Joe Fletcher Orr, Salford
Joe Fletcher Orr’s father used to take him to galleries to have a giggle at contemporary art. Accordingly, the young artist tends to dodge notions of artistic seriousness in his own creations. Rather, he offers up jokes, teases and impish sidesteps, playing with ideas of collaboration and what artwork should consist of. Past exhibitions have featured edible information printouts, a bouncy castle guarded by a real-life bouncer and even the artist’s own outline spray-tanned on to a gallery wall. For his second solo show the theme is Mummy’s Boy. His installation mixes plant pots created with his mother at a pottery class at home in Liverpool and professionally shot photographs of fruit bowls from the family home (such as Welcome Fruit), with the walls painted an especially nice colour she picked out at B&Q.
The International 3, to 29 Apr
RC
The Passion According To Carol Rama, Dublin
Carol Rama was a radical Italian artist who – in the face of various personal tragedies – claimed, “I paint to heal myself.” Her wayward lines, which in the work of lesser talents might appear clumsy, are a mark of psycho-sexual tension, while her sculptures – assembled from stretched bicycle tyres, taxidermy eyes, syringes and fingernails – have a fetishistic air. She was considered a strange outsider, both to fascist authorities in her early days and later to a male-dominated art world, a role she mockingly played up with a “mad cow” alter ego following the 1980s BSE epidemic. As such, she remained a little-known figure until she was belatedly awarded the Venice Biennale Golden Lion award in 2003.
Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 1 Aug
RC
Keiji Uematsu, London
Japan’s Mono-ha movement of the 60s and 70s has been enjoying something of a revival of late. Translated roughly as “school of things”, the work of Uematsu and his contemporaries was characterised by a formal interest in materials in their natural state – such as rocks, wood and glass – exhibited or photographed with very little in terms of intervention by the individual artists. In the left photograph of Uematsu’s 1973 diptych Vertical Position, for example, a block of wood stands in a doorway, while in the right the artist is shown pushing it against the lintel of the door frame. This simple transition asks viewers to consider questions of movement, gravity and the relationship between sentient and inanimate objects.
Simon Lee Gallery, W1, Fri to 6 May
OB
A Lesson In Sculpture With John Latham, Leeds
In 1967, John Latham was sacked from his lecturing post at St Martin’s School of Art for returning a library book that he had masticated, fermented and forced into a test tube. The event marked the beginning of four decades as a conceptual artist, as commemorated by this educational show. Featuring 16 Latham sculptures, it is divided into sections including Material Transformations and Matter, Physics And Process. It also includes a further 16 works by artists connected to his studiously irreverent approach, with Latham’s predilection for using burnt tomes (such as in Little Red Mountain) matched by the likes of Cornelia Parker’s My Soul Afire, a scorched hymnal salvaged from a church hit by lightning.
Henry Moore Institute, to 19 Jun
RC
Roman Opalka, London
French-Polish artist Roman Opalka embarked on his masterpiece, 1965/1-∞, in the year of the title, using a fine brush to meticulously paint millions of numbers in consecutive lines to reflect the passage of time. The artist, of course, understood the title of his project to be a misnomer: the work could never reach the number infinity, even if the creator himself were somehow immortal. Indeed, this cornerstone of conceptual art reached its end in 2011 when, a couple of weeks short of his 80th birthday, Opalka died. By that point the artist had dedicated more than half his life to the work, filling 233 canvases with in excess of 5.6 million numerals. Three of the paintings from 1965/1-∞ will be shown here, alongside examples of the artist’s photographic self-portraits, each of which were taken at particular milestones in this epic, somewhat melancholic endeavour.
Dominique Lévy, W1, Tue to 14 May
OB
Satoru Aoyama, London
If you’re mixing the craft of embroidery with contemporary art – as Tokyo-born Satoru Aoyama has since studying textiles at Goldsmiths College in the late 1990s – then sooner or later you’ll want to confront the legacy of Alighiero Boetti. The conceptualist’s best known works were his embroidered maps of the world produced throughout the 70s and 80s, the making of which he outsourced to a group of women in Afghanistan as a geopolitical gesture. For this new exhibition, Aoyama, now based back in Japan, explicitly enters into a dialogue with Boetti, having embroidered his own on a basic sewing machine. Seen in the dark, the fluorescent creations have a distinctly technological feel to them – a reference, perhaps, to the manner in which life in the 21st century is very different to the analogue age in which the Italian was working.
White Rainbow, W1, Wed to 7 May
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Glasgow International
Despite a purported focus on Glasgow’s industrial heritage, the 78 exhibitions and 50 live events that make up this seventh edition of Glasgow’s biennial extravaganza feature the work of 228 artists from 33 countries. One highlight is bound to be German artist Cosima von Bonin’s ecologically focused installation Who’s Exploiting Who In The Deep Sea?, bringing together mediums including textiles, music, video and sculpture. Elsewhere, a show at Kelvin Hall by local sculptor Claire Barclay should be worth a look, given her track record of enigmatic works (including 2008’s Shifting Ground). Overall, the thing to do is put a day or two aside, have a wander and be pleasantly surprised.
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