The critic Roger Fry’s seminal 1910 exhibition Manet And The Post-Impressionists was panned by almost everyone. The art collector and textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, however, was hooked. The works he bequeathed to the Courtauld Institute Of Art add up to one of the finest collections in the world, including Cézanne’s proto-Cubist depictions of mountains and Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear. A series of special summer showcases putting particular aspects of the college’s treasures in the spotlight is kicking off with Gauguin masterpieces. His heated vision of Tahitian teens in an exotic, erotic Eden is matched by earlier paintings of the sultry Martinique landscape and sun-baked hay.
Courtauld Initute Of Art, WC2, Thu 20 Jun to 8 Sep
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Sadly the American minimalist sculptor and poet Carl Andre is still best known for the 1976 tabloid furore around the artist’s Equivalent VIII - or the “Tate Bricks”, as it became more popularly titled. Yet Andre is far from any kind of sensationalist or confrontational artist. In fact his work is imbued with a modest and almost introverted restraint. Whether working with stacks of bricks, steel plates or wood blocks, he reveals an innocent wonder at the sensuous presence of these everyday materials.
MIMA, to 9 Sep
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The Hayward’s title promises boundless imaginative thinking, and this show’s self-taught artists, fringe scientists and other visionaries don’t disappoint. There are fiendishly intricate maths puzzles from George Widener, and technical drawings of rockets that would run on clean energy from the schizophrenic inventor Karl Hans Janke. Morton Bartlett meanwhile spent his downtime carving seriously disturbing mannequins of little girls. What this motley ensemble all speak to, ultimately, is private obsession and the interior life of the mind.
Hayward Gallery, SE1, to 26 Aug
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Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza’s Tomorrow Never Knows installations are incisive reflections on what they have referred to as “futures past”, fantastical attempts to visualise the forthcoming shape of human society. Naheed Raza’s large-scale projections present video taken from United States cryonic institutes that use techniques for theoretically extending human life beyond the grave; they already feel like dated science fiction. Raza’s poignant images of these desperate attempts to freeze time for a possible future resurrection are set in contrast to Ed Atkins’s videos, which follow visceral bodily actions in hi-tech super-focused detail. The close-up action is even followed to the bottom of the ocean, where a sense of primal possibility evokes unknowable futures.
CCA, to 20 Jul
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Sex looms large in this show of drawings; very large in the case of Mike Kuchar’s comic-strip image of a suggestively serpentine dinosaur, with a pumped-up physique to match that of his caveman master. Kuchar’s Prehistoric Pets of the 1980s, or the younger artist Cary Kwok’s Biro fantasies of brawny beaus, are in a direct line from Tom of Finland’s ebullient images of 1940s musclemen. It’s not all gay bliss, though. Northern art prize winner Margaret Harrison subjects icons of patriarchal culture (Hugh Hefner, Captain America) to some transgressive cross-dressing; and George Grosz, the great satirist of Weimar-era Germany, attacks the fatcat bourgeoisie in his postwar works.
ICA, SW1, Wed 19 Jun to 8 Sep
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Recently Moyra Davey visited Liverpool and Manchester, taking photographs of seemingly innocuous scenes that were nevertheless drawn from personal and literary references. Back in her New York studio, she ordered these images into narrative sequences, neatly folding each photograph and individually mailing them back to Tate Liverpool where they go on show adorned with the creases and stamps, marking their passage. The series is typical of Davey. In this age of digital super-sophistication, in which so many artists resort to enlarging images to a monumental scale simply because now, technically, they can, here’s one who recognises photography’s history of intimate physicality. It’s strangely touching.
Tate Liverpool, to 6 Oct
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Phillip Allen’s paintings chart a narrow line between composition and decomposition. Geometric shapes are stacked up in what appear to be landscapes to form towers that always seem on the edge of precarious collapse. This might be improvised abstraction, but the organic doodles and wayward gestures are constantly held in check by an overall architectural structure. Allen pushes a painting towards formlessness then hauls it back just as it’s turning into a mess; the result is, at times, an exquisite rhythmical tension, reminscent of Coltrane or Coleman.
Kerlin Gallery, to 20 Jul
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Edwina Ashton’s animations, drawings and performances have brought a wonderfully shambolic menagerie to life over the past decade, from elephant men with little legs and ungainly trunks to bug people with cumbersome limbs. Surreal as it might be to watch a homesick elephant on holiday, it’s impossible not to relate to the skits Ashton’s creature-people act out, hinged on the mismatch between our dreams and humdrum reality; her stitched-together costumes, meanwhile, wouldn’t look out of place in a village fete. Her latest performances are staged in a sculptural installation that conjures a beauty spot, encumbered by a noisy snack bar and adjoining car park. This compromised scene is inhabited not by fabulous beasts, but “walrus things” apparently in need of a fag break.
Works/Projects, 15 Jun to 27 Jul
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