally went up to London to have a look. In the following few years I was shortlisted a couple of times, but never made it onto the actual wall again. After a few more visits it became clear that the whole thing was in a nosedive of confused priorities – I don't think this was just "sour grapes" talking – a lottery in which the standards of competence which would apply to any "open" submission anywhere else seemed to have been subordinated to the judges' desire to make the RA appear less stodgy and hidebound by "elitist" conventions of art-worthiness. I blame Grayson Perry, the main co-ordinator of the 2018 show, for starting this downhill slide. Frankly, the Summer Exhibition had become hilariously bad, and not worth the price of a train journey to London.

But this summer I was looking for a place to meet up with an old friend in London, the exhibition was in its last weeks, and it seemed like a handy venue, if only for us to have a bit of a laugh at this year's selection and a therapeutic moan about life in general over coffee. I might not think much of the Summer Exhibition, but the RA's cafe facilities are pretty reliable.

The Summer Show is enormous, filling nine huge rooms floor to ceiling with art; 1851 items, to be precise, of all sorts imaginable, but actually mainly 2D wall-hung pictures. Now, there are several things in that previous sentence worth expanding upon. Let's start with "art".

Things have clearly not improved since I decided they had become too bad to bother with. If I had to characterise the show I'd say it was a celebration now not so much of "Sunday painters" (the traditional jibe) but of sixth-form art. By this I mean work by artists whose competence in handling a medium is incommensurate with the earnest intentions motivating it. Typically, these are poorly drawn and composed scenarios, simply filled in with a paint-by-numbers indifference to any painterly properties other than colour. Feigned cack-handedness with paint is fashionable, of course, as I have noted before (see The Last Time I Saw Richard). Many competent artists have adopted this style, presumably as a democratising, dressed-down, faux-naive "spontaneity", but most of those selected from the open submission are authentic native cack-handers, the unvarnished Real Thing.

Take as a representative example these two works by comedian Harry Hill:

What is there to say about these, other than "Don't give up the day job, Harry..."? Notably, though, both have been sold. All submissions are allegedly judged anonymously, so the panel must have agreed on their merits, unaware that they were by everyone's favourite bald ex-medic comedian. All selected work is also hung without names or titles: I wonder, did the buyers know these were by a celebrity before or after looking them up in the catalogue? Or maybe Harry bought them back himself, as a nice way of supporting the RA's activities? If so, well done, Harry.

But then, what about this:

Heh, remember Spirographs? Or have you ever got carried away getting a set of dried-out biros to flow again? But this is "Entangled Bodies" by Conrad Shawcross, a Royal Academician, no less, and it has sold out its edition of fifty at £330 each. I'm not sure what "ink on paper, print" means – it does sound a bit evasive to me – but that's how this is described in the catalogue, so it must mean something. Hopefully not the dreaded and outlawed variety of "giclée", though, i.e. an original work scanned and marketed as a "print".

Or, consider this remarkable effort:

This is "Spot the Missing Letters" by James Kaye Harris, also sold, for a cool £1,200. I'll save you the trouble: the missing letters are A R T. Got it now? (No, not "rat" or "tar", fool). As Max Miller used to say, "It's all clever stuff!" And congratulations to the new owner: you can anticipate years of visual pleasure ahead gazing at this wonderfully cryptic conversation piece, and what an investment!

The man in the blue shirt is about 6' 3" tall (~190cm); 

the tiny grey painting top left ("Soft Monsters" by Yewon Lee) is 20cm square...

Next to consider from that sentence (surely you haven't forgotten about the sentence?) we have "floor to ceiling". The so-called "academy hang" is a traditional feature of the Summer Exhibition, but surely one of its worst. Faced with hundreds of small-to-medium sized pictures of no particular distinction or coherence, the temptation to treat them as elements in an interior decoration scheme is clearly irresistible. But how frustrating must it be, to have your little picture selected from the thousands submitted – hooray! – only to find it hung 10 or even 20 feet above ground, and rendered invisible by the reflections of the lighting in the glass? You'd need a ladder or binoculars to get a proper look at it. Or, just as bad, to have your quietly toned etching overwhelmed, jig-sawed into a matrix of attention-grabbing shapes and colours? Come on, you Academy judges: why not break with tradition, and select fewer, better pictures, and hang them with the respect they deserve?

Although it's true that a closer examination does not do some of these pictures any favours:

Um, great stuff... And yet two of them have sold: in the middle "High Jump", a lithograph by Peter McDonald (£1,100 framed as seen plus two from the edition at £960 each) and on the right "Trees Connecting the Past to the Present" by Paul Broomhead (£500). Truly there is no accounting for taste (and I am clearly under-pricing my own work). This room was hung by artist Oona Grimes, who – now I come to look at her own work – may well have chosen these as the sort of fun pix she could enjoy playing around with.

Then, finally, there is the physical challenge of those nine enormous rooms. My phone's step recorder tells me I walked the equivalent of over five miles that day, most of which will have been inside the Royal Academy. Admittedly, I'm in my 70s and my stamina is not what it was, but that's a respectable walk at any age, and I think you can be forgiven for starting to feel "arted out" beyond the halfway stage. After that, it all becomes a bit of a blur and a literal pain in the neck, and what you mainly want is to head for a chair, a cup of coffee, and a chat. Which is what we did.

So didn't you see anything you liked, Mr. Sour-Grapes? Well, yes, I did, but it was hard to spot buried amongst all the colour-forward dross, and doubtless I overlooked many things I might have admired under better circumstances. Anything in the last couple of rooms didn't stand a chance. I didn't photograph much, but there were two works in series that caught my eye.

First, a set of mock eye-test charts by Ron Arad RA, this one a "Duchamp Eye Test", hung in a row next to Warhol, Wilde, and Picasso versions of the same familiar chart layout. TBH, it was the size and shape, the layered transparent colours, and the quasi-Japanese brush-strokes that appealed to me as much as the conceit of a quotation rendered in ever-smaller rows of letters. Clever, sure, but random letters could have worked for me just as well.

image from Opera Gallery

Then there was a set of twenty-five "Golden Puja Tanmatras" by Stephen Cox RA, made from Indian basalt and gold leaf:

I had no idea what these were all about when I came across them: I just thought they were rather attractive. But, apparently, the "Tanmatras are the fundamental sensory perceptions of humans. The five Tanmatras correspond to the five senses: hearing, touch, sight, taste, and smell. Each Tanmatra is also associated with a specific element (Mahabhuta), giving them a central role in Ayurveda philosophy and in yoga." So, there you go: make of that what you will. I confess that, at the time, I thought the ones with ears were meant to be monkeys, and rather enjoyed that misapprehension... As I say, there's no accounting for taste.

One last thing. Since (I think?) 2019 the RA's Summer Exhibition co-ordinator has been asked to declare a theme. This year it was Ryan Gander, who stated:

The 2026 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s theme is Interconnectedness. It will aim to explore ideas of entanglement, as well as the unexpected and fortuitous connections and associations between disparate things, no matter how abstract or illogical. Proof that, as humans, our outputs hold more commonality than separation, without us intentionally seeking it.

Really? I saw very little evidence of this in the works selected. Complex scribbles maybe, but cars on fire? A pole vaulter? Silly wordplay? I don't think so. Besides, pretty much all of the "name" artists whose work I recognised were simply showing their latest versions of the same-old same-old: that's how I was able to recognise them! Just between ourselves, whisper it, I think the judges simply picked the ones they liked, and paid little or no attention to any "theme"... Don't tell Ryan. But you do have to feel sorry for anyone who did try to interpret the idea of "interconnectedness" in a creative way and lost out to... Well, can anyone explain to me the sort of "interconnectedness" expressed by the print "Jamie Lee Curtis" on the wall above? Or of the one to its left, that crudely Simpsons-style portrait? Go on, why not have a go!

Oh, I nearly forgot. Another old friend had alerted me to a standout piece that I didn't manage to encounter myself. It was probably obscured by an admiring crowd. Here is its page on the RA website:

Genius. I'm not surprised it took two artists to come up with it. How could the RA not show it? It simply screams "Interconnectedness!" And, incredibly, it's still unsold. I mean, "One bottle of San Benedetto still water, label removed" for just £10,000? There really is no accounting for taste.