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Adrian Searle

Adrian Searle is an art critic for the Guardian and a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art in London

April 2025

  • Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015. Tate. Purchased 2016 © Ed Atkins. Installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria 19 January - 31 March 2019. Photograph by Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.

    Ed Atkins review – a harrowing medley of spiders, sinkholes and death

    Using CGI-avatars, racks of opera costumes and a film starring Toby Jones, the artist explores the proximity of his own mortality – and ours

March 2025

  • Hans Jæger by Edvard Munch

    Edvard Munch Portraits review – smug, creepy and weird, but where’s the drama?

    The Scream artist’s friends, family and physicians populate this patchily assembled collection that suggests little of a boisterous, bohemian life

February 2025

  • An endless desire to be seen … a still from What’s Your Reaction to the Show, 1988.

    Leigh Bowery! review – the sex, scandal and sprayed enemas of the ultimate exhibitionist

    This exhaustive account of the iconic diva and dandy covers all the fashion, drugs, clubs and self-obsession of a life that was short, sleazy and sensational
  • An anti-fascist demonstrator is taken away under arrest after a mounted baton charge during the Battle of Cable Street, London, 4 October 1936

    Resistance review – a captivating century of protest and photography

    Turner Contemporary, Margate
    Marches, strikes and other acts of defiance covering causes from anti-fascism to the Iraq war are captured in compelling detail in an exhibition conceived by Steve McQueen
  • Noah Davis, 1975.

    Noah Davis review – thrilling strangeness from a painter brimming with ideas and adventure

    From Egyptian mythology to the bear pit of reality TV, this show captures a mere eight years of dazzling work from the restless American who lit up LA before dying at the age of 32

January 2025

  • Peter Hujar: Ethyl Eichelberger, 1979

    Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark review – life, death and a gnarly dildo

    These intense and intimate photographs of 70s and 80s New York – from a lounging William Burroughs to a masturbating dancer – constantly sweep you away

December 2024

  • art

    2025 culture preview
    Sensual surrealism, Kiefer’s delights and Gehry’s Guggenheim: the best art and architecture shows to visit in 2025

    Anselm Kiefer’s homage to Van Gogh, Ithell Colquhoun’s seaside of surrealism and Gilbert & George fill the galleries, while the V&A opens its archives at the illustrious new East Storehouse
  • Installation view of Hamad Butt: Apprehensions at IMMA.

    Hamad Butt review – the truncated brilliance of the most dangerous YBA

    Butt emerged as one of the subtlest of the famous Goldsmiths generation, but he died too soon for his sly, oblique work to fully develop
  • Jasleen Kaur's Ford Escort

    Turner Prize: Jasleen Kaur’s winning, welcoming ode to Glasgow

    Pleasure and politics collide in Kaur’s work, which invites our curiosity again and again

November 2024

  • Taking a line for a walk … Dorothea Rockburne’s Domain of the Variable (Y), (Z), 1972/2018/2024.

    Dorothea Rockburne – New York great’s first big UK show all comes down to one long, mesmerising line

  • On Center, On Edge Shatter Scatter by Barry Le Va, created by hitting glass with a sledgehammer, pictured in 1968. A newer version of this piece is in the Fruitmarket exhibition.

    Barry Le Va review – smash hits from the danger-loving king of ‘floor art’

October 2024

  • Bearing witness … Hew Locke and his Watchers in the show What Have We Here?

    Hew Locke’s British Museum looting exposé: ‘inescapably, deeply shocking’

    In a show full of beauty and horror, which even includes ‘Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles’, the artist places his own works alongside those plundered by Britain from long-destroyed peoples
  • Mire Lee’s Open Wound at Turbine Hall, Tate Modern

    Mire Lee’s Turbine Hall review – as kitsch as tatty Halloween decorations

    The Korean artist’s hanging sculpture of a turbine oozing brown liquid aims to frighten and disgust – but this hackneyed effort doesn’t even smell
  • Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern.

    Mike Kelley review – full-tilt blast through exorcised demons and eviscerated toys

    Opening up his screaming world of repressed terrors and tin-foil asteroids, this trip through the late Detroit artist’s prolific career offers no safe spaces

September 2024

  • Waiting for the Barbarians, by Glenn Ligon, in Athens in 2021.

    Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place review – Black art disruptor shakes down the museum

    Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
    The US artist has rifled the Fitzwilliam’s collections and ruffled the calm of its gilded masterpieces with playful unruliness and stark, neon-lit questions
  • Alter Altar by Jasleen Kaur, who has been shortlisted for 2024's Turner prize.

    Turner prize 2024 review – vitality, surprise … and a Ford Escort in a doily

    The nominees bring in bottles of Irn-Bru, gigantic concrete jewellery and blood-red footprints in a show filled with moving cultural collisions and humour
  • Embracing ambiguity … Dumas at her new exhibition in the Frith Street Gallery.

    ‘Art may be a pact with the devil’: the great Marlene Dumas on her darkly provocative art

    She pours or even tosses paint on to a canvas – to see where it takes her. The results range from myths to massacres, bound heads to Satan. In a rare interview, the great artist reveals what drives her

August 2024

  • From left to right; Installation view of Jasleen Kaur, Alter Altar, Vincent Van Gogh Self-Portrait, Mike Kelley as The Banana Man

    Autumn arts preview 2024
    From Van Gogh to Le Va, Rego to the Renaissance: the best exhibitions for autumn 2024

    From this year’s Turner prize and pioneering scatter art to Monet’s London and Goya’s surreal visions – there’s something for all art lovers

June 2024

  • Inches from injury … kids at play in Havana.

    Francis Alÿs: Ricochets review – children of the world unite in a health and safety nightmare

  • Tavares Strachan, You Belong Here, Prospect 3 New Orleans, 2014. (Installation view from Prospect 3 Biennale, New Orleans, LA). Blocked out neon travelling installation on the Mississippi River. 30 ft x 80 ft on 100-ft barge.

    Tavares Strachan review – encyclopaedic art that sizzles with life

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