Picadilly buzzing as Royal Academy adds more art and cafe space

The Royal Academy in Piccadilly has always been a hugely congenial place to spend a couple of hours during a trip to London. But this year, a major makeover has sent this august art space rocketing to the top of everybody’s “must-see” list.

After three years of building work, the gallery has finally unveiled its £56 million redevelopment, celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding with 70 per cent more space for exhibitions as well as a big new lecture theatre, a space for site-specific installations, a studio to show off work by Royal Academy students and new bar and shop facilities.

The much-praised refurbishment is of particular interest to Irish visitors following the new lease of life – and increased exhibition space – given to our own National Gallery by its restoration and refresh last year.

On paper it's torturous – I'm hoping that experientially it's not so bad.

Central to the Royal Academy’s new look is a brand-new bridge. Designed by the architect David Chipperfield, it’s a clever way of linking the gallery’s main building, Burlington House, with No 6 Burlington Gardens. This second building, which sits directly behind the main one, was previously entered from a separate entrance, and had become somewhat neglected and unloved over the years.

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Chipperfield created a quirky new route between the two locations, bringing visitors on a journey of discovery – down a set of stairs, into a vault which was previously a storage space but is now a public gallery, up a flight of steps and across the bridge. “There’s a down-vale, over-hill quality to it,” the architect said. “On paper it’s torturous – I’m hoping that experientially it’s not so bad.”

He also renovated the interior of Burlington Gardens to create light, modern gallery spaces, one of which now houses the Royal Academy’s permanent collections. Another, appropriately, is an architecture studio which will be permanently dedicated to architecture installations.

The big draw over the summer months is the 2018 Summer Exhibition. The Royal Academy was originally founded as a kind of art police, fostering artistic creation within a set of firmly-drawn boundaries and rules. The summer show has been held every year since 1769, and is traditionally curated by one of the organisation’s 80 Royal Academicians, an elected group made up of some of the most celebrated artists in the country.

Unorthodox curator

For the 250th show, though, the Royal Academy picked an unorthodox curator. The Turner Prize-winning ceramicist and printmaker Grayson Perry is a familiar figure from his many appearances on TV panel shows and documentaries, where he’s often dressed as his flamboyant alter ego, Clare.

The gamble seems to have paid off: Perry's iconoclastic selection has been hailed by critics as provocative, political and supremely relevant to the times.  It celebrates the democracy of the world's large open-submission contemporary art show by exhibiting a range of work on the theme Art Made Now.

It's all a far cry from the stuffy image of centuries past

Upwards of 1,300 works are on display both inside and outside the gallery. A monumental sculpture by Anish Kapoor, Symphony for my Beloved Daughter, has taken over the courtyard space. Two vast new works by David Hockney combine photographs taken from many viewpoints into a single monumental image – each one is more than 7m long. Even the main staircase of the Royal Academy – which has been trodden so many times by the feet of, among others, John Constable and JMW Turner – has been taken over by the sculptor Mike Nelson with his work Untitled (Public Sculpture for a Redundant Space).

On Friday nights, the gallery will be open until 10pm, the Annenberg Courtyard buzzing with cocktail bars, chatter, deckchairs and music. Further out still, in the city of London, flags designed by Perry and others flutter merrily along Piccadilly as far as Bond Street and Regent Street.

Stuffy image

It's all a far cry from the stuffy image of centuries past, when the Royal Academy turned up its nose at a submission from Constable because he insisted on painting en plein air. A separate exhibition, The Great Spectacle, tracks the story of the annual show by displaying highlights from the past 250 years, including Angelica Kauffman's Hector Taking Leave of Andromache, which was shown in the first exhibition of 1769, and John Singer Sargent's portrait of the author Henry James, which was famously slashed by the suffragette Mary Wood during the summer exhibition of 1914.

The gallery is also looking to the future, with a wide-ranging and diverse programme of debate and discussion about art, including a Festival of Ideas, which will run from September 7th to 16th.

Among all this innovation and excitement, one aspect which hasn’t changed very much is the red dot sticker: most of the artwork at the Academy’s summer show is, as it always has been, up for sale. It can be bought online and some is priced at as little as £100, though if you want to acquire Banksy’s cheeky take on a Brexit poster – he covered a UKIP “Vote Leave” placard with love hearts – it will set you back a very cool £350 million.

Royal Academy, Piccadilly, London.Open daily 10am to 6pm, Fridays 10am to 10pm. The Summer Exhibition runs until August 19th. Tacita Dean's Landscape show runs until August 12th. The Festival of Ideas opens on September 7th. royalacademy.org.uk