Trained as a designer for Josiah Wedgwood’s famous pottery, John Flaxman is known for his stylised neoclassical sculptural reliefs and the necessarily standardised funerary monuments he produced for St Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. While this initially rather academic-looking show recognises such achievements, its charms lie in the more personal and fluid sketches the artist made during a nine-year sojourn in Rome in the late-18th century, where he learned to love the humble life of the Roman streets. He depicted it in sketches of what appears to be a naked young woman shaking a sheet out of a window, which prefigures the daring graphic economy of late Matisse by almost a century and a half.
Ikon Gallery, to 21 Apr
RC
Photograph: PR
The late Swiss artist Hans Josephsohn created roughshod hulking figures in plaster or bronze, channelling notions of an age-old kind of sculpture: focused on the human body, their scruffy surfaces and battered silhouettes are seriously hands-on. Interest in his work has been gathering pace in the past decade and this show focuses on sculptures from the last 25 years of his life. As with Michelangelo’s Slaves, his famed figures emerging from marble, Josephsohn’s seem to be just taking shape, groaning with the agony of their own creation. They suggest a god or a caveman fashioning his likeness from clay or molten rock. Though bullishly monumental, their features are a blur, like a half-remembered experience that cuts deep.
Modern Art Oxford, Sat to 14 Apr
SS
Photograph: PR
Michael Krebber is a quintessential artist’s artist, pursuing the contradictions of his medium down thorny paths of enquiry where the initiated tread carefully. He addresses a moment where – to paraphrase an oft-quoted statement he made in the 1990s – everything he would want to do with painting has apparently already been thought of, with coolly provocative gestures and bone-dry wit. Gauntlets he’s previously thrown down include exhibiting bed sheets whose commercial prints of checks and horses summon shades of Romanticism, geometric abstraction and pop art, notes from a lecture on painting he gave translated to canvas by a sign-painter, and carved-up sections of used surfboards. Here, scrappy, bright abstractions continue his idiosyncratic painting debate.
Maureen Paley, E2, to 31 Mar
SS
Photograph: PR
A key land art figure, Richard Long has been instrumental in pushing the often clinical contemporary art world into a more tactile engagement with the weight and texture of the natural landscape itself. Here, he shows White Onyx Line and Tideless Stones, conceptually considered sculptural pile-ups of rocks that cannot but these days take on an ecological aura. In contrast, Michael Landy’s Four Walls video (pictured) finds its place within the domestic environment, expanding a tribute to his DIY-enthused but disabled father into a paean to setting up home.
Whitworth Art Gallery, to 16 Jun
RC
Photograph: PR
Since the 1960s, land art has been a predominantly male sculptural phenomenon of shifting boulders, charring tree trunks and treks across the few surviving wildernesses of the world. Against this slightly big-boy-scout backdrop, the work of the American artist Michelle Stuart has stood out as subtle and incisive. This, her first UK show since one at London’s ICA in 1979, documents several decades of incisive nature studies in photography, site-specific installation, drawing and video. Included are creative reflections on the Uffington white horse and a video of her working on a 460-foot-long drawing made by smearing a roll of paper with raw earth and a mess of graphite.
Djanogly Art Gallery, to 14 Apr
RC
Photograph: PR
Oscar Wilde’s famed line, that all art is quite useless, comes irresistibly to mind in the presence of Richard Slee’s pop-bright ceramics depicting the stuff that gets junked, from yesteryear’s gadgets to bygone ways of life. Indeed, what interests Slee is perhaps less art’s peculiar place in our lives than the slow slide into obsolescence that touches all things. Included in his latest installation is Carrot And Stick, an umbrella-like amalgam of the titular objects that looks as bright and plucky as Bugs Bunny. Yet Slee’s favoured subjects are invariably as out-of-date as the unloved mantelpiece knick-knacks that line the shelves of any charity shop. They suggest both thrusting, bright-eyed consumer culture and our struggle to keep up.
Hales Gallery, E1, Fri to 6 Apr
SS
Photograph: Courtesy of the Artist and Hales Gallery, London. Copyright of the Artist
Adel Abdessemed’s work has car crash appeal. He’s made his name turning iconic images into funhouse ghouls, like a gigantic skeleton suspended as if by magic in the air, the chassis of a burned-out car, Grünewald’s crucified Christ, multiplied and made from razor wire, and Zinedine Zidane’s notorious head-butt in chic black resin. His latest efforts include a figure from the famous shot of Vietnamese children covered in napalm, translated into a mammoth ivory statue, and what the gallery bumf describes as a drawing of the “poignant” recreation of Elizabeth II’s throne in razor wire. When it comes to spectacle, it would seem Abdessemed is fighting fire with fire.
David Zwirner, W1, to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
The Dudley-born photographer’s most acclaimed series helps form the centrepiece of Black Country Legends, which otherwise includes a filmed tribute to one AJW, the mystery artist who has apparently left over 250,000 sketches of 1940s Hollywood crooner Mario Lanza abandoned in pubs and shops throughout the region. The intimate subject of Billingham’s Ray’s A Laugh might seem similarly quirky but the embarrassed giggles are inflected throughout by a deep undertone of pathos. Often garishly coloured and at times blatantly, almost defiantly, out of focus, the images capture the artist’s dad slumped in an alcoholic stupor beside the loo. Truly tragicomic and utterly unforgettable.
The Public, to 6 May
RC Photograph: PR
