Best of 2024: Visual Arts

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.

Things were kickstarted with a retrospective of Barbara Kruger (Serpentine Gallery) who uses words and images to illuminate the way language is (mis)used to cajole, bully, manipulate and lie. Having explored similar territory for 50 some years, you’d have thought the American artist would have run out of ideas. Not a bit of it. Dominating the central space was a huge screen showing Untitled (No Comment) (main picture) which explores the Orwellian soup of delusion, manipulation, hypocrisy, lies, hyperbole, double think and double speak on which the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson thrive. Quoting Voltaire, it warns: “Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” and a voice-over replies “Thank you for sharing”.  

In Music of the Mind, Tate Modern acknowledged that, when she met John Lennon, Yoko Ono was already an established artist. Focusing on the early years in New York, where her Chambers Street loft became a focal point for multi-media happenings, the show included her early films, drawings, conceptual paintings, installations, and performances like the seminal Cut Piece 1964 (pictured right) – in which she kneels on the floor while, one after another, audience members cut off bits of her clothing – as well as the films, Bed-ins and recordings she made with Lennon.

The exhibition closed with a film of Ono performing Whisper at the Sydney Opera House in 2013. Among the panting, sighing, gasping, crooning, warbling, yelling and whispering are the words “I wish, let me wish” . It was a beautiful way to end the show – with sounds made in her eighties that echoed the vocals she explored in her twenties. Melanie Manchot’s film Stephen is the best debut feature I’ve seen since Steve McQueen’s Hunger. The recovering alcoholic Stephen Giddings (pictured above) plays both himself and Thomas Goudie, a bank clerk who stole £170,000 from the Bank of Liverpool where he worked. Acting and reality intertwine to the point where you can’t always tell whether Giddings is being himself, or is playing the role of either Stephen or Tom. The tension rarely lets up as we watch the main character lying and cheating his way through life as he struggles with addiction and is fleeced by card and loan sharks. Giddings has ambitions to become a professional actor and, given that his portrayal of pent-up rage practically sets the screen on fire, it’s easy to believe he’ll make it.

Tate Britain’s exhibition of Women Artists in Britain from 1520-1920 was a revelation; it completely transformed one’s view of art history by exposing the myth that female talent is an exotic anomaly. (Pictured left: Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639 by Artemisia Gentileschi). Featuring 100 artists the show demonstrated how, over 400 years, women artists pursued full time careers, were commissioned by royalty, enjoyed critical acclaim and gained international reputations, ran successful portrait studios, set up their own societies and opened their own art schools – despite vigorous attempts by the male establishment to thwart them at every turn. The experience was overwhelming because the work was of such high quality and also because those on show represent the tip of the iceberg – the few rescued from oblivion.

At 84, Judy Chicago is being heaped with accolades, including induction into America’s National Women's Hall of Fame, and is enjoying worldwide celebrity. Her work is determinedly female-centric. On entering the Serpentine Gallery, a vast drawing of the Creation greeted you. Both a landscape and a woman’s body, it is inscribed with the words “her body rose up and her thighs became the mountains and her belly formed the valleys. Plants sprang up from her flesh, and living creatures crawled out of her crevices, and waters ran down her arms and formed the oceans and the rivers.” The Creation and, by proxy, creativity in general are thereby reclaimed for women. (Pictured above right: Immolation, 1972 from Atmospheres, a series of performances).

Having won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Dominique White spent six months in Italy. The four powerful sculptures she showed at the Whitechapel Gallery were inspired by the places she visited and things she learned there (pictured left: Dead Reckoning 2024). Dating back to ancient Egypt and beyond, the Mediterranean slave trade was one of the topics she researched. Her sculptures evoke thoughts of shipwreck and the slaves who rowed Phoenician, Greek and Roman galleys. With their frayed ropes, fragments of rotten sails, discarded fishing nets and worm-eaten driftwood they make specific reference to seafaring. Profoundly melancholy, they seem steeped in history yet emanate a potent sense of resilience.

"I am absolutely indifferent to anything the world may say about me,” Vanessa Bell once declared defiantly. It was just as well since the world chose to foreground the Bloomsbury group’s habit of non-binary bed-hopping rather than the artworks they produced. The MK Gallery’s retrospective steered blissfully clear of salacious tittle tattle and focused, instead, on Bell’s paintings and designs rather than her complicated domestic life.

She clearly felt freer to explore abstraction in her designs than in her paintings. One of her most dynamic designs is a screen featuring Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1913-14 (pictured above). Inspired by Matisse’s The Dance 1909, it features the naked couple prancing about with unashamed delight in the freedom of their nudity. There’s no hint of shame and, perhaps more significantly, the man and woman are portrayed as equals, both involved in shaking the fruit from the tree. The exhibition began a much-needed process of reappraisal through which her contribution as an artist is being recognised once again.At the Aviva Studios in Manchester Laurie Anderson performed ARK (pictured above), the final part of United States 1-4. The piece consists of 50 or so stories linked by tenuous threads that weave in and out like a flow of consciousness. Anderson moved around the stage playing keyboard and violin, singing songs and telling stories in a voice electronically modified to transform her into characters including a Russian troll, a naive young man, a Trump devotee, Lou Reed and even God. If its predecessor held up an ironic mirror to America in the early 1980s, ARK is both more personal (many of the stories are autobiographical) and more universal. “I’m making a ship,” she explained. “Conditions on earth make it impossible to stay, so everyone is trying to figure out where to go… Everyone wants to be a sailor”. Despite anticipating disaster, this mesmerising, three hour voyage is full of hope. Countering horror with humour, Anderson lightens the burden of anxiety. Passing on the advice of her Buddhist teacher, for instance, she says “Try to practice being sad (about the state of the world) without actually feeling sad.”

Zanele Muholi’s first exhibition at Tate Modern was curtailed by lockdown so she has been honoured with a second showing that continues until 26 January 2025. Begun in 2012 Hail the Dark Lioness (Somnyama Ngonyama in Zulu) is an ongoing series of photographs that are so beautiful and so confrontational they knock you sideways. The South African artist decks themself in mundane materials such as raffia, rope, electric cables, safety pins, pan scourers and pencils. (Pictured left: Maholi Qiniso, The Sails, Durban 2019). Adept at turning cheap stuff into regal accoutrements that evoke a queen, a saint, a shaman, elder or priestess, Muholi addresses the complexities of black identity, reflects on the menial jobs offered black women and also parodies the ways black people have been portrayed by white photographers.

• Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern until 26 January 2025
• More visual arts reviews on theartsdesk