1 Richard Wright
Scotland’s minimalist Michelangelo creates another beguiling environmental artwork. Wright uses paint, drawing, gilding and stained glass to shape delicate, suggestive, site-specific installations that simultaneously revel in tradition – recreating the lost arts of fresco and Renaissance perspective – and express the throwaway modern moment. Most of his works are destroyed after being exhibited, but since winning the Turner prize he has created more permanent pieces.
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, to 26 August
2 Painting on the Edge: A Historical Survey
The way Richard Wright reinvents painting as installation art is typical of the radical and subversive evolution of this ancient art. This exhibition examines how painters have made their medium almost unrecognisable while keeping faith with its magic. It ranges from Alberto Burri’s raw combinations of collage and painting and Marcos Girgorian’s earth paintings to Sheila Hicks, whose art is made from slung and suspended fibres. A chance to get to grips with one of modern art’s most fascinating borderlands.
Stephen Friedman Gallery, W1, 8 June to 29 July
3 Grayson Perry
Rude pots and satirical wall hangings galore in this bumper survey. Perry started out in the 1980s before making his name as a neo-artisan in the backlash against Damien Hirst-style conceptual art. His TV punditry is arguably better than his pottery, but he still produces lots of jokey and angry art. An inevitable summer smash, in spite of the technical hamfistedness.
Serpentine Galleries, W2, 8 June to 10 September
4 Hynek Martinec
Martinec’s grotesque reworkings of Renaissance and baroque paintings are both strange and highly interesting. His macabre obsession with death and decay evokes the Prague mannerist court of Rudolph II, the bizarre paintings of Arcimboldo who was cherished there, and the modern Czech surrealism of Jan Svankmajer.
Parafin, W1, to 15 July
5 Andrea Luka Zimmerman
This artist and film-maker uses her work as a vehicle for social and political comment. In Estate, A Reverie, she documents the last years of east London’s Haggerston Estate, telling stories of everyday survival and resistance. Taskafa: Stories of the Street features the late writer John Berger reading one of his stories against shots of Istanbul’s street dogs; while Merzschmerz sees the modern fairytales of Kurt Schwitters retold by children.
Spike Island, Bristol, to 18 June
