Gillian Ayres
Untitled (Cerise), painted in 1972, is an almost six-metre-wide abstraction with the embracing sensuality of a water lily painting by Claude Monet. This startling vision is at the heart of a show that also includes new paintings and woodcut prints by the 87-year-old Ayres. She joyously defies every cliche about what British art is supposed to be like. Her paintings burst with echoes of Matisse and Miró, and insist on a direct emotional response to their waves of colour. Ayres is more like an American abstract expressionist than a parochial British painter.
Alan Cristea Gallery, SW1, to 22 April
People Power: Fighting for Peace
The tanks, planes and bombs preserved in the Imperial War Museum testify to the centrality of war in modern history but this exhibition turns the museum’s priorities upside down in a welcome survey of peace movements and pacifism since 1914. From the war poets and conscientious objectors who defied jingoism in the first world War to CND and its successors today, here are the people who stood up to be counted against militarism. The posters, placards, badges and music brought together here show that protest has always had culture on its side.
Imperial War Museum, SE1, to 28 August
Fred Tomaselli
Surrealistic interventions into the pages of the New York Times bring dreams and nightmares into its rational-seeming world in Tomaselli’s off-centre political art. For more than a decade he has been enlarging front pages of America’s respected liberal paper and adding his own grotesque, fanciful drawings. It all seems like a very natural response to an age when the sleep of reason is producing so many real monsters.
White Cube at Mason’s Yard, SW1, to 13 May
Aleksandra Domanović
Berlin-based sculptor Domanović takes inspiration from the ancient Greek kouroi figures in the German capital’s Altes Museum for her new works that transform vertical column-like statues into robotic 21st-century beings. Erudite art for the digital and post-human age.
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, to 11 June
NOW
In what might be mistaken for national rivalry, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art shows Nathan Coley’s Tate Modern on Fire in the first of a series of surveys of contemporary art. It’s part of a close look at Coley that includes his installation The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship. Mona Hatoum is among the other artists featured.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Sat to 24 September
