Caulfield's work the star of this Academy

This year's Royal Academy Summer Show has stunning designs, art and marvels of modern technology, writes Gerald Isaaman

Wow! The portents are positive as you walk off Piccadilly into the Royal Academy courtyard, to be confronted with a naked bronze Amazonian woman standing 34 feet high and weighing 14 tonnes.
This is Virgin Mother.
It is the work of Damien Hirst, a sculpture of a dissected naked pregnant woman, her femininity brutally exposed revealing in part a foetus inside the womb, which naturally dominates by its very impact. It is beautifully made and presented, right down to the immaculate finger and toenails, and it sets the mind racing in the belief that there is more shock and awe to come in this year’s Summer Show.
The likes of Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey, who caused such a fuss at the 1997 Sensations exhibition, are in the catalogue, but a painting of a toilet roll hardly excites or inspires and, among the mass of the works on display, are too many sad reflections of our dismaying, decadent times.
There are exceptions of course – a few among more than 50 local exhibitors, including architects, from Camden and Islington – but the summer sun seems to have addled too many talents and you can pass them by without hesitation or dishonour.
As has often been the case, the real creativity is on display in the architectural section, where ingenuity and skill combine to provide an opportunity to look into the future.
A detailed sweeping sectional model for King’s Cross Station by John McAslan and Partners is among them. So too Sir Michael Hopkins’ new chemistry building at Princeton, Bergen Bridge by Spence Associates, along with Sir Nicholas Grimshaw’s view of the main entrance of the Caixa Galicia Arts Foundation, the marvellous Singing Ringing Tree creation of Tonkin Liu.
The plans for the new Battersea Dog Home, designed by CJ Lim, from Greencroft Gardens, West Hampstead, make even humans envious while Eva Jiricna, from Warren Street, Camden, provides stunning evidence that living in a private residence in Prague designed by her is truly the place to be in the 21st century.
The real delight, at least for me, is the superb simplicity and elegance of the work of the late Patrick Caulfield, the Hampstead painter who died last year and is honoured with a small memorial show curated by his friend Marco Livingstone, an authority on Caulfield’s work over five decades.
A full set of the 22 Laforgue poem-inspired screenprints from 1973 are themselves an object lesson in the sharp mastery of colour and the inspired precision in his designs.
The ominous foghorn sculpture of Anthony Caro, who lives in Hampstead but works from his studio in Georgiana Street, Camden Town, perhaps serves as a warning for what appears in other galleries.
With walls packed with small prints, engravings, woodcuts and paintings it is always impossible to discern any trend or new genre, the standards showing high degrees of skill, but it is the lack of compelling subject matter that so often repels the eye.
Hilary Daltry from Islington has some attractive tulips that are welcome compared with the stark winter presented by Chris Humphreys from Kentish Town. Pippa Ridley from Camden Town reminds us of the grey confusion of traffic at Oxford Circus while the croquet hoops in the work of Patrick Brandon from Highbury are at least on the political ball, even if unintended.
There is a sexy realism in Girl in Yellow Slacks, an oil by Patrick Draper from Holborn but it is difficult to imagine what inspired the impregnable tin shack subject of Lucinda Oestreicher from Kentish Town.
Hampstead painter Tom Fairs, a regular contributor, is in seductive green landscape mode, a cat sits surprisingly on a pedestal in A Quiet Corner by Stella Parsons from Regent’s Park, and there is an air of enticing mystery in Lady with Dog by Norman Miller from Kentish Town.
But where is the thrusting new inspiration, the cutting edge of tomorrow? Even Damien Hirst is fast becoming yesterday’s child.

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