Jim Shaw, London
To what extent the private individual can be separated from the culture that spawned them is one of the abiding questions thrown up by Jim Shaw’s work. In Shaw’s case, that culture is American, and while no definite answer is ever reached in work that includes painting, ink drawing, sculpture and more, it certainly looks as if the artist, and indeed the person (for he says his work is deeply personal), is inextricably tied up with US pop culture. Shaw had a huge retrospective this autumn at the New Museum in New York but Londoners will be able to sample just a particular body of work. In this new series, the artist has painted iconography referencing DC comics, 1970s rock, Hollywood films and detective novels – images sifted from the artist’s own adolescence – on to sections of used theatre backdrops.
Simon Lee Gallery, W1, Thu to 9 Jan
OB
Diango Hernández, Llandudno
Questions about how art translates from one society to another are raised in the work of the Cuba-born, Germany-based Diango Hernández. Would The End Of Stress, in which a watermelon, orange, banana and wood are secured on top of each other, be read differently if the viewer was in Havana, the artist’s Dusseldorf base or, indeed, a Welsh seaside town? While visitors to the show may see this sculpture as exotic, his Cuban compatriots, in a country where these fruits are farmed, would be sure to disagree. The exhibition title, Time Islands And Space Islands, perhaps suggests that the globalised world is not as homogenous as is commonly thought.
OB
Safe, Manchester
As we are force-fed another serving of new dietary research and seduced by promises of semi-immortality by the media seemingly every day, here’s an exhibition that asks: “Are you allergic to the 21st century?” The show takes its title and focus from director Todd Haynes’s 1995 film, which stars Julianne Moore as a housewife confined to the claustrophobic suburbs of LA’s San Fernando valley. Nine contemporary artists take up the film’s suggestion that paranoia might reveal the true picture. Accordingly, it’s a show that will leave us itching with hidden threats as videos, photographs, sculptures and performances by the likes of Yoshua Okón, James Richards, Jala Wahid and Camilla Wills delve into prosthetic mutations, gastric monstrosities and wallpaper prints that give the impression of spreading like pictorial infections.
RC
Right Here, Right Now, Salford
Alongside LS Lowry’s paeans to industrial gloom, 16 international artists present work created during the last five years through digital technologies. Here are elements of artificial intelligence, sound sampling, sexual voyeurism and oppressive surveillance. Artists show themselves as being as vulnerable to the addictions of social media and Xbox as the rest of us, only more reflectively so. Mishka Henner’s Google Earth aerial photographs of Texan oilfields and a cyanotype of a post-industrial wasteland by Felicity Hammond use relatively basic techniques to astute effect.
RC
Sabine Moritz, London
Tragedy and trauma are recurring themes in the murky paintings of Sabine Moritz. Limbo, a 2013 exhibition staged in New York, saw the artist reflect on the events of 9/11; they grew out of the three days after the terrorist attacks Moritz spent stranded in Nova Scotia when her plane was diverted. A sense of claustrophobia and helplessness is present in other work, too: three children shiver on a doorstep in one painting of the same year; military helicopters on combat operations and the hazy, anonymous figures of uniformed personnel are regular motifs. While Harvest, the title of this exhibition by the Cologne-based artist (she was taught by Gerhard Richter, to whom she is now married) might suggest more bucolic work, she sticks to form, contrasting the renewal of nature to the destructive tendencies of man. It’s a melancholy portrait of a violent world.
Pilar Corrias, W1, Fri to 14 Jan
OB
Qwaypurlake, Bruton
The Somerset town of Bruton has a long history of flooding: in the past, large parts of the town have found themselves under four inches of water. With that in mind, dystopic narrative curator Simon Morrissey’s group exhibition of 17 artists, in which Somerset has been submerged in water and humans are either evacuated or left to a precarious existence, is perhaps not so fantastical. David Wojtowycz’s 2012 film The Lake opens the show and sets its eerie tone. A jetty stretches out into a deep blue sea – the light is post-apocalyptic – the water still to one side but inexplicably choppy the other. If the human is absent from this opening gambit, any sense of our modern world remains starkly missing throughout this ambitious venture: sculptures from Michael Dean, Richard Deacon and Elisabeth Frink, among others, are variously totemic, mystical or organic in form.
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Sat to 31 Jan
OB
Another Minimalism: Art After California Light And Space, Edinburgh
As New York became the centre of the 1960s and 70s art world with abstract expressionism and pop, artists on the east coast had different adventures, represented here by Larry Bell’s Cube #15 (Amber) – a translucent plastic box full of thin air – and Robert Irwin, whose white disc nearly disappears into the gallery wall. Also showing are contemporary artists influenced by minimalist precedents. Olafur Eliasson and Ann Veronica Janssens’s work hovers in coloured mists. Yet the tendency to focus on the elusive is most striking in Uta Barth and James Welling’s photographs.
Fruitmarket Gallery, Sat to 21 Feb
RC
