Love, Kisses and Heartbreak at the Sainsbury Centre: A Winter Series Review

By Elena Vasquez

The Sainsbury Centre's winter series dedicates two full exhibitions to love: The Last Human Kiss, a show about kissing, and Ecstasy and the Aftermath, a show about desire and heartbreak. The critic's verdict: the concept isn't bad, and neither is the execution, but both shows strain under the vastness of their subject.

What does the first exhibition show?

The Last Human Kiss opens with a 15th-century Italian vase. A gaunt couple locks lips on its surface. They do not look thrilled — which, the review notes, is the reality of love: sometimes it is not great.

From there, the exhibition catalogues every kind of kiss:

• Political
• Maternal
• Interracial
• Divine
• Familial

A William Blake watercolour shows allegories of righteousness and peace giving each other an awkward peck. An Anthony van Dyck painting holds the infant Christ and St John the Baptist close. A Benetton advertisement shows a priest kissing a nun. The USSR's President Brezhnev kisses East German leader Honecker. Cupid kisses Psyche.

The core of the show delivers snogs by Edvard Munch, Wolfgang Tillmans and, inevitably, Rodin. Rodin's carved marble canoodle dominates the middle of the exhibition. Tracey Emin contributes a neon reading "The Heart has Its Reasons" — though that work features no actual kissing. As the critic quipped, it is "enough to give you chapped lips."

Where does the kissing show go wrong?

The curators frame kissing through a postcolonial lens, a religious lens and a political lens. The reviewer finds this redundant. Kisses are not underexplored or subconscious — they are universal. People think about their kisses, remember them, treasure them, long for them.

The result, the review argues, feels obvious — "like someone telling you the plot of a movie you've already seen." After enough images of people necking, the viewer gets what the critic calls "mental jaw ache." A whole exhibition of painterly public displays of affection wears thin.

What about Ecstasy and the Aftermath?

The second exhibition covers the joy of new love, the despair of heartache and everything between. Here the review is harsher: that is where the series "really falls apart."

Strong works survive the sprawl:

• A Somaya Critchlow nude
• A set of romantic, poetic Judy Chicago prints
• A Jane Hayes Greenwood painting of leaking, breast-like plant forms
• The Marina Abramović and Ulay video of him on the verge of unleashing an arrow into her heart

But the theme is so broad it sends the viewer spinning. Motherly love, romantic love, desire, the gaze, heartache and grief all share one room. Photographs of queer nightclub dancing argue that community is a form of love. A Paloma Proudfoot ceramic of gossiping mates argues that really liking your pals is love too.

The review's takeaway: each of those themes could have been a whole exhibition in its own right. Instead, they are squeezed into a single room.

How could the shows have worked?

The critic proposes one fix: narrow the focus. The alternative is bolder — delete all the wall texts, drop the faltering conceptual themes and restrictions, and assemble a bunch of artworks about desire, adoration, romance, heartache and snogging, letting visitors find their own way through.

The verdict is ultimately ambivalent rather than dismissive. If you want to know what love is, these two shows do provide a pretty good answer: sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is joyful, but more often than not, it is a bit of a mess.