Looking back: London's best exhibitions, 2022

Francis Bacon: Man and Beast, Royal Academy ★★★★★

In 1991 Francis Bacon painted a haunting study of a bull. The beast in the picture emerges from the darkness as if about to charge into heavenly white light, only the dark void behind holds him back. It serves as a poignant reflection on life’s transience and is Bacon’.

The exhibition at the Royal Academy gave a mesmeric insight into the mind of a 20th-century artistic genius.

Van Gogh, Self-Portraits, The Courtauld review ★★★★★

This exhibition brought together sixteen self-portraits rarely lent and coming from collections from all over the world. It marked the first-ever opportunity to see so many of them in the same space and allowed a unique immersion into the artist's soul.

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven Child, Hayward Gallery review ★★★★★

Old silk garments, stitched bodies, metal cages, needles, stuffed heads and an iconic giant spider – all the elements of Louise Bourgeois’s lifelong exploration into the human (dare I say female) psyche were on display at the Hayward Gallery for a retrospective of the work she produced in the final decades of her long life.

An inward journey into motherhood, psychic wounds and sexual longings through the unflinching feminist gaze of one of the most important artists of the century.

Hew Locke: The Procession, Tate Britain review ★★★★★

Over 100 figures marching through the central galleries of Tate Britain left a lingering impression month after we saw the show.

Men, women and children, some in a suit and a tie, others in what appears to be Islamic dress, some on horseback next to those carrying flags.

Was it a protest, a procession or people migrating? We were not too sure.

Hew Locke's Installation was powerful and unsettling, summing up the world and the time we’re living through right now.

Lisa by Caroline Walker ★★★★★

An ageing mother tidying up her living-room cupboard, midwives preparing for childbirth… Caroline Walker's cinematic paintings portray what any woman would recognise as the 'invisible hours', daily unseen and unvalued small tasks that carry big responsibilities.

Her first exhibition at the Stephen Friedman gallery documented the life of her sister-in-law, Lisa, during her last months of pregnancy and first months of motherhood.

The intensity of first love, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the comforting routine and the mundanity of it all… Walker fleetingly captured those emotions, so elusive when lived, and gently managed to reveal the complexity of women’s position in society.

Our Time on Earth ★★★★★

The climate emergency was the topic of a dense exhibition at Barbican that covered the horrific devastation we are unleashing on the planet. Visually mesmerising and emotionally utterly horrifying, an example of how artists can take hard to process numbers and make it into something powerful and confrontational.

Dreamachine, Woolwich Public Market review ★★★★★

The mind-blowing Dreamachine experience was one of a kind and made us realise that it's really all in your head.

Cornelia Parker, Tate Britain review ★★★★★

Many of us really enjoyed this wide and spectacular survey of Cornelia Parker's work.

Conceptual art can often be seen as abstruse but the artist's ability to make it accessible and playful, yet with the right level of intellectual rigour, challenged us to think about the wider world we live in. Precisely what conceptual art should be.

Munch’s genius beyond the Scream ★★★★★

Edvard Munch’s fame is closely associated with his painting The Scream. But his lesser-known masterpieces — 18 of them shown displayed at the Courtauld Gallery this summer, 11 of them for the first time outside Scandinavia — revealed the genius of an artist whose ability to capture different psychological stages of the human mind remains somewhat unrivalled.

In the Black Fantastic, needed and memorable ★★★★★

Elaborate vibrant costumes made from bags, sequins and artificial flowers by Nick Cave made a powerful impact on visitors to Hayward Gallery’s In the Black Fantastic exhibition – a contemporary art exhibition of works by artists of the African diaspora who draw from science fiction and myth.

In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, there’s been a welcome move to highlight more black artists in exhibitions but this is the first we’ve seen to focus solely on the fantastic and mythical to draw attention to racial injustice and the Black experience. Combined with a superb line-up of 11 contemporary artists the result is a superb exhibition that was both needed and memorable.

A hymn to African fashion, finally ★★★★★

Masterfully curated by senior V&A curator Christine Checinska, this exhibition brought a much-needed fresh and diverse perspective on African fashion which spans centuries.

Cézanne exhibition review, Tate Modern ★★★★★

Cezanne changed the face of painting by showing us new and inventive ways to paint and everything that can be seen in Tate Modern, and the museum itself, wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for him. If Tate Modern is a cathedral to contemporary art then this exhibition is the high altar that Cezanne’s work so richly deserves.

Magdalena Abakanowicz exhibition, Tate Modern Review ★★★★★

Magdalena Abakanowicz may be an artist many haven’t heard of before, and this show does a great job of doing her works justice, and these works need to be seen in person to fully appreciate their scale and intensity.