Georg Baselitz, Lewes
With their fevered – if coded – expression of his country’s buried traumas, the postwar German art great Georg Baselitz’s paintings have always been a touch operatic. Whether he’s depicting fragmented limbs, eagles, or the dark forests of 19th-century German romantic painters, his work always points to one thing: the finely wrought link between Teutonic culture and Nazism. He’s a great first choice to kick off what will be a regular art commission at the opera event of the summer, the Glyndebourne festival. In recent decades, Baselitz’s trademark has been upside-down paintings (for an upside-down world). His works for the festival, however, push this topsy-turviness one step further, spinning constellations of four heeled, dancing legs, with titles referencing German composers as well as hurdy-gurdy tunes. For all the apparent playfulness, though, it’s hard not to think of the Nazi love of Wagner and folk culture. Indeed, these musical limbs strongly suggest swastikas.
White Cube at Glyndebourne Opera House, Thu to 30 Aug
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William Hogarth, Bristol
Bristol Museum is staging the largest Hogarth show ever seen in the south-west, thanks to major loans from Tate combined with its own prints collection. Bringing to life the full range of the 18th-century artist, beyond his ribald satires of London life, it features conversation pieces such as The Strode Family: here a well-to-do city merchant and his titled bride are shown drinking tea with their relatives, performing the polite chitchat needed to make old and newly emerging classes gel. Other highlights include such landmark works as his painting of The Beggar’s Opera, cannily suggesting a collapse between art and life, and a self-portrait with his pug. It’s wonderfully pungent stuff, packed with hidden meaning.
Bristol Museum And Art Gallery, Sat to 31 Aug
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Karen Kilimnik, London
Karen Kilimnik has always painted her passions, though those passions veer wildly, from history painting to Scarlett Johansson, The Avengers and Swan Lake. There’s an endearing, “public opinion be damned” quality to it, though it’s made Kilimnik a hugely influential art star of the past three decades; her sincere whimsy blowing sweet fresh air through knowing postmodern irony. Her latest offerings are typically charming, daydreamy and elusive. They include moody blue landscapes riffing on the golden age of Dutch Delftware: in one, a long road stretches into the distance past trees and a lonely house. For Kilimnik, this former plate decor has become the scene of a great escape from the horrors of the second world war, across the Polish countryside. It’s a subject that fascinates the artist, though her obsessions here aren’t always so weighty. Most deliciously, another work references Fairy Liquid, with a sprite shining pots in a Chardin still-life.
Sprüth Magers, W1, Wed to 20 Jun
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Siân Macfarlane, Walsall
What with the art world’s increasing concern with fact and fiction crossovers, the roles of museum and gallery become at times almost indistinguishable. Here, artist Siân Macfarlane presents a multilayered film that is immersed in the spirit of a time and place, dredging up historical curios, archiving apparent banalities. Picking up on Walsall’s social history, from medieval pageants through to the famous Illuminations, Macfarlane’s props of museum memorabilia hint at historical veracity, but the overall effect is of some kind of psychogeographical dream.
The New Art Gallery Walsall, to 26 Jul
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Ida Ekblad, Gateshead
The central installation here was first created as a stage set for Nick Payne’s Constellations, a play based on the premise that we all inhabit simultaneous parallel universes. Uncanny coincidences or serendipitous surprises are very much the focus of Ida Ekblad’s assemblage art: there’s an air of the dystopian survivor about the Norwegian artist, as she fashions lyrical abstracts from salvaged scraps of metal, concrete and fishing nets. She has adapted the collage tradition of Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg to the free-roaming poetic decadence of Charles Baudelaire’s flâneurs and Guy Debord’s dérives. It’s a deceptively innocent, maybe even desperate, ritual. Committed to making cryptic use of whatever she comes across in her daily round of urban scavenging, with similar mystery she states: “I cannot be concerned with its death, when working at it makes me feel so alive.”
BALTIC, to 31 Aug
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The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, Manchester
The inaugural exhibition at Manchester’s spanking new arts centre takes its title from Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick: who can understand it?” Despite its seemingly downbeat focus, the theme turns out to be all-embracing. Indeed, as the exhibition co-curator Sarah Perks observes, “If there’s one thing everyone has in common it must be heartbreak.” And an international array of contemporary artists sadly couldn’t agree more as they take on the subject of love, loss and terminal disenchantment. Irina Gheorghe’s installation sets the lachrymose tone with coded notebooks compiled by the artist as a schoolgirl. Then Douglas Coupland’s Slogans For The Twenty-First Century chimes in with “THE THOUGHT OF BEING LESS CONNECTED THAN YOU ARE RIGHT NOW IS IMPOSSIBLE.”
HOME, Fri to 26 Jul
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Shirazeh Houshiary, London
Like her peer Anish Kapoor’s optical illusions, Shirazeh Houshiary’s abstractions can be deceptive. From afar her latest canvases resemble delicate explosions of watercolour in lilac and blue, suggesting both cosmic and earthly phenomena, galaxies of stars, skies filled with tumbling clouds. Within these bursts of pigment, however, are swirling strands of tiny, indecipherable words. As language it’s unreadable but, given her past interest in meditative or even spiritual states, perhaps she’s suggesting we forget reason and simply go with it.
Lisson Gallery, NW1, Fri to 4 Jul
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