20 Years of Collecting: Between Discovery and Invention, Zabludowicz Collection review

Although the Zabludowicz Collection’s gallery in a former church in Chalk Farm is only eight years old, the collection itself is celebrating its 20th birthday.

Formed by Anita and Poju Zabludowicz, it has 3,000 works by 500 artists. The couple have disparate tastes: Poju for established names, such as the German painters Sigmar Polke and Albert Oehlen; Anita for eclectic emerging art.

In attempting to reflect this, the show is a hotchpotch. The building’s quirky, churchy spaces can be tricky and favour single-artist shows or small thematic ones. So the clusters of relatively unrelated works in this show are messy, as in the space where British artists Mark Leckey and Heather Phillipson collide with Polke and the German sculptor Isa Genzken.

In the upper gallery, a balcony with tiered seating, Jim Lambie’s colourful Zobop floor is typically enticing, but works by Andy Holden and Guyton/Walker sit awkwardly.

The exhibition is enlivened where individual works are shown in discrete rooms, as with Elizabeth Price’s superb video User Group Disco. And by far the best multi-artist room is one dedicated to Brits who all emerged in the Nineties — the YBAs and their peers, with strong early works by Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing and Michael Landy.

In a show which does little to reflect any coherent identity to the collection, despite its many excellent works, it provides a welcome moment of clarity.

Until August 16 (020 7428 8940, zabludowiczcollection.com)

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