Georgiana Houghton’s Spirit Drawings, which form a new exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, coincides with a new swing towards the spiritual in contemporary art. Spiritual art’s leading light, Hilma af Klint, exhibited all the polytheism of a New Age shaman at the Serpentine Gallery: gilt-leaved suns; pyramids; crucifixes. Raven Row showed Channa Horwitz’s yogi-inspired minimalism.
Mindfulness is all the rage: these exhibitions offer a complete vision of a world for “complete” people. Houghton said she was communicating with the undead when she painted: by table-rapping, similar to using ouija boards.
