Ninety-year-old Ellsworth Kelly is one of the very few remaining figureheads of the heroically groundbreaking days of American abstract painting and here he has selected 12 large silkscreen and lithographic prints to serve as a concentrated retrospective of more than 40 years of uncompromising invention. While some of Kelly’s works – such as the obliquely sunlit corner of a room – might suggest real-life subjects, ultimately they are pure abstract presences. There is a connection here with the innovations of 20th-century modernism, like the late Matisse paper cutouts that will be celebrated at a blockbuster show this year at London’s Tate Modern, for example. Far from being staid, Kelly’s deceptively basic coloured shapes charm the eye like nothing else around.
Ingleby Gallery, 11 Jan to 22 Feb
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Eliabeth Ogilvie’s latest installation encompasses sculpture, film and video, but one material dominates everything: ice. Huge chunks of it hang from the ceiling, slowly melting, with the drips forming pools. This makes the environmental threat of melting icecaps physical and present, with an epic film projection capturing an ice wall strata in real time and a number of films paying tribute to the ice-focused culture of northern Greenland’s Inuit people. Still and silent it may be, but we know this white-blue edifice is not as immutable as it might appear. An environmentalist whose work straddles art and science, Ogilvie remains an active presence on the frontline of climate change.
Ambika P3, NW1, Fri 17 Jan to 9 Feb
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This two-part group exhibition pits the harmonious abstractions of RIFF (to 19 Jan), with the discordance of RIFT (to 2 Mar). If a riff is a catchy repeated musical phrase, the paintings of Nadine Feinson (pictured) and Fiona Curran certainly present a visual equivalent. Recalling rock’s repetitive riffs and the Islamic-influenced tiles that adorn buildings in southern Spain and Portugal, both artists build up patterned layers that almost become decoratively predictable before being disrupted by more organic irregularities.
BALTIC 39, to 2 Mar
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Graham Dolphin’s Come Together is a two-channel video installation charting the ecstatic rapport built up between rock stars and their fans. Filmed close-up and screened in silent slow motion, the faces of bands such as Primal Scream (pictured) and their adoring followers take on a ritualistic aura. Whether you read Dolphin’s work to be musing on an act of mass brainwashing or a mutually enacted ceremony of transcendence, it is rare that video has so effectively captured the intensity of a live gig.
Northern Gallery For Contemporary Art, to 1 Feb
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Kevin Coates’s creations look back to bygone eras when jewels were symbols and alchemists attempted magical transformations of precious metals. As such, his pieces always come with an intricate history. His latest series is inspired by medieval bestiaries, books of fantastical hybrid creatures – serpents with feet, or birds with hooves – based on anecdotes and folklore. Displayed within Coates’s own hand-inked pages, they’re tributes, not to manuscript illuminators, but figures across the centuries with an animal connection. There’s a parrot paired with Flaubert and a fly for Virgil, while Des Esseintes, the ruined antihero from Huysmans’s Against Nature, gets a gold tortoise like the one whose remains are found in his house.
Ashmolean, 17 Jan to 30 Mar
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This show of rarely seen work by Polish artists who fled their home country during the second world war, sees them finally recognised in their own right. There is a tendency to draw parallels between the bold gestures of these artists and those of more acclaimed contemporaries such as Emil Nolde back in war-torn mainland Europe, yet this exhibition reveals artists with their own charm. Josef Herman is the most historically recognised and his Head Of A Bergundian Peasant displays all his typical chunky expressionism, while Stanislaw Frenkiel’s Descent Of The Winged Men (work pictured), is a portrayal of tragically fallen rather than guardian angels.
Graves Gallery, Sat 11 Jan to 28 Jun
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Man’s latest moon explorations have prompted artists to declare their own lunar republic. Its embassy for the next three weeks is the Oxo Tower Wharf Bargehouse, where talks and workshops are being staged alongside a moon-themed exhibition. This includes Katie Paterson’s attempt to plumb the moon’s mystery through music, transmitting Moonlight Sonata in morse code to the surface of the moon and back. More lunar fun comes from Leonid Tishkov’s portable Private Moon (pictured). A candidate for next year’s fourth plinth, Liliane Lijn taps the moon’s feminine side, projecting the word “SHE”, on to its surface. Most magical is Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s riff on a 17th-century book in which a man flies to the moon on a geese-drawn chariot.
The Bargehouse, SE1, to 2 Feb
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Berlin’s dadaists wrote off Hannah Höch – the only woman in the gang of outspoken Weimer-era upstarts – as a harmless good girl. Thankfully, time has proved how wrong-headed they were to overlook the quiet power of her work; Höch’s talents as a montagist are remarkable as this survey attests. Splicing together magazine images of early movie starlets and “new women” with ancient statues or new-fangled gadgets, her satire of sexual identity and changing times is never heavy handed. In her celebrated series, From An Ethnographic Museum, a muscly torso sprouts breasts. She had a Boschian sense of the funny and fantastical, but her vision feels thoroughly modern.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed 15 Jan to 23 Mar
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