The intrigue of Jochem Henricks’s sculptures lies as much in the story of their making as in their final form. We are told that for Cold Birds the birds in question were transformed into carbon, then ultra-pure graphite, and finally presented on a plinth as rough diamonds surrounded with a ring of plucked feathers. Things get more beguiling with Left Defender’s Right Leg, a diamond apparently synthesised from a footballer’s surgically removed limb, mounted on a black velvet cushion and stuffed with tobacco because – the artist claims – the leg’s loss was caused by smoking-related disease. Hendricks takes artifice beyond pictorial illusion into contemporary art-world makebelieve.
The New Art Gallery, from Fri 18 Jan to 7 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
James Lee Byars’s The Angel is the kind of sculpture that makes you very careful about where you place your feet. It consists of 125 Venetian glass globes, hand-blown with just a single puff, arranged like exquisite jam jars on the floor in a pattern that suggests wings unfolding. Like much of the late American sculptor and performance artist’s Zen-influenced work, a sense of transience lingers around it. Its delicate beauty might be packed away – or worse, smashed – at any moment. Created in 1989, eight years before the artist’s death, it’s the centrepiece of this show which also features experiments with stone, ceramics, wood and paper, inspired by his stint studying in Japan in the 1950s and 60s.
Michael Werner, W1, to 16 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Matt Bryans seems to be on a mission to get to the bottom of things: rubbing, blasting and pummelling his materials into forms that suggest where they came from, what lies beneath the surface, or even beyond this world. In his best-known collages he covers walls with worn newspaper. This sense of excavation continues with his latest assemblages of stony orbs that might be dinosaur eggs, cells magnified under a microscope, or pebbles worn down by the sea. In fact they’re red bricks, rescued by the artist from London’s streets and old bombsites. Meanwhile, new newspaper collages conjure haunted English landscapes.
Kate MacGarry, E2, to from Fri 18 Jan to 2 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Oliver Godow’s photographs direct us to look closely at details of our urban landscape that most of us would never even notice, never mind focus lovingly in on. His images are painstakingly composed with subtly orchestrated colours, and sequentially arranged to optimise their effect. Yet the subjects tend to be worthless fragments, things damaged or discarded: a wrecked chair, a free-standing facade, a glimpse of some billboard graphics, a displaced traffic cone. Godow maps out a route of aimless wandering in which obvious topgraphical highlights are swerved in favour of moments of unexpected aesthetic delight, such as a scrap of gold foil wrapped around a bicycle seat, no doubt to keep the cyclist’s backside dry.
Aberdeen Art Gallery, to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
This show moves from the homely worlds of pets and gardening to marvels modelled on computers and grown in labs, as two artists reflect on different ways nature has been modified by human ingenuity. Revital Cohen’s latest film, Kingyo Kingdom, captures obsessive breeders and collectors at Japan’s National Goldfish Competition. A far cry from average pond life, these golden trophy fish with no dorsal fins and elegant wispy tails have been cultivated over centuries. Melanie Jackson, meanwhile, presents The Urpflanze (Part 2), the second instalment of her investigation into plant science.
John Hansard Gallery, Tue 22 Jan to 9 Mar
SS Photograph: Melanie Jackson
This exhibition’s title, The Quest For The Man On The White Donkey, is taken from the artist’s chance encounter with a Palestinian man on the shore of the Dead Sea (work pictured). “It was only after developing the photographic plate that I realised I had encountered my ‘Messiah’,” says Israel. Here the artist’s large-scale and immaculately printed photographs take us on a journey, through the contested territories, that deliberately seeks out scenes ignored or obscured by the world’s news media. Herbs are gathered in Haifa, and someone bathes in the Sea of Galilee, as real people’s everyday lives carry on while conflict rages around them.
Impressions Gallery, from Fri 18 Jan to 13 Apr
RC Photograph: Yaakov Israel
Central to this show by the acclaimed Zurich-based artist is a series of paintings based on stills from Michelangelo Antonioni’s cult 1966 film Blow-Up. As paintings are made from still photographs that are featured in a film, the translations from one medium to the next tend to amplify the hallucinatory atmosphere. As the movement of the brush freezes a perceived movement, one is confronted with a powerful image of uncertainty. It’s as if some moving phenomena has left its stain and imprint upon the paper and canvas as it passes on. Yet Wittwer’s pictures are more charming than disturbing. Another series here – seemingly based on reproductions of paintings by Gainsborough, Watteau and Constable – appear like ghosts of historical masterpieces.
Abbott Hall Art Gallery, from Fri 18 Jan to 16 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Photographer extraordinaire Juergen Teller is known for laying things bare: from a pallid nude Vivienne Westwood draped over a chaise longue like an old curtain, to Björk bathing carefree with her son. This show has it all, from his earliest work of the 1980s through to his recent family portraits, exploring his history and Germany identity. It even includes the letters of complaint his column in Germany’s leading newspaper supplement Die Zeit provoked.
ICA, SW1, Wed 23 Jan to 17 Mar
SS Photograph: Juergen Teller
