Man Ray’s portraits are a hit list of the great, good and gorgeous, spanning five decades of the 20th century. Artists and writers depicted include Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Picasso, and Ray’s protegee and lover Lee Miller. Also among his models are his wife Juliet, Ava Gardner, and film siren Catherine Deneuve. Of course, Ray’s photographs are about far more than fashionable faces. He was one of his medium’s great innovators, always pushing what film could do, as with his rayograms (images made by placing objects directly on photographic paper), or the solarisation process he developed with Miller. Thanks to this method his photos have a silvery, unearthly quality.
National Portrait Gallery, WC2, Thu 7 Feb to 27 May
SS Photograph: PR
In Corin Sworn’s films, all that is solid melts, not into air, but rather flows off course, down the snaking tributaries of her characters’ shifting voices and views. Her latest work, The Rag Papers, features a series of brief encounters and near misses: “a collection of possibilities”, as a voiceover says at one point, where identities keep changing. The action unfolds (and circles back on itself) between very different settings. In a tasteful, expensive-looking flat with Danish furniture and high ceilings, a woman rifles through papers hunting for an obscure object left by an older man, who studies photos of consumer-culture waste. It’s a strangely mysterious and meandering search.
Chisenhale Gallery, E3, Fri 8 Feb to 24 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
With a parallel show at Ghent’s prestigious SMAK, the Italian installation artist infiltrates the main Fruitmarket space with La Strada Di Sotto (The Street Below), an installation of typical aesthetic enchantment. For those of us who have been captivated by Palermo’s nocturnal festivals, Bartolini’s work here will take us all back. The artist floods the gallery floor with a patterned maze of festival illumination. Relieved of their religious context, the lights still retain a melancholic and mournful aura. Bartolini is a true installation artist, not so much placing pre-existing sculptural works in a gallery as transforming the whole gallery space with atmospheric magic and turning it into something else entirely.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Fri 1 Feb to 14 Apr
RC Photograph: Mariangela Insana
Eva Hesse is one of the postwar biggies and this 1965-focused show looks at the breakthrough works she created in an old textile factory in Germany, which paved the way for her legendary series with fleshy latex, fibreglass and string. There’s a more cerebral violence at play in Bruce Nauman’s work. Endless cycles of sex and aggression are distilled into circular slogans and images such as the neon Run From Fear – Fun From Rear, or Carousel, a bleak-looking merry-go-round which drags strung-up casts of deer and coyote in a cruel circle.
Hauser & Wirth Savile Row, W1, to 9 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Mike Nelson piles up junk to reflect the futile absurdities of our consumer-focused world. It’s nitty-gritty stuff that gets to the heart of the urban landscape and makes most contemporary sculpture look thematically trifling and technically indulgent. Working somewhere in the gap between art’s make-believe artifice and the raw facts of real life, he skilfully assembles his often locally found objects into scenarios of quite haunting sculptural presence. Here, in an installation titled M6, he fills the gallery with a mountain of well-worn and half-shredded car tyres.
Eastside Projects, to 9 Mar
RC Photograph: Stuart Whipps
Since the 1960s, the Turin-based Piero Gilardi has been as active outside the art world as within it, working as “creative facilitator” on various leftwing projects. Here, campaigning for anti-psychiatry and the rights of indigenous peoples are documented alongside the early art that first brought him international acclaim during a time of Italian political unrest. Central to these often coolly conceptual works are The Nature Carpets, a series of meticulously carved foam slices of idyllic countryside that gallery visitors were originally invited to picnic upon. The Nottingham-based John Newling’s Ecologies Of Value also touches on ecological issues, and is similarly tongue-in-cheek in its questioning of the wheelings and dealings of the powers that be.
Nottingham Contemporary, to 7 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
This citywide show, curated by Tom Morton, is a major cabinet of curiosities that mixes historical fact with cultural fiction to make one big bag of mixed-media intrigue. Anglo-Saxon human remains borrowed from The Collection Museum’s stores are presented in ice cream tubs as unlikely found-object artworks. Elsewhere, Jess Flood-Paddock unearths evidence of previously suppressed ancient erotica, and there’s Karen Russo’s film about the Externsteine rock formations beloved of Heinrich Himmler and present-day neo-Pagans alike. Finally, Roger Hiorns caps this cultural pick-and-mix by vertically suspending a jet engine in Lincoln Cathedral. If only more venues were open to this degree of creativity.
Various venues, Sat 2 Feb to 7 May
RC Photograph: Gert Jan Van Rooi
It’s William Scott’s centenary and, to mark the occasion, the mid-20th century British painter’s work will be all over the UK this year (including The Hepworth in Wakefield and Ulster Museum, Belfast), thanks to an evolving series of shows kicking off at Tate St Ives. “I find beauty in plainness,” said Scott, a value he stuck to while shifting back and forth between figuration and abstraction. His Matisse-esque early nudes and still lifes of the 1930s aim for directness with their simple shapes and earthy hues. A trip to the States in the 1950s might have opened Scott’s eyes to the possibilities of abstraction, but at heart he considered himself a European painter, preferring Chardin’s intimate 18th-century still lifes to Jackson Pollock’s drips.
Tate St Ives, to 6 May
SS Photograph: PR
