Revelations: Experiments In Photography, Bradford
All along, cameras have been used as much for extending human vision as for simply recording everyday appearances. This exhibition presents a broad range of such insights, most of them enabled through mind-boggling technical expertise, achieving a quite spooky, otherworldly grace. Here’s a bullet piercing an apple, an exploding bunch of roses, an x-ray of angel fish, a microscopic closeup of the proboscis of a hummingbird moth. Yet it’s not all museum-like documentary. The show’s best moments come as images by some big art world names are set alongside scientific enquiry. A 2009 photograph of a lightning field by Hiroshi Sugimoto is juxtaposed with an 1892 image by Alan Archibald Campbell of an electrical charge energising light-sensitive paper with something resembling a super-delicate fern frond.
National Media Museum, to 3 Feb
RC
Ceri Richards, Salisbury
A much-admired contemporary of Frances Bacon, Henry Moore and John Piper, Ceri Richards represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1962, and his work will be familiar to anyone who has admired the stained-glass windows at Derby Cathedral. Yet, for reasons that are unclear, and like so many British surrealists, his work has not been given its due in recent years. This is a crime: there’s much in Richards’s use of exuberant colour to admire; his references to Celtic imagery, sharp angular figuration and the acknowledged influence of poetry and music on the paint-handling and form-making are a delight. It is particularly the latter, Richards’s relationship with rhythm, that is explored here.
OB
Naufús Ramírez-Figueroa, London
There is something endearing about the work of Naufús Ramírez-Figueroa. Take the artist’s series of politically engaged performances and videos made under the title A Brief History Of Architecture In Guatemala, in which Ramírez-Figueroa’s scathing comment on the disastrous urban planning of his home country is made with a welcome, joyous, sense of ramshackle absurdity. A group stand naked bar a cardboard costume of a building (including the artist, who has also performed the work alone), each representing a different design style. A marimba band strikes up, the dancers dance badly to the music until their architectural outfits begin to fall apart, the littered ruins of the buildings a striking contrast to their unashamed, now naked, bodies. Expect a similar lightness masking cogent commentary in the two new sculptural installations, which concern conspiracy theories, archaeology and colonialism, made for this, the artist’s first solo show in the UK.
OB
Works To Know By Heart: An Imagined Museum, Liverpool
This exhibition, selected from the Tate, Centre Pompidou and MMK collections, takes inspiration from the novel Fahrenheit 451, in which the burning of books requires readers to learn them by heart. The show culminates in a special weekend after the official closing, when the art will be replaced by members of the public recalling the works. Only art that is almost charismatically memorable is included: a nightmare painting by Dorothea Tanning, a haunting study by Giorgio Morandi, a sample of Warhol’s silkscreens and a Sigmar Polke exercise in psychic hallucination.
RC
Elisabeth Frink, Nottingham
Here are more than 70 casts, maquettes and study drawings from the once highly popular Elisabeth Frink’s work in public sculpture. Emerging from a postwar Britain that was desperately trying to catch up on artistic innovations that had taken place for decades over the channel, Frink borrowed formal aspects of cubism and expressionism to feed the need for arty figures and animal statues to populate new towns and urban redevelopments. Yet her reliance on a rather formulaic geometry often comes over as inadvertently funny. Her heads tend to be so peculiarly simplified and symmetrical they come across as more futuristic than modernistic, like robotic versions of Easter Island carvings. Indeed, given the fact that they also all have a uncanny likeness to the artist’s distinctively bold and beautiful face, some of the most intriguing exhibits here will be the photos and films of the sculptor at work.
Lakeside Arts Centre, Wed to 28 Feb
RC
David Brian Smith, London
Describing the bare facts of David Brian Smith’s paintings, they might not sound promising. The British artist, born in 1981, likes to paint sheep, the fluffy beasts usually content in some rural idyll watched over by a shepherd (the profession of the artist’s father). Smith, winner of the Royal Academy’s landscape painting award in 2005, breaks the rural realism by tending to paint the scenes in bright pastel shades of yellow, pink and blue for the flock, a palette that isn’t exactly renowned for its sophistication. What is arrived at, however, when one is actually standing in front of one of these highly detailed works, is more interesting than the bald description might suggest. A sense of magical realism pervades in which the countryside is a supernatural, unearthly place. In Smith’s expert hands, the rural and picturesque are made strange and foreboding.
Carl Freedman Gallery, Wed to 23 Jan
OB
B Wurtz, Gateshead
US artist Wurtz conjures charms from consumer detritus – plastic netting, wood offcuts, coat hangers, takeaway trays – and this is an extensive survey of more than 40 years’ worth of junkyard assemblages. He brings the whole thing off with a disarming mock naivety, careful to leave all the joins showing, and reminding us of the sculptural fascination of plastic bags caught in trees or African countries’ re-use of cut-up cola cans for sculptures and trinkets. Some works might resemble dangling chandeliers, others precariously towering totem poles: it’s art for a wasted age.
RC
