Glass artist Chris Blade turned his hand to photography recently as he travelled on a traditionally rigged 160ft tall ship for a three-week trip into the Arctic Circle. The project was organised by a New York arts charity, and when he reached the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard – which is said to be home to 2,000 humans and 3,000 polar bears – Blade was struck by the area’s remoteness from all the comforts and pressures of life back in dear old Sunderland. His experience as a glass sculptor seems to have enabled him to record landscapes charged with crystalline light and clarity.
National Glass Centre, Sat 8 Mar to 27 Apr
RC Photograph: Chris Blade
In the States, the Pearlman collection of works by Cézanne and his peers is something of a star turn, having toured the country over the past four decades, from its long-term home at Princeton University’s Art Museum. Its European debut includes Modigliani’s famed portrait of an elegantly angular Jean Cocteau, with a delicate diamond face, smudge of facial hair and natty bowtie, and an unusual painted carved panel from Gauguin’s open-air dining room in Tahiti. The main act, though, is Cézanne, whose work the New York businessman Henry Pearlman tenaciously pursued. Many prize finds are watercolours and sketches, once deemed less desirable. Yet, in spite of coming somewhat late to the table in the postwar years, Pearlman’s hoard boasts many stone-cold masterpieces.
Ashmolean Museum, Thu 13 Mar to 22 Jun
RC Photograph: Bruce M White
Dermot Punnett overlays abstract forms on to recognisable landscapes to turn them into places of obscurity and intrigue. Woodland undergrowth is superimposed with mysterious geometric diagrams as if to point out some inscrutable meaning (work pictured). He uses oil on canvas to precisely delineate mountainsides and treetops then resorts to what he calls “dragging techniques” to warp the viewer’s perspective. A mass of dots haunts the skyline like a flock of digitised starlings. A jungle is infiltrated by a framework of classical columns. The colours tend towards the aquatic: turquoise, deep blue, acidic green.
Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington, Sat 8 Mar to 19 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Playful thinking dominates the collaboration between two biggies of Austrian art: Dieter Roth and the surrealist-turned-abstract expressionist Arnulf Rainer. Both artists shared an interest in selfhood: for Roth, this included self-portraits in chocolate and a show-everything video diary of his final years; for Rainer it’s meant pursuing heightened emotional states, sometimes through hallucinogenic drugs, which he translates into dense abstraction, symbolic cruciform paintings and worked-over photos. When “mixing”, however, they mucked in together, inventing a third artistic persona whose style they shared.
Hauser & Wirth, W1, Fri 14 Mar to 3 May
SS Photograph: Stefan Altenburger
The artist formerly known as Spartacus Chetwynd has changed her name again, swapping ancient Rome’s famed freedom fighter to the Motown great Marvin Gaye. This former Turner nominee’s work however, remains as idiosyncratic as ever. Her first London show under the borrowed moniker combines two new series: further paintings in the ongoing Bat Opera project (pictured), and collages illustrating Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. In her small paintings, the bats might become players in lonely landscapes that could be straight out of an overheated Romantic imagination, or be depicted with all the grandeur of military portraiture. The method behind the Chaucer-inspired collages, meanwhile, suggests the diverse voices both in the medieval poet’s portmanteau stories and Chetwynd’s own collaborative art.
Sadie Coles HQ, W1, Tue 11 Mar to 26 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
As central planks of the biannual AV festival, the exhibitions Metal in Middlesbrough and Stone in Sunderland focus on the north-east’s connection to the materials, ranging from the ancient dolerite stones of Whin Sill through to the area’s history of mining. But the region is only a base from which to see worldwide vistas. Simon Starling shows gold-toned images of an okapi, a giraffe-type beast once native to north-east Congo, an area now renowned for unregulated gold mines, while Gabriel Orozco presents a video of his hand simply rubbing and polishing away at a riverbed stone (pictured).
MIMA & Centre Square, Middlesbrough, to 24 Apr; City Library And Arts Centre & Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, Sunderland, to 17 May
RC Photograph: PR
Bodies come in all shapes and sizes here. Henry Moore’s smooth, robust everyday icons and Francis Bacon’s tortured souls are the touchstones: the title comes from Bacon’s painting of a muscular amputee. Their influence on the gallery’s younger artists isn’t always obvious: what do these mid-century greats have in common with Yinka Shonibare’s post-colonial dandy mannequins? Nonetheless, stand-out pieces include Huma Bhabha’s meditations on the evolution of figures in art (pictured), drawing on ancient sculpture to fashion ominous post-apocalyptic hybrids.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, W1, Fri 14 Mar to 26 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
It is often taken as fact that computer scanning has made traditional printmaking obsolete. This exhibition takes a look at how contemporary artists have variously adapted to the creative potential and drawbacks of digital reproduction. The curator, Jo Stockham, sets the historical scene with a choice print by the 19th-century wood engraver Thomas Bewick, a master of the art of loving reproduction if ever there was one. Then she opens up the arena to such renowned contemporary artists as Wolfgang Tillmans, Bob Matthews (work pictured) and Jane and Louise Wilson to demonstrate that the most high-tech print media can enable us to look anew at the visual magic of our age old world.
The Bluecoat, Sat 8 Mar to 15 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
