Bridget Riley, Sheffield
By 1968, when Bridget Riley had become the first UK artist – and woman – to win the Venice Biennale international grand prize for painting, her dazzling abstract images had become so widely ingrained in the swinging 60s zeitgeist that she must have felt the need for new avenues. Venice And Beyond, Paintings 1967-72, charts the transformation of her work from geometric monochromes to abstractions of graceful radiance. Gone are the flashy illusionistic tricks, the grids, zigzags and spirals that sent her audiences’ woozy. In their stead are shimmering fields of colour and more atmospheric depths. In Late Morning 1, for instance, the painter seems to evoke the resonance of sunlight through a fine blind of pastel-shaded verticals. As the artist said of this belated penchant for colour: “Unstable and incalculable, it is also rich and comforting.”
RC
New Art West Midlands, Birmingham
With work by 43 recent graduates from five local art schools, selected by the ICA’s Katharine Stout and artists Sonia Boyce and John Stezaker, New Art West Midlands provides a taste of up-and-coming trends. Despite mounting pressures, art departments still provide a precious opportunity for aspiring artists to establish self-belief. And it shows here, with distinctive images of individual identity. Tina Mirsharifi’s series Look At How Authentic We Are depicts a veiled couple snapping selfies, while Kyle Cartlidge’s Doubt Adorns The Head That Wore The Crown The Night Before is a painted portrait topped with a daubed expressionist mask.
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Rose Wylie, Cardiff
Rose Wylie’s Black Strap (Red Fly) depicts, in the artist’s typically basic rendering, a woman staring at a house. She is flanked by two giant bugs, one red, one black. It’s characteristic of Wylie’s odd paintings, populated by fantastical characters dancing across dreamlike, if not Freudian, landscapes. Here’s the Queen Of Sheba, there’s Philip Seymour Hoffman. Here’s a dining table set out in the desert, there’s a stork worrying a pitched tent. Yet it would be unwise to take these subjects at face value, as it would be to attempt a symbolic reading. Stylistically, Wylie’s work is reminiscent of Philip Guston, but the anarchy brings William Burroughs to mind. More power, then, to the institution that tries to bring curatorial order to the painter’s real subject: wilful, exuberant, disorder.
OB
Neoliberal Lulz, London
Our personalities are a resource for corporations, from Facebook selling “friendship” to the data companies that leach information about our spending habits. The artists in this group show are staging a fightback. Jennifer Lyn Morone has registered herself as a company, with shares in herself available. A video documents the artist-company’s development of software that will allow users to sell for themselves the data they produce. Emilie Brout and Maxime Marion’s The New Gold Diggers is an installation of gold-coloured product samples. Clearly cheap tat, they act as an analogy for neoliberal values; all that glitters, and all that.
Carroll/Fletcher, W1, to 2 Apr
OB
Imran Qureshi, London
Imran Qureshi’s work comes in a variety of scales. His terrifying red paint-splattered installations, with the appearance of a massacre – often shown outside – are shocking. Yet here, the Lahore-born artist is working in his other main medium, the Pakistani tradition of miniatures. These intricate paintings, rendered in gouache on handmade wasli paper, are in no way any less dark. Qureshi’s work is reflective of the corrosive history that has beset Pakistan, from the military rule he was born into to the country’s modern terrorist atrocities. Some of these paintings revisit the red splatters of his larger installations, as if the work itself has been caught in the crossfire; others are subtler but no less affecting. A series of miniatures from 2014 depict trees, all bucolic until we meet the symbolism of a single work, Rise And Fall, in which one trunk lays felled, undermining all those that stood before it.
Barbican Centre: The Curve, EC2, Thu to 10 Jul
OB
Performing For The Camera, London
The so-called “truth-claim” of photography – that the medium is a faithful replicator of reality – has long been debunked. Yet most of the emphasis has been placed on the photographer as manipulator, as they set the frame and conditions, and control the edit (that’s before even considering the effect that Photoshop has had). This exhibition sets out to remind us that, so long as the subject is aware they are in front of a lens, their actions will change. A pose will be thrown, an image projected, a performance made. The curators display an array of artists who have acted up for the camera, from the early experiments of the 1800s to 20th-century pioneers of identity politics such as Cindy Sherman and Hannah Wilke, to the much-hyped “Instagram artist” Amalia Ulman.
Tate Modern, SE1, Thu to 12 Jun
OB
Nothing Happens, Twice, Preston
It’s a sign of our times that Samuel Beckett is a quotable figure of choice for so many artists: this group show’s title is taken from a critic’s description of Waiting For Godot. So here we get absurdities with a tragicomic bent, from Hilde Krohn Huse smashing duck eggs to Sally O’Reilly’s shoe narrating a lone monologue. Centrally, there’s also a film commission from Nathaniel Mellors, set in Preston’s brutalist bus station and featuring a metamorphosing plumber and a time-travelling toilet.
Harris Museum And Art Gallery, to 4 Jun
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