Painterly painters used to talk of any painting worthy of its name being “about paint”. Well, Callum Innes puts on the oil paint and scrapes it off, then he puts it on again and washes it off with turps. His works have been referred to as “un-paintings”, and a recent series was titled Exposed Paintings. Yet these works tend to be graceful presences. One square of colour sits next to another, their edges bleed out sensuously and their subtle differences of tone take on a lyrical resonance. Yes, these are indeed paintings about paint, and Innes is a painter for whom the phrase is still fitting.
The Whitworth Art Gallery, Sat 2 Mar to 16 Jun
RC Photograph: Hyjdla Kosaniuk/Callum Innes
It’s always sexy time in Dorothy Iannone’s paintings. The lovers she depicts wear their genitals like badges of honour, women’s labia engorged like over-ripe peaches, and of a size to rival their paramours’ pretty pink or vermillion batons, which always point their way. Iannone’s world is certainly a place where women are equal to men; if her busty earth mothers bend over it’s because they want to. Furthermore, her work is frequently autobiographical, and a number of the earliest paintings in this jubilant survey portray her with her lover, Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth. In a psychedelic, folky style, clusters of stars, golden suns and vividly coloured dots surround her figures like explosions of ecstasy made visible.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Sat 2 Mar to 5 May
SS Photograph: PR
For the next six months the Zabludowicz Collection is showcasing its painting treasures, pitching work by emerging talent against that of leading German artist Albert Oehlen. The pieces chart Oehlen’s development from punky upstart to grown-up agitator, always pushing at what painting can be. The first instalment offsets Oehlen with two like-minded American-based younger artists. There’s an installation of New Yorker Francesca DiMattio’s vertiginous paintings as well as her kitschy, surreal ceramics. Los Angeleno Matthew Chambers playfully flits between abstraction and iconic images from art history, while his “slash paintings” cannibalise his own art by making collages of strips cut from previous work.
Zabludowicz Collection, NW5, to 5 May
SS Photograph: PR
RB Kitaj’s biography makes painful reading. Though an idiosyncratic star of British art, after a spate of scathing reviews in the 1990s, which he believed led to his wife’s premature death, he committed suicide in 2007. This retrospective, split between his key theme, Jewishness, and everything else in his intellectually roving work, is a timely reminder of his unique, complex vision. A friend and peer of David Hockney, whose portrait is included here, Kitaj uses pop art’s bright colours and collaged forms. Yet his works are also filled with references to writers such as Kafka and Freud, politics, art’s old masters, and – more acutely as the years went on – Jewish history.
Jewish Museum, NW1 & Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, Sat 2 Mar to 16 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
A fox-headed figure brandishes a replica of Colonel Gaddafi’s golden gun in one hand, and in the other holds on for dear life to his Blackberry. This is Revolution Fox from Revolution Kids, a recent series of rebellious street-cred sculptures by Yinka Shonibare, MBE. Shonibare’s playful satires mix up identities, confound stereotypes, and poke fun at post-colonial conceits: he often uses brightly patterned batik fabrics as “signifiers of African-ness”, knowing very well that such “authentic” ethnic textiles were initially mass produced in Holland. This extensive retrospective includes works extemporising on the death of Nelson and an alien visit to Earth, as well as a series of collages titled Climate Shit.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Sat 2 Mar to 1 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
Artist Mark Leckey, curator of this diverse show, believes that digital technology is reawakening all kinds of ghosts in the machine. As electrical gadgets and communications networks increasingly come to resemble the intricacies of the human nervous system, Leckey sees a new kind of “techno-animism” emerging, drawing cultural comparisons between the world-changing amazements of high technology and the metamorphic visions of tribal ritual. Here, Leckey sets electrical circuitry next to shamanistic diagrams. There are fossils, angels, mummies and monsters, as well as art from the all-time high priestess of sculptural spells Louise Bourgeois and a psychic assemblage from Robert Gober.
The Bluecoat, to 14 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Mark Francis first gained recognition in the early 1990s for large, meticulously executed paintings of what often appeared to be teeming sperm. In image after image he evoked primal movements of creation viewed under a microscope, with each proto-entity trailing its dark after-shadow of mortality. For these recent paintings, Francis seems to have swapped his microscope for a telescope: in precisely defined grids that are distinctly reminiscent of astronomical diagrams, coloured bands are dotted with dark, nebulous globes. The enchantment of Francis’s paintings lies in the painstaking technical sensitivity with which he creates his dreamy micro and macro otherworlds. It’s almost as if he has been cataloguing what lies beyond sight.
Kerlin Gallery, to 13 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
The men, women and children in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings quietly grow on you. Often posed against dark backdrops in the manner of traditional portraits, they draw us in with their gentle, insistent mystery. What is the woman who turns her head from us looking at? The artist doesn’t say. In fact, they’re not portraits at all but fictional characters, apparently born from her expressive brush marks. They’re also mostly black, a fact Yiadom-Boakye refuses to make anything of, depicting her characters in a broadly 20th-century wardrobe that defies any attempt to define them. It makes for a sophisticated take on identity politics, subtly eluding any attempts at labelling through race or class.
Corvi-Mora, SE1, Sat 2 Mar to 13 Apr
SS Photograph: Marcus J Leith
