‘He’s the Pauline Kael of art criticism’: artists pay tribute to the Guardian’s Adrian Searle

They’ve tattooed him, taken him to pole-dancing clubs, learned from and been inspired by him. Now, leading artists from Chris Ofili to Rachel Whiteread and more give their verdicts on our out-going chief art critic

‘He writes with an open heart’

Chris Ofili

I first met Adrian as an artist and teacher when I was a student studying painting at Chelsea School of Art in the late 80s and early 90s. Since then, I have come to see his writing as a natural extension of his art practice and teaching, translating an understanding of the creative process into words. That process can lead the artist into uniquely personal territories where we can endure deep frustration and enjoy the best of life – love. Adrian looks and writes with an open heart and understands that, at its best, art is evidence of love.

‘Adrian brought artworks to life’

Isaac Julien

I have known Adrian since 1980, when I was a student at St Martin’s School of Art where he was one of the teachers. He was also on the jury for my graduation work, and from that time on our paths continued to cross in many evocative and interesting ways. I remember him not only as a teacher, but as a painter — exhibiting at the Royal Academy Summer Show alongside artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Denzil Forrester. I too had a work there back in 1980, and in that sense, we share a discreet but lasting connection through painting that goes back to the very beginning of my career. Later, in the late 1980s, our friendship deepened as I moved closer to the Bloomsbury community of which he was such a distinctive part.

When Adrian turned to art criticism, his extraordinary writing quickly became one that artists deeply cherished. As many of us began exhibiting more widely, he was the person you most hoped would engage with your work. What set his writing apart was its sense of conversation. He never stood at a distance from the work, but entered into it with a rare openness and intelligence. There was a reflexivity in his approach that was uncommon in British art journalism at the time, a visceral engagement that brought artworks to life rather than placing them under inspection. His writing had an elegance that went beyond journalism, something closer in spirit to the great essayists, cosmopolitan in outlook, shaped by his life across different countries, yet always grounded, perceptive and often wonderfully witty.

I really hope to see Adrian’s collected writings published very soon!

‘The Alice in Wonderland of art’

Marlene Dumas

Adrian Searle is wonderful. A bit like Alice in Wonderland, that type of wonderful. He always has a surprise in store for you, making it a pleasure to read what he has written, with a wit that you did not bargain for. Never boring. He has that priceless gift of a sharp sense of humour, which can make you laugh about art and its vanities, while knowing that he is kind and cares, as well as being rough and wild. We also have an unexpected connection regarding time, not place, being that we were both born exactly on the same day in the same year. This may not be relevant to his talents as an art critic, but it is inspiring to me.

‘He disposed of my son’s vomit’

Jane and Louise Wilson

Adrian Searle has been one of the great constants across generations of artists. From his early career as a painter, to curating memorable solo and group exhibitions, he has for over three decades written the most astonishingly brilliant and perceptive essays and reviews about art and contemporary artists.

A familiar presence in the art world, there has always been something wonderfully reassuring about spotting him at an opening or a preview. You’d see him and instantly feel the room was better for it: unpretentious, totally engaged, with a wicked sense of humour.

We first met in 1993 in a way that was very Adrian – standing in the Serpentine Gallery, he was cheerfully sodden-footed, having just waded through the lake to see the Robert Gober exhibition. And that beguiling combination of determination, curiosity and absolute commitment to the artwork has never left him.

Years later, on a journey back from an opening with my [Jane’s] young son, who was travel sick, Adrian quietly stepped in to help – and then insisted on disposing of the sick bag himself when we arrived at Victoria Station. A small, generous gesture, but one that said everything about him.

Adrian has understood, better than almost anyone, what it means to sustain an art practice over a lifetime. His writing carries such clarity and surreal wit – never fazed by what he sees, always from a heart filled with empathy and generosit – that, it’s fair to say for so many artists, he’s not only an art critic – he’s the most loved art critic!

‘Wit, barb, charm and heft’

Mark Wallinger

In Adrian’s hilariously candid Confessions of an Art Critic from that first April/May 2020 lockdown reckoning, he recalls an encounter with “a young academic from another country that had left me quite out of sorts. ‘What is your methodology?’ he had asked. ‘And what are your critical criteria?’ Search me.”

It is almost impossible to write anything about Adrian without quoting him. He writes like a dream and is the most immediate good company. That tone: “What can you do?” Which could be asked equally of the artwork, the artist , and the viewer. Trust in me, says our critic, but at the end of the day it’s a bit of a performance as he describes the ventriloqual nature of inhabiting the artwork. Circling his own doubt until the authentic note is reached.

Adrian gets it. He has been an art student, a teacher in art schools, and an artist who wrote poignantly about shutting the doors to his studio and his practice on becoming the chief art critic of the Guardian. But always a writer. What he says about John Berger could equally apply to him. “His writing is filled with insights. That he trained as a painter gave him a sympathy and understanding of the act of making and its difficulties – rare among critics now.”

Not that the difficulties stop there. In his Confessions from 2020, the portrait chosen of Adrian has him lifting his t-shirt to reveal his David Shrigley tattoo: WRITING. It is both a calling and a complaint: “I almost miss painting, compared with the torture of writing.”

His moving on from the Guardian set me browsing delightedly through his back pages to marvel at the range and depth of his knowledge and his passion about artists and artworks. It is a matchless record of 30 years of engaging enquiry; a huge undertaking viewed in retrospect. Full of wit, barb and charm, heft and authority, it conjures a bigger picture of the times we have lived through, while retaining the freshness of response required by the newspaper deadline.

I feel fortunate to have had Adrian write supportively, and critically, about my own work in the pages of the Guardian over the years – cherishing his sympathetic and perceptive review of my Russian Linesman exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2009 and my show at Hauser and Wirth in 2016. He wrote a wonderful catalogue essay that accompanied the exhibition of Ecce Homo in Vienna in 2000, and we can all look forward with relish to discover what he has to say now that he can “write differently and with fewer deadlines, more time and mental space, and to see where the words might take me”.

Though, as an artist, there will never be quite the same edgy anticipation of Adrian’s review in the Guardian.

‘I put him in the Beano’

Andy Holden

A favourable review from Adrian in 2016 pulled me out of the wilderness. I paid tribute to “the arbiter of taste” when I curated an exhibition about the Beano comic at Somerset House in 2021. In the central room was a large cartoon of Adrian as a Beano character reviewing the show. Adrian played along with the joke and reviewed it. It was ironic, but it was sincere; it mattered what Adrian thought of an exhibition. If you got a favourable word from Adrian it was one of the few things you could be proud of. His taste was, unlike other critics, enjoyably unpredictable: there was never a sense that he was guaranteed to like it. He would never let an artist off the hook, and because of that he was always worth reading.

‘He loves artists – especially if they know about fishing’

Rachel Whiteread

I’ve known Adrian since 1982. When I was the first year at Brighton, he came and gave a talk. He was very memorable because he talked extremely passionately about his sexualised paintings. He was obviously an extremely interesting man.

Adrian has always written with an artist’s eye and not an art historian’s eye. He is probably as interested in nature and literature as he is in art, which I think gives him an edge. You always see him sitting next to artists at dinners and talking, really gleeful and delighted – especially if they knew something about fishing.

He was very much there when I was making House. He really understood the neighbourhood, what the piece was, the politics of it and the timing. After I’d made it, a few of us happened to be in this very seedy strip bar. A pole dancer came running up to me, gave me a great big hug and said, you’re that Rachel Whiteread, aren’t you, that made House! It was the sweetest moment. I personally don’t have that sort of friendship with any other reviewer. I was talking to Nan Goldin recently about how, back then, there was a kind of camaraderie. Now it’s all on Instagram.

We had a very good friend called Lucia Nogueira, who was a Brazilian artist. She sadly died of cancer. There were people that were underdogs and Adrian always got behind them. There are gazillions of artists, and Adrian always just got his head down, researched and looked and wrote from the heart. And I think that’s what made Adrian special. Some people just write from a critical point of view. Adrian is very smart, but he wrote from the heart. And that’s why I’ve always loved what he’s done.

‘Grinning, he said he’d spent five hours in my show’

Ed Atkins

Adrian’s is the only consistent voice in broadsheet art coverage I care about. He is the real thing. There’s never been any sense of retaliatory positioning in his writing, no hint of sycophancy or conservatism — nothing ulterior, really — there’s just been the work, the attention, the love of art, and how on earth to give a true account of his encounter with it. It’s such a challenging thing to do, really, but Adrian is a master of the form.

I remember meeting him on his way out of my show at Tate Britain, after the press preview. He told me he’d spent some five hours in there; somehow, however, he was grinning. I care so much about people’s experience of my work; to know that Adrian had met it with such generous, corresponding consideration meant the world to me. And I am so moved now to be able to thank him publicly — on what I suspect is also, in effect, on behalf of countless recipients of his terrific attention.

‘Grumpy when it was needed’

Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture

Thanks for your grumpy intolerance when such was needed. It may have helped straighten the arc of art which otherwise bends towards bullshit.

‘The Pauline Kael of the YBA generation’

Tacita Dean

Adrian Searle brought seriousness to contemporary art in the British press. Good contemporary art lands perilously in any culture, but perhaps more so in the UK because we never really had an effective modernist tradition here. As a result, contemporary art was viewed by many as ahistorical and to be ridiculed - something not to be taken seriously. But Adrian helped to change that, contributing to a better understanding, which in turn increased its popularity. Well-informed, connected and insightful, Adrian’s writing posited the argument that being an artist was a serious undertaking and that work made today could have a legitimate place in art history.

Although far from exclusively, his most concentrated period at the Guardian was in the era surrounding the rise of Young British Art. Suddenly, the UK had an art movement and Adrian played a hugely significant role in informing, navigating and educating the public, and even artists themselves, about what the work signified, meant or did not mean. Although he was not the voice of the YBAs, he contextualised their art. There are some reviewers, like Pauline Kael, for example, the cinema critic of the New Yorker, who play an outsize role in connecting with the taste and the zeitgeist of a particular genre. I believe Adrian became that person for art in newspaper journalism in the UK. Above all, artists trusted him and appreciated him as their interlocutor. It mattered what he wrote because he had an exceptional eye and despite our trepidations, we knew in our hearts it was our good fortune to be judged by him.

‘He gave me insights into my own efforts’

Thomas Demand

To be reviewed by Adrian Searle always feels like an honour. His curiosity is legendary, and to my knowledge, his straightforward judgement, where art was concerned, was almost never devastating – though he could be far less forgiving when speaking about institutional decisions. What one always senses behind his writing is someone who loves art and understands the difficulties of making it from within: not as a strategy or calculation, but as a proposal, a solution to a problem. He obviously knows that an artist’s shortcomings, doubts and insecurities are inseparable from whatever makes the work possible in the first place.

When my work was object of his musings, I often felt recognised in his reviews, and they gave me, time and again, insight into my own efforts. That is a rare gift in criticism: not merely to assess a work, but to return it to the artist in a form that makes it more legible, sometimes even to himself.

At the very beginning of my career he gave me a tutorial that has stayed with me ever since, remarkable in part because he did not entirely know what it was that I was doing – and neither did I – but that wasn’t bad, it was just accepting the fact that it might become something eventually, but there weren’t words for it yet. That uncertainty, rather than limiting the conversation, gave it its generosity.

He is, in person, an extraordinarily conciliatory and inspiring interlocutor for anyone lucky enough to spend a little more time with him, whether in the humble setting of an art school or, years later, in a splendid hotel bar in Warsaw. In both situations, and in many others, one feels the same rare quality: an alert and generous intelligence, without vanity, and animated by an unfailing interest in the ideas of others, expressed in a most constructive and eloquent manner.

‘I felt I didn’t walk alone’

Mirosław Bałka

From the beginning of my artistic presence in London, Adrian’s words were the companion of my works. This was very important support knowing that you don’t walk alone.

‘I was touched when he mentioned my pro-EU poster campaign’

Wolfgang Tillmans

Nearly 10 years ago, I took part in a Frieze art fair talk alongside Julia Peyton-Jones, Jane and Louise Wilson and Adrian to discuss how London’s art scene had changed over the previous 25 years. It was October 2016, a few months after the Brexit referendum, so the conversation naturally turned to Brexit and my pro-EU poster campaign. Adrian noted I was one of the few artists to speak out in support of Remain, then corrected himself, calling it the “only meaningful pre-referendum campaign”. I was really touched that someone was prepared to publicly acknowledge the time and energy I had devoted to European union in the lead-up to the referendum.

‘A single paragraph brought crowds to my pavilion’

Vlatka Horvat

I started reading Adrian’s writing in the Guardian 20 or so years ago when I still lived in New York City. This meant I was reading his accounts of exhibitions I wasn’t actually seeing. His writing was always so vivid, you could picture the shows and the works in your mind, but also sense something beyond the visible. With Adrian’s writing you feel like you’re there, in the show he’s writing about, but you also feel like he’s really there. That he’s someone who takes the time to really be there and really look, someone who lingers, who spends time with the work.

There’s also often a sense, reading Adrian’s texts, that he’s working through what the work is or what it might be, with me, the reader, alongside him. That the writing is for him a place to think. To me, Adrian comes across as a writer who is willing to be affected, to be unsettled. Willing to be seen through his writing as a vulnerable presence; looking at the work and thinking about it with a vulnerable eye and a vulnerable body. And as much as he’s often happy to leave us, and himself, with open questions, there is incredible sharpness and precision and clarity in the position he’s writing from. Adrian reads shows and artworks through looking, through thinking, through context, through emotion, through affect, through conjecture, through history and the current moment, weighing and balancing these factors to produce pieces of great richness and complexity.

In his review of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Adrian had good things to say about my exhibition for the Croatian Pavilion. It was “only a paragraph” but it brought lots of visitors to the pavilion who otherwise would not have had me or my work on their radar. I lived in the Croatian Pavilion as part of my project for the duration of the Biennale and talked with visitors daily, and even in October and November, months after the review was published, visitors were still telling me that they came to see my show specifically “because Adrian Searle liked it in the Guardian”. I was really glad of this; it also made me smile. We were joking amongst the project team that Adrian was single-handedly responsible for significantly increasing our visitor numbers. Of course he didn’t know he would be doing that when he wrote the text, but I hope he does know what an influence his writing and thinking has had on so many readers.

I always make sure that I go see the shows Adrian liked. Also the ones he didn’t, as his writing is never just passing judgement – it’s always contextualised, rich, sharp, full of questions and thoughts that you want to sit with, read again, and think about. For years I’ve been keeping a list on my laptop called Shows to See. It started as a list for myself, but then became something friends often ask me to share. When a show on my list has a note in parentheses that says, “Adrian S. loved it”, this is like a shorthand that you most definitely should not miss that show.

I will miss Adrian’s voice in the Guardian.

‘He let my rescue collie hump him in the garden’

Heather Phillipson

Adrian’s most striking quality as a critic is that he’s always game for an adventure. What he transmits in his criticism is his whole, spirited character, which I know as we have been on adventures together. I once joined Adrian and his partner, Helena, on a minibreak in the Suffolk countryside, which commenced with him allowing my worried rescue collie to hump him, recumbent, in the garden. This is absolutely in keeping with how Adrian meets art, and the world: munificently.

During the trip, Adrian and Helena divulged that, when helping to edit each other’s texts, they read the other person’s text aloud, falsetto. I’ve since heard all of Adrian’s articles through helium. Long before I met him, I had the impression that Adrian was having fun as a critic, which was a relief, because, let’s face it, there’s not enough fun in art.

I’m making Adrian sound playful and camp and mischievous, which he is, but he’s also attuned to melancholy, non-sequitur, and what’s unassimilable. He revels in all of it. Adrian is a critic who understands that art is a harebrained pursuit and, accordingly, takes it seriously. I’d suggest that this is because Adrian is, himself, an artist, whose medium happens to be words. To put words together in interesting ways, you have to be an interesting thinker, and Adrian’s mind is made of extra supple elastic.

It’s no coincidence that the other rare thing about Adrian amongst critics is that he is liked by artists. He is even friends with us. Not because he always praises artists’ work, but because he meets our work on its own terms. (Adrian and I first met when he arrived early to review my show, I was sweeping out the gallery and panicking, and he got me talking about poetry - a superior kind of meet-cute.) Adrian has a facility for getting inside art’s nitty-gritty, being down there with you in the muck. And that is why his writing actually matters to artists.

In general, I don’t read reviews of my work, but I did read Adrian’s reviews, because his is one of the few opinions that matters to me. Adrian is singular and absolutely irreplaceable and I miss his thoughts on my work – on all art – already.