Francis Bacon and Henry Moore seem more ships in the night than bedfellows. It’s hard to imagine the painter’s tortured souls, with their leering, diseased animal mouths and mutilated bodies, cosying up to the sculptor’s smooth-edged reclining earth mothers. The premise of this major show is that even if these artists’ response to their age was totally different, their interests chimed: they experienced war first hand, admired Picasso, Michelangelo and Rodin and pushed the human figure in new directions attuned to the modern world. They shared a gallery and friends, and Bacon apparently even asked Moore for sculpture lessons at one point.
The Ashmolean, Thu 12 May to 19 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
From childhood recordings of birds and youthful years of pop fame with Cabaret Voltaire, through to sampling Antarctic seal songs for David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet, Chris Watson has distinguished himself as an artist with a highly sensitive ear for the evocative of the sounds that surround us. Here he infiltrates the Millennium Gallery with a spectacular multimedia sound sculpture derived from a year’s archiving of the resonances of Sheffield. The ear-splitting crash of Forgemasters’ furnaces and the human roar of Bramhall Lane and Hillsbrough Saturday afternoons are set in almost operatic tension with the curlew calls of the surrounding Peaks, conjuring an affectionate portrait of a city that the 19th century writer John Ruskin called “a dirty picture in a golden frame.”
Millennium Gallery, Thu to 23 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Young artist Bartholomew Beal displays a distinct taste for existentialist absurdities in this series of wretched losers. Inspiration comes courtesy of the rubbish bin tramps of Endgame, Samuel Beckett’s theatrical celebration of defiance against life’s tragicomic contingencies. Nearer to home, Beal has used subjects garnered from research into 19th century Derbyshire history. There’s Sammy Ashton, a showman travelling the county with his stovepipe hat and a menagerie of performing animals, and a legendary local called Alice who reputedly lived in a bacon box. Beal portrays his cast of anti-heroes with an impressive painterly confidence.
Derby Art Gallery, Sat 7 Sep to 10 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
A line-up of antique figures always stood sentinel over Sigmund Freud’s desk. Of course, the great shrink was interested in another kind of archaeology – he burrowed into the human psyche. Daniel Silver taps shifting notions of sculpture’s significance – as a sacred or fetish object, of excavating earth, mind and metaphor. His mutated versions of Freud’s desk guardians can be found in a central London urban wilderness.
Odeon Site, WC1, Thu 12 Sep to 3 Nov
SS Photograph: Marcus J Leith
As exhibitions of unorthodox and so-called outsider art seem to have proliferated internationally over the last decade, so this historical overview of the role of creativity in the evolution of psychiatry is timely. The show documents the whole problematic championing of art in the world of the clinically disturbed, from the earliest experiments with art therapy in the 19th century through to the infamous community of dropouts and misfits established at London’s Kingsley Hall in the 1960s by the innovatory provocateur Ronald Laing. Highlights will be works by eccentrics who were already recognised as artists before the onset of madness.
Djanogly Art Gallery, Sat 7 Sep to 3 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
James Welling has produced some of art photography’s most thoughtful, lushly captivating works. Wyeth, photographs examining sites depicted in Andrew Wyeth’s eerie paintings of empty fields and buildings in Maine, might come as a surprise to Welling fans. The American landscape painter’s kitschy creepiness initially seems a long way from the photographer’s brainy body of work. Many of Welling’s shots cast Wyeth’s locations in a brazenly sunny, crisp documentary light. Others, such as a photograph of a window taken inside the house from Wyeth’s famed painting Christina’s World, are more dreamy. Largely conspicuous by their absence, Wyeth’s paintings have clearly had a major impact on Welling’s imagination.
Maureen Paley, E2, to 6 Oct
SS Photograph: PR
London stalwart Sadie Coles is opening her vast new gallery on Kingley Street this week with canvasses that luxuriate in paint. Following a distinguished lineage of American abstraction from Jack The Dripper to Warhol’s oxidised ‘Piss Paintings’, rising New York art star Ryan Sullivan adds spray paint to loose seas of free-flowing pigment, creating something poised between accident and control. His works resemble aerial photography, crumpled skin, slabs of rock or foaming seas. In his latest creations he’s upped the ante, exploding cans of spray paint by puncturing them and letting the ensuing jets of colour spatter freely.
Sadie Coles HQ, W1, Wed 11 Sep to 2 Nov
SS Photograph: PR
It’s just two years since Tim Hetherington was killed on a mission in Libya, so this show stands as a timely tribute to the Liverpool-born photojournalist. Anyone who presumes that the factual verity of photo and video reportage has had its day should witness the dreadful truths of war as Hetherington embodies them here. His Infidel photographic series shows American soldiers in Afghanistan not so much in action as in the interminable limbo-land of waiting for it all to kick off: lounging about and having a laugh. The theme is taken movingly further in Sleeping Soldiers, a three-channel video installation of the soldiers napping against a haunting soundtrack of juddering helicopter blades and superimposed film fragments.
Open Eye Gallery, to 24 Nov
RC Photograph: Tim Hetherington
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