Now in his 90s, this Royal Academician who’s just been awarded an OBE, is known as a stalwart exponent of a dazzling brand of abstract expressionism where fizzing juicy fruit colours rule. Like Bridget Riley, his lightbulb moment came when he discovered the work of Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko at a landmark Tate exhibition in the mid-1950s. His early work, where diagonals dominate, seems sparse when set against paintings from the late 70s on. In these visually dense compositions, blobs and lattices of pigment are built up in complex layers to create a vertiginous sense of depth and exuberant energy. The selection here holds back on his usual eye-popping palette in favour of works in blue.
Plymouth College of Art, Mon to 14 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR
As befits our star-struck age, many of the subjects in this updating of the portrait tradition verge on celebrity status: the Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo and the renowned Californian artist John Baldessari, for example. A fair few of the artists have made such fashionable names a major focus of their life’s work. Wolfgang Tillmans’s exquisite photographs (his snap of DJ Princess Julia is pictured above) focus on the self-regarding glamour of the cool set, and whereas once sitters for mainstream portraits tended to be figures of politics and aristocracy, this show demonstrates the current central power of PR. But there’s a twist in the tale, with the sitters also providing written responses to their portraits.
Mostyn, to 13 Oct
RC
Photograph: PR
For Gilberto Zorio, art is about energy and constant change. For one sculpture, he’s turned two crumpled sheets of lead into two baths. One contains copper sulphate, while the other holds hydrochloric acid; these combine to form crystals on a dangling skein of copper. Nothing stands still here: lights flash erratically from what looks like a leather oven mitt hooked up to a wire, and the voices of gallery goers plucky enough to stand atop a breezeblock balanced on ball bearings echo around the gallery. The materials speak of modern industry, but Zorio’s concerns are ancient. His favoured symbol – outlined in phosphorous and revealed by UV lamps in a new installation – is the star (pictured), that constantly evolving mass of unstable matter.
Blain Southern, W1, to 28 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR
A perfectly fitting trio of shows by three of the most talented, audacious and healthily irreverent of today’s Glasgow-based painters. Iain Hetherington flaunts his Wally narratives as if they’re cutouts from throwaway comic strips. Jacob Kerray’s portraits are all warped and bloated, despite their posh atmosphere of baroque respectability. Finally, Piper churns out and piles up his little canvas images at the rate of several a day like stream-of-consciousness outpourings.
Centre For Contemporary Arts, to 14 Sep
RC
Photograph: PR
Photography was both a weapon and a target for these feminist firebrands who set about challenging class and gender stereotypes. Spence’s Phototherapy series, created after she’d been diagnosed with cancer, shows her re-enacting traumatic moments from her childhood, playing the housewife stuck doing the ironing, as well as Jo, the vulnerable little girl. Complementing it are New Zealand-born Alexis Hunter’s very early works, hand-coloured photocopies showing art students dressed as suffragettes waving placards with feisty slogans. A painter at heart, Hunter first turned to photography for documentary purposes. Later, darker works from the 1970s sees a sequence of images where a woman commits suicide.
Richard Saltoun Gallery, W1, Thu to 27 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR
The pots currently found amid the aisles, chapel and transept of Winchester Cathedral come in various shades and sizes. In dark flinty greys or earthy reds, some stand tall as sentinels, others are small enough to hold in your hands. Whether short and stout or smooth, tall and oval, that these works by leading ceramicist Julian Stair suggest bodies is no accident. They’re the artist’s take on funerary urns: containers of human remains that have been used for millennia. He’s also fashioned sarcophagi – a long teardrop for the legs and torso, a circle for the head – that echo the prone stone figures carved atop the cathedral’s tombs with pared-down, semi-abstract forms.
Winchester Cathedral, to 30 Sep
SS
Photograph: PR
Liam Gillick’s art is a quandary. One might view it as abstract, minimalist and purely formal in its perfectly balanced composition and technical finesse. On the other hand, the artist tends to frustrate such a response by rigorously avoiding aesthetic appeal and adding cryptic texts which introduce an air of highly intellectual reflection. Here, six free-standing shelf-like structures, meticulously fashioned from aluminium frames and coloured Plexiglas panels, are placed next to two wall-based texts: “For the door that is welded shut, Hallelujah!” and “For the shed that can’t be entered, Hallelujah!” It’s hardly straightforward and ultimately it’s a body of work that cleverly skips cliches and gets us pondering.
Kerlin Gallery, to 14 Sep
RC
Photograph: Denis Mortell/PR
Deshayes presents a strange collision of aesthetics in South Yorkshire. Traditional patinated bronze sculptural forms and a post-industrial gloss of lacquered aluminium and vacuum-formed plastics clash in his ambitious show. There’s yet more contrast between early 20th-century figurative busts by the likes of Frank Dobson and Jacob Epstein, and Deshayes’s own stretched layers of modern, state-of-the-art plastics. The show emerges from a commissioned period of research conducted by Deshayes at the Leeds Henry Moore Institute, and a plaster maquette by Moore forms part of his archive of sculptural borrowings here. The overall effect is of the raw materials of history and collective memory emerging from Deshayes’s skin-like facade of fascinating manufactured synthetics.
S1 Artspace, to 14 Sep
RC
Photograph: PR
