The best art and architecture of 2024 | Art and design

Adrian Searle’s best art shows of 2024

Studio Voltaire, London
This unlikely pairing of self-taught Plymouth-based national treasure, who painted her everyday surroundings, and a Finnish illustrator of muscle-bound hunks bulging in their biker leathers, was a collision made in some sort of heaven. Cook accompanied her pneumatic subjects to the boozer and down the caff, dancing and carousing on girls’ nights out, while Tom of Finland cruised a fantasy world of man-on-man horseplay and wild alfresco sex. Blimey.

Turner Contemporary, Margate
Filled with subtlety and invention, all the work here was made by women, many of whom were marginalised or even excluded from an art world that was predominantly male, white and straight, and during a period when feminism was slowly gathering pace. This ambitious show collided formal rigour and weirdness, the mathematical, the political, the woven, the painted, the cast, the constructed, the handmade and the machine-assisted.

Frith Street Gallery, London
Disquieting family portraits, a head that looks like a rock and images of grieving: “One thing my work is always about is ambiguity,” the 71-year-old, Amsterdam-based South African painter insists. Edvard Munch haunts evidence of a massacre in Norway, and many recent images are teased from pours and puddles of paint, a sardonic devil, the flaying of the satyr Marsyas. Magical and mournful.

Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge until 2 March
Different translations of lines by Greek poet Constantine Cavafy jostle in neon all over the museum’s portico. Ligon’s glutinous text paintings interrupt the old masters. Ligon juxtaposed his own works with etchings by Degas, illuminated manuscripts and the writings of James Baldwin and turned the museum’s collection of flower paintings into a room exploding with blooms and excess. Caustic, erudite and inquisitive, All Over the Place is a model for what artists can do in a museum setting.

Pinault Collection, Venice
Assisted by AI, this ensemble of film, live performers – human, simian, crustacean, and robotic – was an unhinging experience. Disembodied voices, a monkey waitress marooned in a restaurant after the Fukushima nuclear accident, gigantic floating rocks, a robot archaeologist digging for signs of life in a desert, all featured in the French artist’s cavernously dark and mysterious mise-en-scène. I reeled out, uncertain of the ground beneath my feet, and almost fell into the Grand Canal.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
Filled with strangeness and beauty, Unravel was often gorgeously excessive, at other moments quiet and private, not giving up its secrets till you lingered. It was also filled with stories and materiality, tenderness and violence, craft skills and hectic flamboyance. Straddling different continents, traditions and approaches, this great tangled knot of an exhibition was threaded through with political themes, from police brutality to colonial oppression, in often startling and uncompromising ways.

The Courtauld, London
Draw, erase, rework, rub out and start again. Repeat. Frank Auerbach’s charcoal portraits, made between 1956 and 1962, are more than evidence of effort. In February, 17 of these magnificently rough and patched summations of his repeated attempts to capture his subjects filled two rooms of the Courtauld. In a sense, they are all portraits of their maker, and evidence of a life lived. Auerbach’s death this November aged 93 lends them a further depth.

Dia Beacon, New York State until May
Steve McQueen asked five world-renowned bass players of African descent to improvise together in Dia’s enormous bare basement, creating a mournful, heart-stopping soundscape that fills the empty space. Sixty light boxes on the ceiling cycle through the spectrum of visible light, suspending visitors between night and day, underground and below decks at sea – perhaps on the Middle Passage, in limbo and full of apprehension. Bass is a situation, an elegy, an extended moment drawn out in time.

Great Court Gallery, British Museum until 9 February
Much of the British Museum’s collection is the product of ill-gotten gains, of looting and vandalism and the proceeds of slavery. What the museum preserves cannot be disentangled from the larger stories of empire, the destruction of societies and the erasure of cultures. The evidence is embedded in the museum’s history and holdings. Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke unpacks these shocking stories, using his own sculptures, and his terse, critical commentaries to counterpoint works from the collection, and from farther afield.

Barbican Art Gallery, London
Francis Alÿs’s ongoing film series documenting children’s games around the world filled the Barbican with squeals and laughter, shouts and cries. The Mexico-based Belgian artist has filmed kids skipping stones over the waves in Morocco, racing snails in Belgium and flying kites in Afghanistan. He recorded adolescents playing football on a street devastated by bombing in Iraq, in 2017, and kids in Ukraine playing at making roadblocks and asking motorists for a password. (All are free to watch online.) Traditional games and joyful attempts to make sense of the world collide, sometimes in the most desperate circumstances. This was my show of the year.

Jonathan Jones’s best art shows of 2024

National Gallery, London
This exhibition turned French impressionism upside down and inside out by following a trail from Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, Degas’s vertigo-inducing masterpiece showing a circus star hanging from the trapeze by her teeth, in order to find out who Miss La La really was and why she became a hero of Paris bohemia, opening your eyes anew to Degas, sex, race and the birth of modern art.

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne
Tugging The Fighting Temeraire to Tyneside for this exhibition, as part of the National Treasures project that sent masterpieces out of London, was inspired: JMW Turner’s crimson and bronze, tear-jerkingly smoky vision of a great ship being heaved off to die resonated with the post-industrial story of Newcastle, while photographs of 1970s shipyards and backstreets by Chris Killip were juxtaposed with Turner’s nautical paintings and watercolours to heartbreaking effect.

British Museum, London
Gladiator II be damned! This was the real Roman blockbuster of the year with everything from ballistas and body armour to a machine for gambling with dice to take you into the lives of Roman soldiers and their families 2,000 years ago. Actual skeletons, including a soldier who died saving people from Vesuvius, completed the epic thrills and horrors. A gory triumph in a comeback year for the British Museum.

The Courtauld, London, until 19 January
You can’t resist the wide open eyes of Claude Monet, whatever he’s looking at – and there’s an extra fascination to seeing what he made of the smog and crowds of our own capital. This painter of sensual beauty emerges here as a modernist in the mould of Conrad and TS Eliot, contemplating the commuters crossing Thames bridges in bleary light: so many, he never thought death had undone so many.

British Museum, London, until 23 February
Only the British Museum could put on this history-making show, using its global collections, combined with eye-popping loans, to show how Anglo-Saxon England was connected with China via everywhere between – taking you to Tibet, Cairo, Córdoba and other wondrous places 1,500 years ago. It is brilliant history without bias, that refutes both parochial nationalism and the unquestioned cult of restitution, proving by its magic that world museums enhance humanity.

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
The way Mahama combined big, brilliant charcoal drawings with installations using wood, bark and photography to tell a history of Ghana and the British empire was utterly captivating. His depictions of young men carrying heavy rails, with their expressiveness and monumental power, were gripping. I lingered among portraits of colonial employees set on haunting wooden structures. It revealed a knockout artist of our time, up there with Kiefer and Kentridge.

National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 January
This exhibition disarms you with Bacon’s tender, loving side only to hit you all the harder with his remorseless eye for the pity and terror of our frail brief lives. He comes across like a metaphysical poet exposing the skull beneath the skin, not to mention the spine and organs inside the nude. You leave with a raw excitement as if someone had pulled back the curtain on true existence.

National Gallery, London
Sepulchral, desperate, hellish – that was how life looked to the painter and murderer Caravaggio in 1610 as he faced his final curtain. There’s nothing elegaic or accepting about his farewell painting, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, just horror at how violent we are, how violent he is, as he screams repentance and rages for a bit more of that red, raw light. This tiny exhibition made an immeasurable, unforgettable impact.

British Museum, London, until 30 March
The insatiable creativity of Picasso amazes and delights all over again. At the heart of this survey of a lifetime’s dirty etchings is his 1930s masterpiece The Vollard Suite, which is revealed as ranking equally with James Joyce’s Ulysses as a modernist interpretation of classical myth. Picasso creates his own new fairytales from the raw material of Ovid, portraying his inner darkness while facing up to the monsters of fascism.

National Gallery, London, until 19 January
The vulnerability of Vincent van Gogh weeps from every blue and yellow ridge of paint in this uplifting journey with him through the fields of Provence. Seeing The Yellow House, entering his humble bedroom, sitting on his kitchen chair and gazing into his sapphire eyes makes you feel you are Paul Gauguin, there with him, awed and a bit scared. Then you see the swaying cypresses outside the asylum and find yourself lost in his ecstasy. Not just a great art show but a great lesson in being human.

Oliver Wainwright’s best architecture of 2024

There have been various attempts to give recalcitrant concrete silos a new lease of life, but few have been as successful as this: a 1930s silo complex in the Norwegian city of Kristiansand reborn as a dramatic new repository of Nordic modern art. Designed by Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, with Mendoza Partida and BAX studio, the project retains the power of such soaring industrial spaces, and provides breathtaking views across the harbour from a public roof terrace.

The prairies of rural Indiana might not be an obvious place to find a hotspot of modernist architecture. But – thanks to a progressive local businessman, who offered to pay the architects’ fees for public buildings if they were by the best designers of the day – the city of Columbus reads like a who’s who of 20th-century architecture. From a library by IM Pei to churches by the Saarinens and a host of remarkably inventive high schools, the buildings are brought to life in American Modern, an illuminating new book.

At a time when the right to protest seems increasingly under threat worldwide, this landmark exhibition (MAK, Vienna) and book put the importance of spatial subversion centre stage, showcasing ingenious tactics from radical movements across the ages. From the aerial netting erected above the streets of east London, in a fight to save homes from motorway expansion, to the “mini Stonehenges” scattered across the streets of Hong Kong to slow police vehicles, it provided an urgent catalogue of resistance.

One of the 20th century’s most divisive architects, Paul Rudolph had a mind-boggling oeuvre that was finally put under the spotlight in this dazzling show at the Met in New York. Filled with his spellbinding large format drawings, depicting thrilling perspectival scenes of Piranesian staircases, dizzying atria and massive planes of corduroy-ribbed concrete, the exhibition brought to life the spatial genius of an architect whose reputation has been maligned for too long.

Queueing for 3bn years has never been so much fun! This radical revamp of the museum’s gardens, by Feilden Fowles architects and landscape firm J&L Gibbons, breathed prehistoric life back into the place, with a dramatic geological ravine leading visitors from the tube station exit into a mesmerising Jurassic world. There they will find a magical place of tree ferns, mosses and liverworts, with a majestic bronze diplodocus skeleton keeping watch over the scene.

In our increasingly resource-scarce world, the astonishing work of the self-taught Belgian outsider architect Marcel Raymaekers shows that practices of re-use and recycling don’t have to limit the architectural imagination. In this fascinating book, research group Rotor traced the designer’s 50-year magpie career of demolishing, salvaging and re-arranging building components into fantastical new homes, complete with interiors made from old ships and skylights fashioned from fighter jet cockpits.

Taking a sledgehammer to the view that rammed earth construction is only the preserve of rural eco experiments, young firm Dechelette Architecture has been busily pursuing urban earth buildings in Paris over the last few years. Its latest is a remarkable five-storey block of social housing in the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, with a load-bearing earth block facade. Almost entirely cement-free, it points the way to a low-carbon, bio-based future.

Facing being priced out of London, or stuck in insecure rentals for eternity, one plucky community decided to get on and build their dream for themselves. Church Grove is the stunning result – the largest community-led and partly self-built housing project ever undertaken in the capital, a place where the price of these light-flooded, co-designed homes will be tied to local income for ever. A ray of hope in an otherwise bleak housing scene.

It’s not often that you’d find yourself wanting to extend a stay in hospital, but Herzog & de Meuron’s new children’s hospital in Zurich is a healing environment like no other. More sylvan spa complex than clinic, it is a world of timber-lined courtyards with individual chalet-like rooms opening out on to broad walkways flooded with daylight. A universe away from the typical NHS environment of low ceilings, windowless corridors and harsh fluorescent lighting.

For anyone who cares about cities, the Olympics have a bad rep for a good reason. The bloated travelling circus of urban regeneration (with a two-week side-helping of sport) has all too often left in its wake costly, oversized, underused white elephants. Paris did things differently. The city barely built any new venues – apart from a mould-breaking timber-framed swimming pool – and instead pumped funds into the much-needed renovation and repair of existing municipal facilities. It revamped 25 public pools in some of the city’s poorest areas, and gave a new lease of life to other venues, like the daring hyperbolic paraboloid shell of a 1970s gymnasium. It also made the Grand Palais look – and perform – better than ever. Paris also used the games as a catalyst for a programme of urban greening, building 250 miles of new bike lanes, extending the Métro network, planting 300,000 trees and cleaning up the Seine to such a degree that three new swimming areas will be opened in the river next summer. It has set a very high bar for the 2028 Games in Los Angeles – one of the least environmentally friendly cities on the planet, with a threadbare public transport network. Vive la France!