1. Thomas Houseago’s playful sculptures

Before visitors even reach the front door of the Royal Academy, a parade of unsettling, larger-than-life figures, fossicked as if from the tar of British artist Thomas Houseago’s unconscious, will accost them in the Annenberg Courtyard. Occupying a privileged position in the blueprint of the show – a space occupied last year by Anish Kapoor RA – and standing alongside Alfred Drury’s iconic sculpture of Joshua Reynolds PRA, Houseago’s bronze, plaster and wood statues will be an arresting blend of classical heft and postmodern playfulness. His five 15-foot-tall faces recently drew crowds at New York’s Rockefeller Center; his works for the RA will attract passersby from Piccadilly to the piazza in front of the Academy. Strange hybrid forms, melding historic and contemporary references, Houseago’s sculptures will acclimatise visitors to the range of creative vision on show inside. The artist’s tendency to leave his surfaces unfinished should also set an enticing tone of rawness and intensity.

^{Image: sculptures by Thomas Houseago installed at the Annenberg Courtyard, showing Sun & Moon Mask in the foreground. Photo: © Royal Academy of Arts / David Parry. Artwork: Courtesy the Artist, Gagosian and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.}

3. Emma Stibbon’s monumental woodcut print

When a volcano collapses, the resulting crater, triggered by the sudden siphoning off of incandescent magma from below the structure, is called a caldera (meaning “cooking pot”). After coming across the otherworldly glow emanating from such a geological implosion in Hawai’i’s Volcanoes National Park, its primeval light shuddering through the mist of a rainforest, Emma Stibbon RA had the inspiration for what would become her largest work to date: a nearly four-metre-wide, four-part woodcut on Japanese paper, entitled Caldera Overlook (2017), which is shown in one of the rooms devoted to printmaking. The subtle gradations in warmth and tone that pulse behind a dense thicket of silhouetted trees echo the lyrical resplendence of works by Hokusai and Hiroshige – masters of Bokashi, a Japanese printmaking technique that emphasises the diaphanous shading of intense colour.

^{Image: courtesy of Emma Stibbon and Alan Cristea Gallery, London.}

5. Hannah Collins’s haunting photograph

A rickety bookcase leans against the roughly scrubbed walls of an abandoned hut. A petrol bottle is shoved in sideways amid the few volumes that have collapsed on the shelves, left dishevelled either by recent use or lengthy neglect. Who can say? All that’s evident is that this is a place whose now poignant dereliction was preceded by the pulse of unpretentious being. This large-scale pigment print (Nelson Mandela’s Teenage Home, National Monument), more than three metres wide, is part of a series that chronicles British photographer Hannah Collins’ visit to Mandela’s childhood home in Mvezo, South Africa. Intended to be read in the manner of a traditional history painting, this haunting image relies for its effect on a tension between its culturally evocative title and the dreary desolation it depicts.

7. Cornelia Parker’s fatal ink blots

“Art is dangerous”, the jazz composer Duke Ellington is famously said to have said; “when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it”. Chemically speaking, Poison and Antidote Drawing, a mesmerising Rorschach blot by Cornelia Parker RA, will continue to be dangerous for some time. Her symmetrical smear is a mix of black ink and rattlesnake venom – a serum that retains its toxicity for years. Renowned for work that involves physical risk in its making (in an early installation she had a garden shed packed with explosives and blown up by the British Army), Parker is fascinated by the equilibrium created by the confrontation of opposing forces. To counterbalance the violence of lacing her black blotch with lethal secretions, Parker has accented the dark stain with contrasting streaks of white ink which she has spiked with anti-venom.

^{Image: courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London.}

9. John Davies’s unsettling sculptures

So engrossing are the faces, frozen physiques and mournful dignity of the 20 or so figures assembled into the tight, melancholic congregation of John Davies’s sculptural installation My Ghosts that one could easily miss the scatter of smaller clues at their feet that unsettle the scene. Sequestered surreally by a puny white picket fence, and encumbered by dozens of empty wine bottles, a diminutive house and a blank picture frame, the sombre flock seems to have swollen in physical size and emotional magnitude like shapes of a nightmare triggered by profound loss or guilt.

Preoccupied since the 1980s by the manner in which memory and the elapse of life can sculpt the human face and form, John Davies has built a reputation choreographing ambiguous dramas performed by existential players cast from his own life. On display in a room curated by the figurative painter Tim Hyman RA, the curious collision of seemingly incongruous narratives in My Ghosts creates an aesthetic friction that is almost too much to bear in its near indecipherability. How are we to reconcile the sadness of the inscrutable family at the centre of the larger group, who seem to be conveying the naked body of a dead child, with the spare symbolism of a stop-motion orbit of a planet and swoop of an eagle above and behind them? And who, or what, are we to imagine is approaching from the left, so stealthy in its silent slouch that only the ears of the two dogs, cocked its way, can hear it?

10. Wim Wenders’s evocative photographs

Hoisted onto a jumble of huge rocks, their rusted steel surfaces growing more and more distressed by the second under the heat of a south Eurasian sky, the ancient letters of the Armenian alphabet rise like an alien copse of metallic cacti. This powerful picturesque monument, erected in 2005 by the Armenian government to commemorate the enduring legacy of the early medieval Armenian theologian and linguist, Saint Mesrop Mashtots – who invented the system of 36 signs (later expanded to 39) in c.405 CE – caught the imagination of German filmmaker and photographer Wim Wenders Hon RA when travelling through the South Caucasus region in 2008.

Moved by the experience, Wenders found himself reflecting on the power of these elastic symbols to elevate the profile of a people and an otherwise detached landscape. Save for the emergence of these letters and their ability to assemble and reassemble themselves into profound articulations that can vibrate across the world, Mashtots’ homeland might be significantly poorer in its cultural capital. The sun-soaked ambience and desolate romanticism of this work – which features in a display of Wenders’s photographs in the RA’s McAulay Gallery – recall the tempo and tone of his affecting images of the American West, an enduring series of soulscapes that began when the artist scouted locations for his 1984 film Paris, Texas.

^{Image: courtesy Wim Wenders Foundation and Blain|Southern.}

11. James Turrell’s portal of pure light

From a diamond aperture in the gallery wall pulses a vibration of something softer and purer than the everyday word ‘light’ conveys. The shape from which this ethereal luminosity emanates, and the feeling of being transported to a place that is at once of this world and beyond it, echoes the quiet orchestration of Mondrian’s tribute to jazz-age New York, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) – that masterpiece of modern art that Jock McFadyen regards as a prototype for an abstract work that nevertheless fits the show’s theme: “art that describes the world”. Best known for his experimentations with how observers of his work perceive light, colour and the materiality of the world they inhabit, James Turrell’s work is the perfect portal for escaping the hubbub of the exhibition yet remaining in the thick of it.

^{Image: © James Turrell, courtesy Pace Gallery.}