Louise Bourgeois, Newcastle upon Tyne
Renowned for her monumental sculptures, Louise Bourgeois continued to work with the incisive medium of etching well into her 80s, when these 25 prints were dredged from the obscurities of her memory. While her cell-like installations might be more theatrically tragic, these small, scrawled images from 1994’s Autobiographical Series and 1999’s 11 Drypoints are, if anything, even more painfully sensitive. One never knows with her mischievous genius whether Bourgeois is being confessional or flighty, but every image here carries an emotional spell that sticks in the mind. Bourgeois teases us with sexual acrobatics, a staircase leading to a void, a pregnant mosquito. Then she sinks the heart with a deceptively banal image of a woman sitting at a sewing machine. She’s an artist you can easily fall in love with, who was working right up to her death almost five years ago.
Northumbria University Gallery And Baring Wing, Sat to 22 May
RC
Fiona Rae, London
For 30 years Fiona Rae has pioneered paintings where art historical and contemporary visual ticks rub against one another. In a single work you might encounter pop motifs and spraypaint flares, as well as eruptions of 20th-century abstraction. This is all set against the flattest of coloured backdrops, which – depending on your viewpoint – are either pure surface or limitless void. Her latest works abandon her signature palette of eye-popping colours; in their place she uses many shades of grey to create paintings poised between abstraction and figuration, inspired by Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing as well as the smudgy, swirling Nine Dragons of the famed 13th-century Chinese ink drawing.
Timothy Taylor Gallery, W1, Wed to 30 May
SS
Francis Bacon And The Masters, Norwich
This show offsets Francis Bacon’s gruelling vision of psychologically tortured men and physically contorted nudes with a starry hit list of the many masterpieces that inspired it. The contours of a twisted, punctured and morbidly beautiful half-naked crucified Christ by the Spanish baroque painter Alonso Cano can be traced in Bacon’s spectral crucifixion for a secular society, or the warped flesh of his hunched animal nudes. Rembrandt’s frank, probing portraits of old, weathered men whose intense gazes suggest thoughts turned inwards are almost reversed in Bacon. His faces, similarly illuminated in the darkness, erupt with mental conflict in a blur of paint. Cézanne’s experiments with paint and volume and Soutine’s expressive blurring are also picked up on. No show exploring Bacon’s influences could leave out Picasso: the distorted, fragmented cubist heads were adapted by Bacon for a modern age traumatised by war.
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Sat to 26 Jul
SS
Ahmet Ogüt, London
Ahmet Oğüt is an artist with a can-do attitude. His politically pointed group projects explore the ways people can subvert the system. In one of his best-known works, he reversed Ray Bradbury’s book-burning classic Fahrenheit 451 by getting firefighters to give away once-banned books. Now he’s transforming Chisenhale Gallery into a TV studio and bringing the collaborators from this and other works together, including a stuntman, lip-reader and sports commentator.
Chisenhale Gallery, E3, Thu & 29 Apr to 31 May
SS
David Mach, Durham
In the north-east, David Mach is best known for his life-size brick locomotive, stationed opposite the Morrisons in Darlington. He is the creator of post-pop art transformations: a gorilla fashioned from coat hangers; a multiple-matchstick portrait of Charlie Chaplin; wasteland cityscapes constructed from piles of old magazines. His work hit the news in a big way in 1983 when an offended member of the public was caught in the inferno he ignited in an attempt to destroy the artist’s anti-nuclear submarine sculpture, Polaris, built from 6,000 car tyres. Mach may have downsized somewhat here but loses little of his bad-boy cheek, with works inspired by Shoot and Commando comics. A football crowd sets the scene with exclamations of “Booo! Geroff, You Sponge-Faced Bunch of Nanas!”, while a parachutist chimes in with a counterpoint of “Caramba!”
The DLI Museum And Art Gallery, Sat to 5 Jul
RC
Tal R, London
There are no lessons to be memorised or rules obeyed in Tal R’s new show, Chimney School Of Sculpture. Rather, the artist – known for work that hums with intense colour – has created a playground for the imagination. His titular “chimneys”, made from wood and sheathed in candy-striped fabric, are hopelessly impractical, resembling cat posts or bird feeders. These preside over freeform black-and-white ceramics created using ancient Japanese raku firing. The results resemble cartoon monsters and, like Leonardo’s clouds, we can imagine what we want in their amorphous forms, while hand-made “opiumbeds” are the perfect spot from which to survey the scene.
Victoria Miro, N1, Thu to 30 May
SS
Georgina Starr, Middlesbrough
Installation artist Georgina Starr deals in myths, archetypes, psychic matters. She’s an unashamed 21st-century shaman, wielding performance, video and iBeacon smartphone technology. Following research conducted in a Tanzanian cave, she conjures metaphorical cross-associations between all things ovoid and is lyrical about bubbles: “The bubble is a world, an orb […] a moon, a sun and a crystal ball. It is also a voice, the speaking aloud of what is inside.” There’s a retro photo here of three women seemingly inflating party balloons with their vaginas. Yet Starr is in earnest, balancing precariously on the serious side of the bathetic; her labyrinthine installation seduces the viewer with the almost embarrassing excess of its imagery. She has even lured the gallery invigilators to eschew their traditional roles and variously act up as the artist’s doppelgangers.
MIMA, to 28 May
RC
