Jeremy Deller: English Magic, William Morris Gallery - exhibition review

Jeremy Deller's unique vision of England in the British Pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale was among the most important British artworks in recent years. It's recast here, in the former home of one of the exhibition’s heroes, William Morris.

Deller is an orchestrator, a director, pulling together existing material like historical objects and documents and making unexpected connections, as well as commissioning new works by craftsmen. The show’s centrepiece is a fantastical mural by Stuart Sam Hughes, in which Morris, a passionate defender of Venetian heritage, stands in the lagoon clutching Roman Abramovich’s 135m-long yacht, Luna, about to hurl it into the waves.

Luna was infamously once docked outside the Giardini, the setting for the Biennale pavilions: a historic city’s wonders blocked by a symbol of contemporary wealth. Deller uses this event to connect Morris’s arguments for socialist reform in the 19th century to the collapse of communism and growth of capitalism in the former Soviet Union.

This toing-and-froing in time is everywhere. You can handle a Palaeolithic hand axe, while nearby is Hughes’s futuristic evocation of the burning of St Helier in Jersey in 2017, following riots against its secretive banking practices.

It all connects to Morris: here, his love of ancient monuments, which he saw as evidence of England’s beauty, and his desire for the equal distribution of wealth.

Deller's material segues brilliantly into the gallery’s own artefacts, leading us into Morris’s world as well as his own.

Until March 30 (020 8496 4390, wmgallery.org.uk)