Philip Guston, London
Philip Guston was well into his 50s when he became the artist we know today. Prior to his career as the premier painter of life as a twisted comic-book horrorshow, he was a leading light of New York’s deeply serious abstract expressionists. In the late 1960s, however, something snapped, and he turned his masterly brushwork to something new. Inspired by the Krazy Kat cartoons, Guston created a sharply politicised and deeply personal world peopled by goofy hooded Ku Klux Klansmen and hairy Cyclops balls (a stand-in for the artist). There’s the occasional guest appearance by Richard Nixon, with a supporting cast of old shoes, bottles and light bulbs. Whether painting everyday objects or sinister characters, however, his paintings bristle with a deep sense of unease.
Timothy Taylor Gallery, W1, Wed to 11 Jul
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Cornelia Baltes, Sunderland
Cornelia Baltes’s paintings escape their frames with high-spiritedness. Her seemingly artless daubs tend to leak out on to the walls like furtive murals and – accompanied by photographic, sculptural and written fragments – leave a treasure trail of mysterious clues, adding up to some highly cultured misbehaviour. Past imagery has included super-subtle abstracts and atmospheric landscapes as well as a graffiti menagerie, caricature portraits and severed tree trunks. Then, just when you get the impression that Baltes is giving us permission to laugh out loud, she undermines any levity with alarming precariousness and nightmarish shadow: one recent show in Cologne was titled There’s A Light And A Whistle For Attracting Attention.
City Library And Arts Centre, to 18 Jul
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James Turrell, King’s Lynn
Houghton Hall, the Norfolk country pile built for Walpole, is getting a psychedelic makeover thanks to James Turrell, chief luminary of the Los Angeles light and space art scene. Within its grounds, he’s installed works that recall what the future looked like from the 1960s: clean, minimal and literally glowing. Planes of coloured light shift and pool across walls, while a new commission will send slowly dancing light over the facade of the house each Friday and Saturday night. Turrell’s concerns, though, are both ancient and modern: his fascination with perception and the revelatory properties of light – of stars, sun or sky – is as old as man. In this vein, he’s installed one of his Skyspaces within a canopy of trees. There are no special effects, just a window to contemplate the sky’s changing light.
Houghton Hall, Sun to 24 Oct
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Pia Camil, Pablo Helguera, Pedro Reyes, Middlesbrough
Apparently, 2015 has been governmentally defined as the year of the UK in Mexico and the year of Mexico in the UK. Accordingly, MIMA welcomes three Mexican artists. Aiming “to slow down the process of mass culture production”, Pia Camil’s hand-dyed and stitched canvases sample imagery from garish Mexico City billboards for her charming abstractions. Pedro Reyes is being commissioned to join forces with Teesside choirs; and, if that’s not therapeutic enough, visitors are invited for a total mind, body and psyche workout in Pablo Helguera’s Addams-Dewey Gymnasium.
MIMA, to 6 Aug
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Stan Douglas, Dublin
Surely one of the coolest photo-artists around, Stan Douglas presents here his renowned series Midcentury Studio, Malabar People and Disco Angola, works redolent with psychological tension and a brooding high contrast, set against backgrounds of endless black. Even more enticing, however, is sure to be new film installation Luanda-Kinshasa, set in New York’s famed 30th Street Studio. The film reimagines a classic instance of record company mismanagement of a genius musician’s innovatory ambitions. In the early 1970s Miles Davis hoped to connect with a younger audience by recording unheard-of concoctions combining influences from Indian classical music and Karlheinz Stockhausen experimentations, a desire sadly thwarted by the album’s marketing campaign. Douglas’s film imagines Davis going further, and incorporating the genre of Afrobeat into his oeuvre.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 20 Sep
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Luke Fowler & Mark Fell, Glasgow
Luke Fowler has gained art-world renown for videos reinvestigating the enduring influence of marginalised cultural mavericks such as the controversial (anti-)psychiatrist RD Laing. Often described as “para-documentaries”, his films present revealing multiple perspectives conjured from archival finds and specially created evocative footage. In contrast, Mark Fell is a multi-disciplinary artist-musician with a penchant for high-wired electronica and algorithmic structures. His work is complex, hypnotic and deeply penetrating. With typical daring, they collaborate here on a film about the historical legacy of Pavilion, an 80s and 90s Leeds venue that retains some claim to have been the UK’s first gallery for the exclusive showing of the newly emerging genre of feminist photography.
The Modern Institute, to 4 Jul
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Carsten Höller, London
It’s hard to think of a better artist to fill the Hayward’s famously crowd-pleasing summer slot than Carsten Höller. As with the giant slides this celebrated trickster installed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall nine years ago, his shows can be as much fairground as exhibition. Here, the fun includes robotic beds travelling around galleries, as well as two new slides snaking down the outside of the building; plus, for the truly adventurous, flying machines installed on the roof. It’s more than playground kicks that fascinate Höller, though. As his installation of giant hallucinogenic mushroom sculptures suggests, he’s interested in how our learned perception of the world can be upended.
Southbank Centre: Hayward Gallery, SE1, Wed to 6 Sep
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