If you attend gallery openings or art debates in London you’ll probably have come across a scruffy figure clutching plastic shopping bags stuffed with newspapers and what appears to be most of his belongings, who peers intently at the work and the captions. That figure is Gustav Metzger, the most committed and prescient political artist of his generation. If ever there were a perfect antidote to the mirror-polished cheesy grin of the Serpentine’s previous show, by Jeff Koons, Metzger’s work is it.

‘Eichmann and the Angel’ (2005)

Metzger, who arrived in Britain from Nurenburg at the age of 12 on a Kindertransport (and whose parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust), remains a radical and his relentless, revolutionary political stance places him at a vast remove from the insistent commercialism and banal self-indulgence of the contemporary art world. He once suggested that artists suspend commercial production for three years as a protest against capitalism. It was not a resounding success.