These 38 stunning landscape watercolours by the great 19th-century painter Joseph Mallord William Turner were given to the Scottish National Gallery in 1900 by Southwark-born Quaker and Turner fan Henry Vaughan. The collector asked that they should be exhibited each year only for the month of January to preserve their delicate tones from the effects of natural sunlight. The tradition continues even in these days of sophisticated and effectively harmless lighting techniques. This is a lovely wintertime way of reminding ourselves of just how Turner could conjure radiance out of humble watercolour paints. From The Rialto in Venice through to Wales’ Llanberis Lake set against the dramatic backdrop of Snowdon, Turner shows us just how magical an act simply looking at our world can be.
Scottish National Gallery, to 31 Jan Photograph: PR
Nicholas Keogh’s A Film About Bluebottles has been defined both as “tragic” and “darkly humorous”. Set to a soundtrack of big-band swing, corny pop and creepy movie music, the film focuses on said insects as they crawl across a sheet of white paper and – just as they reach the bait – get blasted by a 12-gauge shotgun. Keogh has established himself as a kind of backstreet shaman, devising a range of video scenarios and scrap-sculptural contraptions that ritually enact encounters between urban waste and the natural world. Also included here is his ramshackle soundsystem Bin Disco 5 (pictured). An assemblage of junk emblazoned with the slogan Special Brew – I Love You, this portable sculptural soundsystem was originally cobbled together for the prestigious Manifesta 5 international arts festival.
Golden Thread Gallery, to 15 Feb Photograph: PR
David Tremlett transforms the nature of spaces by painting abstract lines, arcs, circles and trapezoids directly on to the walls using pastel pigment mixed with engine grease (work pictured). So are these works painting, sculpture or some novel form of architectural interior design? The artist, obviously more concerned with the process of creation than with definitive classification, has described them as “flat sculpture”. As you enter each room the effect is seductively disorientating. Slabs of black and white are visually punctuated by geometric passages of primary colour.
Ikon Gallery, to 21 Apr Photograph: PR
An almost three-metre-high statue looms over the Sculpture Park lake. It is meticulously crafted from bronze, a material traditionally associated with monumental authority. Yet this is no figure of military power or inherited privilege lifted high above our common level by a podium-like plinth. It’s a casually dressed bloke (pictured) standing as if on any city-centre street corner and glancing down to check his smartphone. Tom Price takes the inherited conventions of civic statuary and gives them a simple yet surprisingly effective thematic twist. In the indoor Bothy Gallery stop-motion animations show the clay heads blinking creepily. Other bronzes are naked rather than nude, their awkward stances betraying all the embarrassing vulnerability of being caught with one’s pants down.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Sat 4 Jan to 27 Apr Photograph: PR
