I didn’t expect to be so moved – galleries reopen

I’m in Mayfair and I’m boarding an airplane. Or rather, I’m boarding an approximation of an airplane. In the centre of Hauser & Wirth, there are airplane seats, organised into a formation that resembles a section of economy, and dislocated windows, hung on the walls where paintings might normally be. The seatbacks are stuffed, and a spring/summer 2012 edition of Sky Shop magazine is splayed across one of the seats. We are frozen in time and space.

Like most of us in recent months, this plane — an installation by German artist Isa Genzken — isn’t going anywhere. It remains perpetually rooted. Its windows open on to white walls. The work — ‘Untitled’ (2018), the centrepiece of a larger exhibition called Window — connects aircraft space with the sterilised placelessness of a white-cube art gallery, spaces that have always been highly controlled but perhaps never more so than now. Since galleries reopened in London last week, appointments must be booked in advance.