Escaping the 'white box'

It's not the first time a piece of artwork commenting on Tony Blair's premiership has brought an exhibition into the limelight. Last time we saw 'the Blair effect' was shortly before Christmas when a Banksy image displayed in the window of Santa's Ghetto grabbed the festive headlines.

This time it's Michael Sandle's Iraq Triptych, pictured above. The central panel, Expulsion from Paradise, features Blair and his wife Cherie naked outside Number 10 Downing Street. To their left is a stack of corpses and to their right is a scene reminiscent of Abu Ghraib.

Sandle appears exhausted by the press attention: "I'm getting worn out," he exclaims as yet another camera crew herd him into position in front of his work.

Talent spotting

But there are many things which make the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition special which don't grab the headlines.

As the world's largest open submission show of contemporary art, it displays the work of established and unknown artists side by side. Paintings are numbered, so the eye is drawn to what it finds interesting rather than labels featuring famous names.

Many of the works are for sale. Sandle's Triptych, for example, is available for £45,000. Some of the prints, meanwhile, are as little as £60; often sold in multiples, red dots gather around the prints like measles as the exhibition goes on.

What's interesting about the prices is that they are not set by critics or auctioneers or even the academician judges, but rather by the artists themselves. Humble pricing may prove the fortune of the discerning art collector in years to come.

Side by side

There are several famous exhibitors in the first room of the exhibition: a Jasper Johns (displayed for the first time at the Acamdey since the late 80s) sits next to an Antoni Tapies, and Gavin Turk's Dumb Candle sits on a plinth next to a Marcus Harvey (famed for his portrait of Myra Hindley which was vandalised during its appearance at the Academy's Sensations exhibition in the late 90s).

Sandwiched inbetween is the work of London-based Japanese artist Jiro Osugo - a debut which holds its own.

Similarly, in a room filled with abstract painting, the oil paintings of student Benjamin Pritchard hang besides acrylics by Frank Bowling.

The idea of discovering new artists and giving them a chance equal to that of their more established counterparts clearly thrills the curators. Royal Academician Paul Huxley was delighted to discover that one previously unknown exhibitor - David Cooper - was the man who runs the art transport company he uses to cart his own work about.

Stuffed full

The other thing that marks the show out from other exhibitions is the quantity of work on display.

It is a tradition of the salon to pile work up to the rafters. Victorian illustrations of Academy shows depict just that, and nothing has changed.

But considering that there were around 12,000 works submitted this year, the cramming is no surprise.

Of these submissions, 1000 made it through to the first judging stage. Shortlisted works are then taken to the gallery and 'tried out' in situ. Of the thousand, 800 were hung.

The curatorship of a room is a daunting prospect for an artist used to what Huxley describes as the "white box" concept of hanging art. It's hard to avoid what curator and architect Ian Ritchie describes as a "jumble sale" feel.

Somehow, though, despite the quantity, the feeling of light that is the theme of this year's show shines through. And the exhibition's mix of old-established and new-hopefuls lends energy to an eclectic exhibition.

The Summer Exhibition opens on Monday 11 June at the Royal Academy of Arts

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