Alan Smith and Bertrand Henry - Galerie Hus

Alan Smith, Trace 4, 1988

Bertrand Henry & Alan Smith: Archives Fugitives is showing at Galerie Hus, Paris, until 15 September 2012.

Alan Smith (a former Course Leader of Fine Art at the University of Gloucestershire) has made drawings which derive from intense observation of minute details of everyday life.  I work always from memory, not direct observation, using simply a pencil and eraser.  I’m fascinated by objects and images which have been forgotten or overlooked; so familiar that they become invisible. I believe it’s possible to take these images, hovering at the edge of our vision and, by imbuing them with fresh meaning, to reveal their emotional charge. (From Galerie Hus.) Read a critique by Joyce Cheng.

Alan Smith, Fugitive Archive 42011, 2011

Alan Smith, Fugitive Archive 132011, 2011

Alan Smith, Sans Titre 1, 1996

Bertrand Henry creates portraits and landscapes in very small format in India ink (and often in ballpoint pen). He redirects our gaze to a concept of place based on a poetic mix of imaginative vision and concrete reality. His concern is not reportage but in conveying an idea of landscape, ‘linked to memory’. (Rainer Michael Mason/Galerie Hus.)

Bertrand Henry

Jenny Saville - Modern Art Oxford

Jenny Saville, Atonement Studies: Central Panel (Rosetta), 2005-06

Jenny Saville is at Modern Art Oxford and the Ashmolean (23 June - 16 September 2012) and is the artist's first major, solo exhibition in a public gallery. Saville came to attention in the 1990s with her large  paintings of large bodies mapped out with contour lines indicative of planned surgical modification: women's engorged bellies, swollen breasts and thighs, shouting of anguished self-image in bloody gobs of pigment (Skye Sherwin in The Guardian). Her work has continued to focus on the female (and transgender) body and face; recent work includes drawings and paintings inspired by Renaissance Virgin and Child paintings.

Read an interview with Rachel Cooke: I want to be a painter of modern life, and modern bodies.

Jenny Saville, Fulcrum, 1997-99

Jenny Saville, Bleach, 2008

Jenny Saville, Entry, 2004-2005

Jenny Saville, Passage, 2004-2005

Jenny Saville, Reverse, 2003

Jenny Saville, Torso II, 2005

Sebastião Salgado: Genesis

Sebastião Salgado, A Dinka man, his skin covered with ash from burnt cowpats, to protect against insects and parasites, Southern Sudan, 2006

Sebastião Salgado: Genesis  will be at the Natural History Museum in April 2013. These images, published in The Guardian, are a sample from his eight year project to document the 'last wild places in the world': This is what is in peril, this is what we must save.

Sebastião Salgado, A bushman with a captured korhaan, or black-bellied bustard, Kalahari desert, 2008

Sebastião Salgado, A Dinka group at Pagarau cattle camp, Southern Sudan, 2006

Sebastião Salgado, A journey through the Old Testament, Tekeze river, northern Ethiopia, 2008

Sebastião Salgado, A Yali man in the Jayawijaya mountains of Irian Jaya, West Papua, Indonesia, 2010

Sebastião Salgado, The Brooks Range, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska, US, 2009

Sebastião Salgado, Valley that stretches from Lalibela to Makina Lideta Maryan, Ethiopia, 2008

Mary Fedden, 1915 - 2012

Mary Fedden, Feather and Two Stones, 2008

Mary Fedden died on 22nd June 2012. Read obituaries by Michael McNay and in The Telegraph.

McNay describes Fedden as an artist who brought to perfection a style that married a very English sensibility to a modern European one. Fedden's 'studiedly' naive still-lifes drew on an aesthetic associated with the work of British painters Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood as well as taking influence from Braque and Matisse.

Mary Fedden, Pink and Orange, 1966

Mary Fedden, Fish and Lemons, 2009

Mary Fedden, Flowers in a Jug, 2002

Mary Fedden, Red Jug

Mary Fedden, Red Table, Brown Jug, 2009

Andy Warhol: The Portfolios - Dulwich Picture Gallery

Andy Warhol, Marilyn, 1967

My favourite artist at my favourite gallery by my favourite architect...! Andy Warhol: The Portfolios is at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 16 September.

The exhibition presents a selection of Warhols screenprints made between 1962 and 1985. Read a review by Richard Dorment.

Andy Warhol, Birmingham Race Riot, 1964

Andy Warhol, Campbell's Soup II, 1969 (Oyster Stew)

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1970

Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali, 1978

Andy Warhol, Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century, 1980 (Franz Kafka)

Sir John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817 (photograph by richardr)

Sir John Soane, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1817 (photograph by Eric Hardy)

Yoko Ono: To The Light - Serpentine Gallery

Yoko Ono, still from Film No. 4 [Bottoms], 1966 (Watch the film here)

Yoko Ono: Into the Light is at the Serpentine Gallery until 9 September.

Ono was associated with the Fluxus Group in the 1960s: a loose, international collective founded by George Maciunas taking its cues principally from Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The optimistic aims of Fluxus were, according to Joseph Beuys, to purge the world of bourgeois sickness... of dead art, to promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote non art reality, and to fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action. (Walker, J.A. (1973) Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design, p94)

Ono's most celebrated work is, probably, Cut Piece (1965) a performance in which Ono knelt on the floor with a pair of scissors at her side: the audience was invited to cut off pieces of her clothing. Ono remained unflinching until there was no more to cut away.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Carnegie Hall, 21 March 1965 (Watch a film of the perfomance here)

Read a review of Yoko Ono: Into the Light by Adrian Searle, a profile by Charlotte Higgins, watch Ono perform with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; follow Yoko Ono on Twitter.

Bruce Nauman: Days / Soundworks - ICA

Bruce Nauman, Untitled, 2008

Bruce Nauman: Days at the ICA, 19 June - 16 September, is the UK premiere of a work which Nauman created for the 2009 Venice Biennale where he won a 'Golden Lion'. The work is a sound installation which presents a continuous stream of seven voices reciting the days of the week in random order. Fourteen flat panel speakers will be installed in the lower gallery, one voice emanating from each pair of speakers as the visitor passes between them. There are men’s voices and women’s voices, old and young. Some speak swiftly, others with pause, each with his or her own cadence. The collection of distinctive voices produces a chorus—at times cacophonous, at others, resonant—and creates a sonic cocoon that envelops the visitor. The work invokes both the banality and the profundity of the passing of each day, and invites reflection on how we measure, differentiate, and commemorate time. (Text from ICA and MoMA.)

Also 'showing' at the ICA is Soundworks: One hundred new sound works have been produced by artists from all over the world... The artists have been invited to submit a sound work, taking its stimulus from themes evoked in Bruce Nauman's 'Days', presented concurrently in the lower gallery, as part of our season on sound.(Text from the ICA,)

Listen to a selection of the soundworks here and more here.

Invisible: Art of the Unseen, 1957 - 2012 - Hayward Gallery

Yves Klein in the Void Room (Raum der Leere), Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, January 1961

Invisible: Art of the Unseen, 1957 - 2012 is at the Hayward Gallery until 6 August 2012.

Curated by Ralph Rugoff this exhibition aims to show that less is more. The historical starting point for the survey is Yves Klein's 'manifesto of immaterility' most fully embodied (?) in his exhibition Le Vide ('The Void') at the Iris Clert Gallery in Paris in 1958: the gallery was empty.

'Objects' included in the Hayward show include an invisible car (Carsten Holler), an invisible maze (Jeppe Hein), and an empty plinth (Tom Friedman) - though the column of air above the pinth has been cursed by a witch.

Read reviews by Laura Cumming, Jonathan Jones, Richard Dorment and Laura McLean-Ferris; read Ralph Rugoff's '10 Best Invisible Artworks'.

Gianni Motti, Magic Ink, 1989

Tom Friedman: Untitled (A Curse), 1992

Teresa Margolles, Aire/Air, 2003

Lai Chih-Sheng, Life-Size Drawing, 2012