1 Tracey Emin And William Blake In Focus
Who knew Tracey Emin was a fan of William Blake? When Tate Liverpool decided to exhibit Emin’s infamous installation My Bed she suggested this intriguing juxtaposition. Emin’s work will be shown beside Blake’s visions of innocence and experience. Both artists use the written word, both are bold voices from outside the traditional elite, and both defy repression. “Exuberance is beauty,” said Blake: this is a chance to compare two artists of immense exuberance.
2 William Kentridge
The art of South Africa’s William Kentridge is a sustained, serious investigation of history. His eerie animations became famous in the 1990s for mapping the legacy of apartheid. In his 2012 work The Refusal Of Time, he uses shadows and sounds to combine autobiography, philosophy and politics in a five-channel video that questions the nature of time itself. This and other powerful pieces offer meat for the mind as well as the senses from one of the most grown-up artists of the 21st century.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed to 15 Jan
3 Wifredo Lam
This fascinating Cuban painter gets a well-deserved retrospective. Lam lived in Paris in the days of the surrealists and was strongly influenced by Picasso. He took this avant-garde experience home to Cuba and combined Caribbean religious traditions with surrealism to create paintings of potent mythic resonance. Their blocky, sculptural strength gives tough reality to a world of legend and dream.
4 Jannis Kounellis
This exhibition explores how the Greece-born Kounellis escaped the confines of traditional art forms to become one of the most astounding of installation artists. It includes his early works on paper, in which the ideas that would make him a member of Italy’s arte povera movement can be seen taking form. Kounellis has an appetite for the stuff of real life, the history of rural Europe and living nature. His art is a sensual and startling encounter with the organic. One of the major artists of today.
White Cube At Mason’s Yard, SW1, Fri to 29 Oct
5 Mike Kelley
LA’s Chinatown cherishes its Wishing Well, a pseudo-Chinese, partly derelict popular monument. Mike Kelley recreated it in his 1999 installation Framed And Frame; he saw this kitsch landmark as representing the persecution of the city’s Chinese community. Here, it is shown alongside a study gallery on the late artist’s work and importance.
