Brighton boy Jeff Keen might be the most exciting and yet least known of the experimental artist-film-makers who came of age in 1960s Britain. As a posthumous Tate show recently revealed, his 8mm works leave you buzzing, rather like a series of rapid-fire electric shocks. They typically feature images from movies, comic books or advertising that strobe in quick succession, with storms of scratchy, felt-tip pen-style animation, double imposition or film shown in silvery negative. Here, a choice selection from Keen’s 70-plus films is shown alongside works culled from his equally vast archive of paintings. They share the films’ frenetic energy and love of layering, with canvasses exploding in spaghetti-squiggles of pigment.
Kate MacGarry, E2, Sat 9 Mar to 20 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Katy Dove’s animations take their cues from Kandinsky’s abstract paintings, aspiring to the condition of music. In the earliest work on show here, colourful shapes slowly dance into view, replicating and rotating to chanting vocals, slow beats and shimmering sounds. A more recent offering features live action and puts landscape back into the picture: delicate abstract lines and rainbow splodges of watercolour multiply against forest backdrops. In her series of etchings and paintings, Six Audio Visual Musical Forms, she interprets classic musical forms such as the canon and fugue. Offering an alternative to standard scores, words multiply in patterns and coloured lines, and dashes bleep and hum on the page.
Spacex Gallery, Sat 9 Mar to 4 May
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A complementary pairing of two of the UK’s most ingenious performance and installation artists. Hayley Newman’s work continues to be energised by a seductive generosity of spirit. On the face of it deceptively free-form, her interventions into our workaday world are often deeply, if playfully, subversive. Here, she exhibits Domestique, a collection of over 50 used dishcloths casually embroidered with poignant if daft faces, and Histoire Economique, a series of rubbings taken on envelopes from the facades of London banks, created during her stint as Self-Appointed Artist-In-Residence in the City of London. Emily Speed, meanwhile, offers an acrobat performance in Manchester’s infamous Toast Rack halls of residence.
Castlefield Gallery, to 7 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Martin Boyce’s 2012 work, Eyes, a folded metal mask mounted on a subtly distressed resin board, forms the focus of the latest in the gallery’s Study exhibitions, which stage creative intrigues for critical reflection. Meanwhile, French artist Benoît Maire’s first London show also delves into the creative potential of narrative discontinuity and theoretical uncertainty: in front of a mirrored screen, a transparent head is displayed in a glass vitrine, and bits and pieces of this and that are artfully combined to create an air of poetic suspense. Maire’s works are sculptural reveries, made by dreaming with the materials rather than by simply imitating dream scenarios.
David Roberts Art Foundation, NW1, Fri 15 Mar to 11 May
RC Photograph: Serge Hasenböhler
Eddie Peake is still at art school, but his lusciously libidinal work has already got people whispering that he’s a talent to be reckoned with. Last summer, his barely dressed, impossibly buff dance troupe was the temperature-raising hit within Tate Modern’s newly opened Tanks galleries’ first season. As performers blended pop video routines with the poses of classical statues, it felt as if antiquity’s nymphs and fauns were getting a Grace Jones makeover. Now White Cube has snapped him up, and his exploration of pop aesthetics and the eternal appeal of the body beautiful evolves across graffiti paintings, sculptures in polished alabaster plaster and a saucy neon satyr.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, to 21 Apr
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From the early-20th century scrapbook subversions of Picasso through to today’s computer cut-and-paste and digital sampling, collage has constituted perhaps the most internationally widespread and radically inventive technique of modern times. This show, garnered from the Arts Council collection, takes a look at the rather limited use of collage’s unpredictable possibilities among British artists of the past hundred years. It must be said that most of the exhibits look rather tame compared to the likes of Schwitters or Rauschenberg (both currently being shown in London). Yet from the surrealist lyricism of Eileen Agar through to John Stezaker’s enigmatic portraits (pictured) there are a few delightfully bewildering surprises.
Tullie House Museum And Art Gallery, Sat 9 Mar to 12 May
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Dotted about Capability Brown’s gardens, William Turnbull’s semi-abstract sculptures come across like so many semi-industrial totems. Turnbull, who died late last year at the age of 90, was a friend and working colleague of some of modern art’s most influential figures – the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and the painter Mark Rothko. While his work never quite reached the innovative heights of such giants, it is nevertheless imbued with modernism’s heroic sense of adventure. While the subject matter is often otherworldly, the forms in which it is embodied are invariably solidly planted – spectral figures fashioned from fragmented chunks of substantial steel.
Chatsworth House, Sun 10 Mar to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
There’s something melancholic about the young women Emma Talbot paints in inky comic-book style, with their oversized, featureless heads. The atmosphere is always spooky and a feeling that dreams have gone awry is hard to shake. The Collector, John Fowles’s creepy novel about a lottery winner who abducts the art student he’s secretly obsessed with, is the inspiration for the artist’s latest series, upping the ante on the psychological prisons implied in earlier works. Particularly haunting are Talbot’s images of the heroine trapped in her underground cell, her paintings on the wall and pen in hand as she seeks escape through art and her diary. Yet to paraphrase one of Talbot’s other key influences, Morrissey, this dream of another world, a better world, is something anyone can relate to.
Mrs Rick’s Cupboard, to 3 May
SS Photograph: PR
