Compton Verney is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a blockbuster show of work by two superstars of international sculpture, much of it to be set within its always-enchanting 18th-century Capability Brown parkland. Auguste Rodin was perhaps the last great artist of 19th-century French Romanticism. His life-size figures appear always to be pitting a defiant humanism against the cruel twists and turns of fate and the inevitable fact of mortality. Alongside such detailed dramas, I wonder how the 20th-century Yorkshireman Henry Moore (work pictured) will fare, with his blobby hybrids of abstract modernism and the tame conventions of the art school life-class.
Compton Verney, Sat 15 Feb to 31 Aug
RC Photograph: PR
In the past year, Wysing’s artist-in-residence programme has seen international and local talents pass through the doors of the studio and gallery complex in the Cambridgeshire flatlands. This exhibition, bringing together work produced by 11 artists there, uses the writing of artist-activist Gustav Metzger and a Victorian sci-fi novel as a loose jumping-off point. Eschewing futurism, Cecile B Evans explores humdrum tech in her animation and ceramics. Meanwhile, scrambled stories come from film-maker Keren Cytter, whose new film Corrections (pictured) unpicks movie tropes, with two men plotting their parents’ murder, overlooked by witnesses.
Wysing Arts Centre, Sun 16 Feb to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Benedict Drew’s psychedelic video installations are a giddy, goofy trip into the dark side of 21st-century gadgets. Underscoring the element of thought control transmitted through the tech we love, his first show at Matt’s Gallery puts instructional speech and synthesized voices into the mix. In place of the subtle whispers of advertising or political leaning, however, his work offers a rowdy “escape route”. Weird, eerie futuristic music engulfs you in a room clad in white plastic, where you can gaze at images of ice-cream and legs. There are special effects and sets worthy of early Doctor Who, such as a cave of silver foil enlivened by an analogue synth arpeggio. Finally, while an astronaut spins in a film, talking head-like sculptures tell us how to be.
Matt’s Gallery, E3, Wed 19 Feb to 20 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
The 93-year-old Irish artist Patrick Scott stages a two-venue retrospective of his charming work, which takes in more than 140 pieces from the last 75 years. At the Irish Museum Of Modern Art there are earlier paintings in which everyday life is reduced to disarmingly simple visual signs: a skeletal tree, a diagrammatic fence, a cartoon woman carrying a pile of twigs on her head. In the later work presented at VISUAL, Scott returns – via a giant kite painting (six metres square and titled Kite!), a series of rainbow rugs and gold-leaf tables for meditation (pictured) – to his characteristic shade of almost transcendental grace.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, Dublin, Sun 16 Feb to 18 May & VISUAL, Carlow, to 11 May
RC Photograph: PR
Joana Vasconcelos’s sculptural constructions infect Manchester with a glimpse of the passionate yet melancholic culture of Portugal. This is less a display of separate pieces than a large-scale infiltration of the gallery’s space with a baroque celebration of pattern and colour. There’s an interwoven cascade of recycled beads, traditional Portuguese tassels and Manchester cotton velvets, alongside works with titles such as Tutti Frutti (pictured), and Islamic-influenced Portuguese tile-work.
Manchester Art Gallery, Sat 15 Feb to 1 Jun
RC Photograph: Unidade Infinita Projec
Sarah Wright arranges her prints from floor to ceiling on the gallery wall, which turns her separate, often fashion-style prints into a larger narrative. Images of a woman’s head sampled from a fashion magazine are superimposed with abstract circles and rectangles (pictured). Elsewhere, there are geometric diagrams whose significance seems purely enigmatic. The atmosphere tends to be visually muted and thematically introverted. Faces are turned away and images inverted. Various printmaking techniques are wielded to give oblique impressions. Banalities are interspersed with reveries to form a graphic stream-of-consciousness that is convincing for the systematic precision of its presentation. Whole sections of the walls are mirror-coated so viewers themselves get caught up in the ongoing visual collage.
Tramway, Sat 15 Feb to 2 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Ryan Mosley’s paintings are like a long night out that gets progressively darker as the intoxicants mount up and the crowd grows bigger and more unhinged. The London-based artist’s previous paintings saw a carnival crowd of troubadours, cowboys and cactus-men parade through a trippy, sexy and quietly menacing landscape. Working in an antique palette of mustards, sludge greens and dried blood reds, he made plenty of allusions to past greats, from Titian to Manet. His latest show sees him shake free the references to dive deep into his own delirious painterly world. Like Mosley’s Don Quixote figure enraptured by the landscape he paints, there’s plenty to get lost in.
Alison Jacques Gallery, W1, Fri 21 Feb to 15 Mar
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Germany’s renaissance masterpieces were deemed ugly by Victorian art’s gatekeepers and over half the National Gallery’s collection of Westphalian paintings were sold off in the mid-19th century. This show redresses the balance, and hoists up the gritty realism, honesty and human insight of the likes of Albrecht Dürer and unknown Swabian artists (work pictured). There’s an emphasis on world-weary faces and everyday life, rather than gods or saints.
National Gallery, WC2, Wed 19 Feb to 11 May
SS Photograph: PR
