Tim Stoner, London
There is an Ernest Hemingway poem from 1923 which observes that there is no such thing as nightlife in Spain: “They stay up late but they get up late. That is not night life. That is delaying the day.” The new paintings by Tim Stoner showcased in this exhibition are informed by the years the Essex-born artist spent living in Andalucía, and are full of anonymous, often silhouetted figures busy, delightfully, delaying the day. Worked in the colours of a landscape saturated by a sun high in the sky or the bathed blues of a warm, cloudless evening, and depicted in blocky forms reminiscent of Matisse’s cut-outs or Joan Miró’s surrealism, are scenes of unashamed leisure, from the swelter of beach life to the bubbling exuberance of a bar with midnight long past.
Modern Art, EC1, Fri to 13 Feb
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Giacomo Manzù, London
In 1919, aged 11, Giacomo Manzù apprenticed as a wood-carver. From thereon, the adolescent years of this Italian shoemaker’s son were spent in the company of first a gilder and then a stucco-worker. This formative time resonates through his sculptures, which demonstrate extraordinary skill against their unnerving simplicity. Although Manzù rejected the academic pretensions of his modernist-inclined peers (he once said: “For me there is just work”), he nonetheless radically modified the traditions of realism to his own ends. Despite his fame as a religious sculptor, his busts form the core of this exhibition, alongside the artist’s sketch work.
Estorick Collection Of Modern Italian Art, N1, Fri to 3 Apr
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Larissa Sansour, Nottingham
London-based, Jerusalem-born artist Larissa Sansour approaches the semi-surreal and apocalyptic predicament of present-day Palestine through videos evoking parallel dimensions. A Space Exodus, a witty and sad remake of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, shows a female astronaut planting the familiar black, white, red and green flag against vertiginous sci-fi panoramas, as a voiceover intones: “One small step for Palestinians, one giant leap for mankind.” Meanwhile, the futuristic skyscraper of her Nation Estate has separate floors designated for each Palestinian city. The storylines might seem ingenuous, but are carried off with media-buff panache. Nation Estate features the slick and stylish interiors of the classiest TV advertising, and her redemptive film In The Future, They Ate From The Finest Porcelain – which gets its UK premiere here – is rhythmically edited for haunting impact.
New Art Exchange, Fri to 13 Mar
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Edgar Martins & Jordan Baseman, Liverpool
Edgar Martins and Jordan Baseman present appropriately mystified and mystifying perspectives on death. Created following research with the Institute Of Legal Medicine And Forensic Sciences in Portugal, Edgar Martins’s photographic inquiry into suicide features his trademark dark expanses. Meanwhile, via sequences of 35mm archival slides, Jordan Baseman’s Deadness ponders why some of us need the reassurance of viewing a lost loved one. The banal carousel of the slideshow, reminiscent of interminable family get-togethers, frames an exploration of art’s greatest subject.
Open Eye Gallery, Fri to 3 Apr
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Benoit Platéus & Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, London
Benoit Platéus’s photographs are characterised by their bleached-out processing, a flash of seemingly ethereal – but, in actual fact, chemical – light that all but obliterates the picture’s surface. While examples of those works might not be represented here, the artist’s interest in surfaces and the makeup of colour most certainly is. For the past five years Platéus has been saving the empty bottles from the chemicals used in his photographic works. To these he adds pigmented resin that mixes with the remnant colour of the developer or fixer, hardening in the containers as barely diffused blocks of dye. The sculptures that have resulted will be exhibited here this month alongside the “black paintings” of fellow Belgian artist Jean-Baptiste Bernadet, the latter swirling abstract mixes of dark paint wiped on large canvases with sheets of paper.
Almine Rech Gallery, W1, to 22 Jan
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JMW Turner, Edinburgh
As with just about every year for more than a century, this show has come around again, but it never ceases to brighten the midwinter gloom. Ever since the connoisseur-collector Henry Vaughan bequeathed his collection of 38 watercolours by Joseph Mallord William Turner to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900, the institution has honoured his stipulation that they be publicly shown only during January. It was an order intended to protect their delicate pigments from the fading effect of direct sunlight, and despite the subsequent invention of more sensitive lighting, it’s now felt that observing the tradition preserves the sense of occasion. And it is an occasion: the landscapes here may be modest in size but they achieve a transcendental grace through the reverence of particular features of real-life places. It’s unassumingly awesome work.
Scottish National Gallery, to 31 Jan
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The Artist Proposes, Sheffield
As the increasing popularity of “open studios” sessions attests, the public seem to relish a peek into the artist’s cloistered struggle, or some self-consciously tidied-up version of it, at least. Accordingly, Site Gallery’s annual Platform residency programme shifts the studio palaver into the public gallery with The Artist Proposes, a work-in-progress preview of six artists’ work. The first finished fruits will come from collaborative duo Lucy Beech & Edward Thomasson later in the month (19 Jan to 6 Feb). On past form, Beech & Thomasson are perfectly fitted for this kind of exercise: they work with local performers in a meticulously choreographed physical theatre in non-theatre settings, thus touching cleverly on aspects of play-acting in real life.
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• This article was amended on 11 January 2016 to update the main image, and to correct the date the exhibition at the Almine Rech Gallery ends, from 23 January to 22 January.
