Last year’s New Contemporaries, the annual show that selects and showcases “early career artists”, was so navel-gazing that I couldn’t bear to review it. So it is a joyful relief to enter this exhibition and find so much art that works directly on the senses. To mark its 75th anniversary, it takes place at the ICA where it was staged from the 1960s to the 80s. And boy, does the ICA need the lift. This arts centre on the Mall was once at the heart of London’s cultural life but now rarely has an exhibition worth seeing. It is an atmospheric venue for this show, with its long, noble history of staging the new, as if the ghost of Richard Hamilton were here to greet a rising art generation.
One miraculous work lifts the entire exhibition. Hazel O’Sullivan’s Sidhe is a truly original and daunting painting whose lurid pink and red colours, elaborate false perspectives and rounded forms combine abstract mystery and uncanny precision – a hardness that held me captivated.
