The best art of 2020: Picasso’s doodles, queer South Africa and gory Gentileschi
Pablo showed his devilish side, Zanele Muholi captured queer lives in South Africa and Artemisia Gentileschi offered a savage ride through suffering and rage. Our critics rank their top shows
Intimacy, awkwardness, glamour and camp … Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern in London.
Intimacy, awkwardness, glamour and camp … Zanele Muholi at Tate Modern in London. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA
Adrian Searle and Jonathan Jones
Sat 26 Dec 2020 00.00 GMT
Adrian Searle
5. Crushed, Cast, Constructed
Gagosian, London, now closed
A show of grey sculptures: what could be more fun? Urs Fischer’s hugely enlarged aluminium casts of clay shapes squeezed and stretched in the palm of his hand, Charles Ray’s fastidious reconstruction of an abandoned 1938 farm tractor that for many years lay rusting in a field, and John Chamberlain’s crushed replica of a Donald Judd box – each played with form and formlessness, the haptic and the engineered, forensic reconstruction and wilful destruction. The sculptures related to the scale of the human body and all had an appeal to our sense of the anthropomorphic. Crushed, Cast, Constructed felt like a concise, poetic little essay, and none the worse for that. Read the full review.