Our pick of this week’s art events: 14 – 20 August

RA Recommends

Published 14 August 2015

From the multi-sensory sculptures of Paul Neagu to an astronomy-inspired installation at the Whitworth, we guide you through the week’s top art events.

  • Beauty and Balance

    Kettle’s Yard at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 14 August – 30 April 2016
    Founder of Kettle’s Yard, Jim Ede, believed in the importance of creating aesthetic balance in a room to draw out the beauty of the artwork that filled it. His ideas were demonstrated in Kettle’s Yard by the considered way in which artwork was placed around furniture, glassware, ceramics and natural objects, each item working as part of a complimentary whole.

    As the house and gallery closes for major redevelopment work, it offers up its permanent collections to a number of offsite projects, including the exhibition Beauty and Balance in the Glaisher Gallery at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Viewers can experience paintings and sculptures by artists such as Joan Miró, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson in an altogether new setting.

  • View of Kettle's Yard extension showing the Buddha and works by Mario Sironi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson

    View of Kettle's Yard extension showing the Buddha and works by Mario Sironi, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Ben Nicholson

    Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, photo: Paul Allitt

  • Paul Neagu: Palpable Sculpture

    Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 13 August – 8 November 2015
    The Romanian-born artist Paul Neagu had a skill for gratifying all five senses through his phenomenological approach to sculpture. In his most extensive survey to date, Henry Moore Institute stages a selection of the artist’s sensory works including a number of his tactile boxes (below), edible sculptures, films, and drawings, paying homage to Neagu’s idiosyncratic artistic language and lasting influence on British sculptors Antony Gormley RA, Anish Kapoor RA and Rachel Whiteread, whom he all taught.

  • Paul Neagu, Object Tactile

    Paul Neagu, Object Tactile, 1970.

    Courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) © Estate of Paul Neagu / DACS London 2015.

  • June: A Painting Show and Tower

    Sadie Coles, London, until 15 August and Ibid, London, until 22 August 2015
    There has been an abundance of exciting group shows in London’s commercial galleries this summer, dovetailing with the Royal Academy’s own Summer Exhibition. With autumn fast approaching, this is your last chance to see two of the best, at Sadie Coles and Ibid. The former displays work by painters that rarely get shown in the city, such as Sylvia Sleigh’s realist nudes (below), while an extensive display of works on paper is on view at Ibid, from evocative drawings by Egon Schiele to the graffiti-like scribbles and pale washes of fellow Austrian Flora Hauser, a contemporary artist.

  • Sylvia Sleigh, Felicity Rainnie Reclining

    Sylvia Sleigh, Felicity Rainnie Reclining, 1972.

    Oil on canvas. 107.5 x 152.5 x 3 cm. Copyright the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.

  • Bedwyr Williams

    The Whitworth, Manchester, until 10 January 2016
    Back in 2013, Bedwyr Williams dazzled audiences at the Venice Biennale with his galactic sound and light installation, Starry Messenger. Williams reproduced the small tiles in the gallery’s Terrazzo floor on a mammoth scale, creating for the viewer a sense of being a mere fragment in the vastness of space. The Whitworth gallery reconstructs his astronomy-inspired piece, with the addition of new work by Williams and an assortment of drawings and wallpaper pulled from the Whitworth’s collection.

  • , Bedwyr Williams at the Whitworth

    Bedwyr Williams at the Whitworth, 2015.

    Photographer Michael Pollard.

  • Construction Industry: Contemporary Assemblage, Construction & Relief

    A.P.T Gallery, London, 13 August – 6 September 2015
    The Deptford-based gallery Art in Perpetuity Trust is playing host to the work of 15 contemporary artists, the common denominator being that each one draws on a particular aspect of modernist traditions associated with construction. Nearly 100 years since Constructivism emerged in Russia, this show demonstrates how radical ideas about construction and materiality are being embraced and explored by artists today.

  • John McLean, Traffic Yellow

    John McLean, Traffic Yellow, 2009.

    Steel, powder coated steel & powder coated aluminium. 266 x 140 x 85cm.