Agnes Martin, London
Agnes Martin thought art should be felt, not intellectualised. It should pursue beauty, nature and innocence. For this recluse who ditched the 1960s New York art world for the wide-open spaces of New Mexico, it was a spiritual endeavour. This rationale might come as a surprise when you look at her paintings. At first sight, they’re a long way from the high emotion of Jack the Dripper and the ab ex boys who influenced her. Instead, she painted and drew grids of graphite lines delineating stripes in washed-out desert colours: cool, pared-back works that made her a significant force in minimalist art. This major survey traces her development, from the early biomorphic paintings she rejected to the uncompromising reduction of her mature, assured voice.
Tate Modern, SE1, Wed to 11 Oct
SS
Albert Adams, Newcastle upon Tyne
Just as Albert Adams’s mentor and major influence Oskar Kokoschka achieved artistic intensity by reflecting the devastations of two world wars, Adams concerned himself with what he once called the “vast and terrifying prison” of his native South Africa. But in addition to expressionists such as Kokoschka, Adams – who after the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre fled to settle in London – seemed to have picked up on a roll call of figurative painterly contemporaries. An image of convulsions set in a clinical interior reminds us of Bacon, while a composition of fragmented silhouettes is reminiscent of Kitaj. It’s work that is uncomfortably haunted by the work of others, yet, somewhere through it all, there’s Adams himself, convincing in all his political pain.
University Gallery And Baring Wing, Northumbria University, Sat to 10 Jul
RC
Roni Horn, London
Over the years, Roni Horn’s work has included photography tracking the passage of time and Iceland’s elements on a young woman’s face, twinned sheets of glowing gold leaf, and her instantly recognisable coloured glass sculptures that suggest giant frosted sweets. Throughout these changing mediums, though, Horn draws. This show focuses on three recent series. For Hack Wit, phrases have been cut up and blended: “A cheap suit all over me like an aching void” reads one in juddering green and purple letters. Remembered Words creates its own language with grids of words and gouache spots. The paired drawings cut up and reassembled for Or, meanwhile, resemble skeletal computer renderings.
Hauser & Wirth, W1, Fri to 25 Jul
SS
Beatriz Olabarrieta, Sunderland
The Spain-born artist Beatriz Olabarrieta specialises in sculptural quandaries. Whilst so much sculpture, even within the contemporary form of installation, is a matter of contriving monumental presences, there’s always something missing, or amiss, with Olabarrieta. Her site-specific installations balance precariously on the edge of the unfinished, setting theatrical scenes for us to personally occupy and realise. Here, recognising the tentative and often dubious use of interpretive texts in relation to contemporary art, she has invited a series of cultural figures to write commentaries that will become part of her mystery play.
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Fri to 11 Jul
RC
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye; Duane Hanson, London
The Serpentine’s summer shows pair two artists obsessed in very different ways by the human figure. Rising British art star Lynette Yiadom-Boakye creates mysterious, alluring paintings of black people that defy type-casting. The selection here includes fey dancers and kids in the wilderness, and a cross-section of sitters posed casually, say in jeans or a dressing gown and slippers. They’re completely convincing, vivid characters, full of inner life, yet, in fact, are works of fiction. Then there’s Duane Hanson, whose hyper-realist sculptures of working-class Americans – life cast with polyester resin and then carefully painted and dressed – have the tawdry fascination of Madame Tussauds. At least initially. Spend some time with his sad-eyed, obese men and women pushing stacked shopping trollies and the pathos unfolds. He brings a pointedly human dimension to 1960s pop art.
Serpentine Galleries, W2, Tue to 13 Sep
SS
Lynn Hershman Leeson, Oxford
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s art has long provided a prophetic commentary on technology’s dark side – yet she’s best-known for her sci-fi films with Tilda Swinton and an acclaimed documentary chronicling feminist art. With a major career retrospective touring Europe and this capsule survey in the UK, 2015 could be the year that people finally realise she’s an artist to be listened to. In the 1970s, for example, she anticipated the spread of surveillance culture and multiple online identities by inventing an alter ego, Roberta Breitmore. For four years she “played” this woman, who had her own bank account and shrink, while her Phantom Limb photo collages of women and tech-hybrids in the 1980s pre-empted the cyborg fever of the following decade. Her finger is still firmly on the pulse of new science, too. Her latest interactive installation, Infinity Engine, developed with Oxford boffins, explores genetic manipulation.
Modern Art Oxford, Sat to 9 Aug
SS
Craig Murray-Orr, Edinburgh
If the history of landscape painting has been less about recording scenery than embodying some sense of emotional belonging, then Craig Murray-Orr stands out as one of its most distinctive contemporary practitioners. There is little topographical detail and no sign of human presence in the small oil-on-board paintings presented here, but there’s a mood that darkly endures. Here’s a bulging horizon, a drift of wispy clouds, three blurs flitting across the sky where, one supposes, birds once flew. It is reminiscent of Lowry’s atypical seascapes or the haunting minimalism of late Rothko. You might see these as abstracts, but they are abstracts whose reaches you look into and ponder.
Ingleby Gallery, Sat to 4 Jul
RC
