When I first visited the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition years ago, I didn’t really know what to expect, except that it was a historical art event (now in its 245th year) that was part of the London summer calendar. Over time I became used to the format, knew to expect hundreds of artworks of all styles and media, including painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and architectural models, by artists I had heard of, and many more I had not.

The format was tweaked a little, every year the hanging of each room was different, by different Royal Academicians, reflecting taste and zeitgeist. But there was one constant: there was a good chance I’d be flagging towards the end. This is, after all, the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show, this year with more than 1,200 artworks to see, in 14 rooms.

It is undeniably fun though, going round the galleries, finding a model of a Fiat 500 here (Blame the Tools, Ron Arad RA), an unsettling Dreamcatcher there (Marilène Oliver’s), a cat, a kitten, a kangaroo, a St Kildan or a Cornish landscape, scores of pictures as sunny as greetings cards, others shadowier, then portraiture with a room to itself this time (one highlight, Julian Opie’s faceless Maria Teresa, right), and always outside in the courtyard some monumental artwork to look forward to — such as this year’s sensational bottle-top wall-hanging from Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui.

For me, the rooms towards the end of the show are the best, and you should retain some energy for them. The entire final room is given to Grayson Perry RA’s The Vanity of Small Differences, a series of six gloriously colourful and witty tapestries examining class and aspiration in Britain today. Made to accompany Perry’s 2012 series on taste on Channel 4 TV, it was inspired by William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress. Perry updates the 18th-century moral tale of a young man’s rise and fall, weaving into his tale a host of contemporary items from rooftop security cameras, to cans of Red Bull, an Adidas kitbag, iPads, iPhones, and so on — all along playing with notions of identity and confronting today’s taboos, tastes and ‘tribes’. I enjoyed the Old Master references in the titles too, such as The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, pictured above, and The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal.

In the neighbouring photography gallery one of the most striking works is dedicated to the architect Sir John Soane, and Hogarth’s Progress is in Soane’s former home, now a museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Emily Allchurch’s Grand Tour: in Search of Soane (after Gandy) is a photographic capriccio that blends all the buildings created by Soane. Three of the five Oxfordshire artists showing this year have works in this gallery — Martin Bardell, from Binsey, Molly Tearne from Oxford, and Janine Kilroe from Bicester.

A recent exhibitor at Oxford’s Magdalen Road Studios and the O3 Gallery, here, Bardell shows Base Camp, a c-print on aluminium of a solitary yellow and grey tent withstanding the icy elements.  Tearne shows a pair of intriguing portraits of Francoise and Vincent (sold individually) using glass negative, collage and paint. And Kilroe, an exhibitor in Oxfordshire Art Weeks this May, offers Brighton Carousel, an attractively inventive photograph on hand coloured paper.  Sparing use of colour picks out the painted horses and vacant deckchairs on the beach; and the gleaming eye of the galloping horse draws the viewer in: does it long for freedom?
This year portraiture has a room to itself; Julian Opie’s faceless Maria Teresa 1 is a highlight. 

And printmaking makes its usual strong showing, filling two rooms.  Oxford-based Weimin He shows Tower of the Winds VII, a dramatic woodcut from his portfolio of prints and drawings documenting the transformation of Oxford’s Radcliffe Observatory Quarter where he is artist in residence.

 
Works from two further Oxfordshire artists are in the Lecture Room: two oils on panel from Robbie Wraith, from Holton, called Keys and Arriere Pensée; and two lively kitchen scenes from Lucy Pratt, from Chipping Norton.  In Keys an old lockable box cannot contain its rusty collection of keys: so many stories and secrets spilling out of a life.  And in Pratt’s Open Wide a chef flamboyantly tastes his creation, while across the room, reached by stepping round a large sleek fibreglass sculpture by Dame Zaha Hadid RA, Pratt’s Sneaky Slurp speaks for itself.

Royal Academy of Arts

Until August 18

Visit royalacademy.org.uk