The Hand in Public View
Artists ground authenticity in flawed, tactile making amid AI’s polish.
In a culture of frictionless images, the hand still insists. London is testing that insistence in public, and with conviction. At the Royal Drawing School’s 25th-anniversary programme, drawing is framed as a way of seeing, a daily discipline that outlasts style. At Serpentine South, Peter Doig folds listening into painting, a material patience that invites time rather than spectacle. And at Studio Voltaire, a gallery-wide collaboration with Spectra turns archival posters and new commissions into a living print room. Across these rooms, authenticity is not a claim, it is a practice of attention.
The Royal Drawing School puts it plainly, drawing from life is how artists learn to engage the world, a practice that must be taught and sustained. The anniversary programme, with The Power of Drawing and The Drawing Year show, repositions mark-making as a civic skill. Their language is instructive, drawing is a way to think, to feel, to repair, to learn how to look again, and the School commits to access and slowness in a city that is rarely either.
At Serpentine, House of Music presents Doig’s paintings with sound selected from his own archive, played through restored analogue speakers. From October, the gallery becomes a listening space, visitors are asked to pause and linger as they look and listen. The paintings do not compete with the sonic field, they share a room with it, which is a modest but decisive gesture. The work refuses the compression of fast images, it proposes a hand-painted cinema where the grain is the point and the medium breathes.
Studio Voltaire’s It’s A Love Thing, made with Spectra, gathers decades of LGBTQIA+ health advocacy posters and invites contemporary artists into dialogue. The tactile force of print, paper, paste, ink, is foregrounded, not as nostalgia, but as a living ethics of communication. The exhibition shows how hand-made clarity can carry urgency without the sheen of optimization. You read, you recognise, you feel the press of care under your fingertips.
Taken together, these London sites offer a renewed contract with materials, with time, with the public. The hand is not anti-technology, it is anti-forgetting. SUPERWRX reads this as an ethics of refusal that privileges memory, repair, and sovereign attention. The future will still be coded, but it can also be drawn, printed, painted, listened to, in real rooms, at human tempo.
