Lucy Austin, That Art Gallery, Bristol
Lucy Austin’s solo show at That Art Gallery includes paintings from her series Shelf Life, which features collaged, layered surfaces of flattened cardboard packaging from soap, toothpaste, tea and biscuits. Holes or ‘windows’ in the packaging reveal Austin’s energetic under-painting, with further layers of black felt, hessian and fine linear ink drawings made on transparent rice paper. Austin’s layering process is slow: it takes her two to three years to complete each painting. She describes the earlier works in this series as ‘emerging from a first layer of dark indigo… they are paintings for our austere times’. (EW)
Until 28 September 2019. www.thatartgallery.com
Europe After The Rain, Newlyn Art Gallery, Newlyn
This group exhibition, curated by artist Simon Faithfull, borrows its title from Max Ernst’s 1942 surrealist painting Europe After The Rain II, which depicts a haunting future landscape. The show, which features film, photography, painting and installation by international artists including Larry Achiampong, Melanie Manchot and Karen Bos, imagines a world in transition, presenting visions of dystopian terrains and artefacts from possible futures. ‘Europe After The Rain’ runs parallel to ‘Fathom‘, a solo show of film and photography by Faithfull at The Exchange in Penzance. (EW)
Until 5 October 2019. www.newlynartgallery.co.uk
Look At This, Arts Building x Skip Gallery, London
Skip Gallery is an ongoing collaborative project that commissions artists to create publicly-sited interventions within a common or garden skip. For ‘Look At This’, the gallery’s largest show to date, it re-presents five of its previous projects by artists David Shrigley, Gavin Turk, Richard Woods, Paul Kindersley and Maja Djordjevic, alongside new interventions by Baker & Borowski and Sarah Maple. For his work Upgrade, Woods has upturned one of the cartoon-style bungalows that first appeared in his work Holiday Home into a skip full of builder’s rubble to create what appears to be a comment on gentrification and London’s over-inflated property market. Maple’s The World As We Know it is a bold text-based work that seeks to challenge our preconceptions about society and culture. (SP)
Until 15 September 2019. www.skipgallery.com
Platform Graduate Award 2019, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford
Modern Art Oxford launches its 2019 series of solo exhibitions by recent fine art graduates who have been selected for the Platform Graduate Award 2019. First up, Ruskin School of Art alumnus Grace Robertson will present a body of work that foregrounds a commitment to drawing as a contemporary practice. Through a series of performances taking place as part of the show, Robertson will seek to rearticulate her drawings using a system of interactive fragments, recycled materials, writing and sound. Robertson’s exhibition, which continues until 15 September, will be followed by solo shows by Amy Richardson (19-29 September), and Kulsuma Monica Khatoon (3-13 October). Platform Graduate Award exhibitions also take place at Turner Contemporary, Margate and Aspex, Portsmouth during October, and MK Gallery, Milton Keynes in November. (SP)
Until 13 October 2019. www.modernartoxford.org.uk
Tim Mitchell: Product, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland
‘Product’ brings together two bodies of photographic works by Tim Mitchell that track the birth and death of our clothes. In the first series, created across six years when he was an uninvited artist-in-residence at Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks, Mitchell provides an eyewitness account of how desire for fashion is created through enormous spectacle involving multi-million pound budgets. Alongside this, a body of work created with the anthropologist Dr Lucy Norris plots the processes by which our clothes end their lives – being herded together in warehouses, stripped of their identities and marks of distinction, and shipped to the Indian subcontinent to be broken down. (SP)
Until 3 November 2019. sunderlandculture.org.uk
Selections by: Ellen Wilkinson and Stephen Palmer
Images:
1. Lucy Austin, Scavenger, 107×76 cm, acrylic and collage on canvas.
2. Nick Laessing (left), Max Ernst reproduction (right), in Europe After The Rain. Photo: Steve Tanner
3. Richard Woods, Upgrade, as part of ‘Look At This’, Arts Building x Skip Gallery.
4. Grace Robertson, A fly in three halves, 2019. Courtesy: the artist
5. Tim Mitchell, Product: Cast-off woolen clothing is sorted again in large warehouses in Panipat, now into basic colour groups, where it’s new value lies.
More on a-n.co.uk:
Park Hill Art Space: Sheffield’s new flagship artspace given planning permission
Curating disability part one: bringing the outsiders in
