Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude
Egon Schiele was 20 when he turned to that most classical of subjects – the nude – bringing it, twisted and inwardly screaming, into the modern world. The young artist created dark portraits of teenage girls, prostitutes and his own angular, skeletal body, electrically charged with sex and death. This exhibition focuses on this most provocative aspect of his work, whose explicit eroticism briefly landed him in jail. It includes many of his self-portraits as a wild-haired, hollow-cheeked and dead-eyed ghoul and his many female models, frequently depicted nude but for stockings or lifting their petticoats, occasionally clutching one another in a heated embrace.
The Courtauld Institute Of Art, WC2, Thu to 18 Jan
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Raphael Hefti, Agnieszka Polska, Nottingham
Raphael Hefti manipulates banal materials with painstaking technical finesse until they’re completely transformed. He takes anti-reflective glass and layers it until it gives off an otherworldly iridescent sheen. Elsewhere, abstract photos are conjured by dusting light-sensitive paper with flammable moss spores, once called “witch powder”. In marked contrast are Agnieszka Polska’s video films. A central piece, Future Days, features papier-mache masked protagonists resurrecting the memory of artists who are almost forgotten. Here they’re reinstated as stars in a heavenly afterlife, where their transcendence of mortality mitigates against them ever again being infected by the earthbound passions of the creative spirit.
Nottingham Contemporary, Sat to 4 Jan
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Listening, Newcastle upon Tyne
Here’s an exhibition that is listened to: you experience the installations by picking up a telephone or pressing a glass to a wall. Inevitably, there’s a slightly furtive aspect to it all. Prem Sahib has us straining to eavesdrop on a party going on in an inaccessible room next door, while Katie Paterson’s doorbell connects us to the obscure, enchanting resonance of a melting iceberg. Mikhail Karikis explores our interaction with the sounds of the sea with his piece SeaWomen, while sound sculptors Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller present a shed on legs, inside which you become complicit in what appears very much to be a murder or a crime of passion.
BALTIC 39, to 11 Jan
RC
Shinro Ohtake, London
Shinro Ohtake has emerged as a major figure in Japan’s art and noise music scene over the past three decades. His collagist work, using images cut from magazines, comics and other printed material, is goofy, surreal and visually stunning. Pop culture detritus is built up in layers in scrapbooks, paintings and sculptures. Sometimes this is done in a complex grid system, resembling a microchip in close-up or an aerial view of urban life. More typically, it’s chaotic and expressionist, a visceral evocation of media clamour. At times it’s funny, as with Radio Head Surfer, a kind of rave-era robot. Working with found images, his connection with mass media always feels personal.
Parasol Unit, N1, to 12 Dec
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Conflict And Collisions, Wakefield
While this year’s artistic responses to the first world war commemorations have been disappointing at times, here’s one that impresses. Alexandra Bircken presents a B-52 bomber stylised with blunt phallic bravura then covered with a stretched skin of shiny black latex. Charles Sergeant Jagger’s 1920 plaster frieze No Man’s Land acts as a backdrop for Toby Ziegler’s blow-ups of internet “war porn” mutilations. Finally, Folkert de Jong sets his 3D-scanned, bronze mutations cast from Henry VIII’s suits of armour adrift amid a marooned armada of mini galleons.
The Hepworth, to 25 Jan
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The Artes Mundi Prize, Cardiff
There’s an exceptionally strong lineup for this year’s Artes Mundi prize which, at £40,000, is the largest cash prize awarded for the arts in the UK. The shortlist of nine includes the Berlin-based Israeli artist Omer Fast, whose expertly scripted and produced films exploring truth and fiction include a study of drone warfare and post-traumatic stress disorder that stunned audiences at the Imperial War Museum last year. Other big hitters are the Americans Theaster Gates, whose urban interventions include turning empty buildings into artist communes that double as living exhibitions, and Sharon Lockhart, whose photographs and films capture the everyday lives of labourers around the world. Representing the UK, Karen Mirza and Brad Butler’s You Are The Prime Minister explores endemic British privilege, with its titular proposition culled from an Eton College entrance exam for 13-year-old boys.
National Museum Cardiff, Fri to 22 Feb
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The Nuisance Of Landscape: Grizedale - The Sequel, Kendal
This is a celebration of the last 15 years of highly inventive creative ventures at Grizedale Arts’ Lawson Park farm above Coniston Water. Just when British landscape art was settling into a back-to-nature purism typified by Andy Goldsworthy’s piles of sculptural pebbles, this Lake District organisation stepped up a collective instigation of rural-based creativity that looked beyond tourists. Goldsworthy’s tastefulness is rightly featured here, but so are a range of less reverent options, including Laure Prouvost’s neo-dadaism and Jeremy Deller’s low-life folk art. Prouvost’s Turner prize-winning film installation Wantee can be found across the courtyard. It celebrates her fictional grandfather’s association with Kurt Schwitters. Also, during November, in keeping with Grizedale’s ongoing community engagement, a mini meeting house will be specially erected in front of Abbott Hall where shamanic prankster Marcus Coates will lead a series of encounters with local movers and shakers, ranging from stalker-hunters through to waiters.
Abbott Hall Art Gallery, to 20 Dec
RC
The Bad Shepherd, London
Peter Bruegel the Elder’s earthy vision, forged in a 16th-century Netherlands, has echoed through the centuries. This show explores the influence of his depictions of ruddy-cheeked, sturdy-limbed, pleasure-seeking peasants and mysterious landscape paintings on the several generations of Bruegels who followed in his footsteps and other contemporary artists. You’ll find Peter Brueghel the Younger’s gutsy paintings of pig slaughters and country brawls; Sarah Lucas’s mythical beast made from fags; Nicole Eisenman’s paintings of nocturnal revelry, where tankard-swilling night owls have more than a passing resemblance to the Bruegels’ inn scenes; and Peter Doig’s Night Fisher.
Christie’s Mayfair, W1, to 16 Jan
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