Folkestone Triennial: A Million Miles From Home
Three years ago the debut Folkestone Triennial was a triumph, exploring the town's history in ways that were in turn witty, poignant and political. With Andrea Schlieker at the helm again, this next instalment promises more lively insights. The social message is user-friendly in Brazilian artist Tonico Lemos Auad's giant scratchcard wall installation. It conceals images of parades in Folkestone and Brazil, but also calls to mind those for whom the lottery represents the only hope of a better life. Martin Creed has created elevator music for the Victorian Leas Lift, one of only four water-balanced funicular lifts still active in the UK. The crowd-puller should be a face-off between two aquatic creatures: Cornelia Parker's bronze mermaid, and Charles Avery's 20-foot sea monster merging horse, snake, fish and wallaby.
Sat to 25 Sep, folkestonetriennial.org.uk
Skye Sherwin
Twombly and Poussin: Arcadian Painters, London
Cy Twombly once said he'd liked to have been Nicolas Poussin. Indeed, the American abstract expressionist is a self-conscious protege of the great intellectual elitist of 17th-century painting. Poussin created elegant linear harmony and rigorous order in distinguished classical or religious subjects but also charged depictions of Arcadian abandon. This exhibition unites their work under themes including anxiety, myth, Venus and Eros. It would be worth seeing for the inclusion of Poussin's Sacraments alone, his series exploring the meaning of the Christian sacraments from Baptism to Penance, considered a zenith of western art. The show also premieres art film-maker Tacita Dean's 16mm portrait of Twombly, a study of the art titan in his studio in Lexington, Virginia.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21, Wed to 25 Sep
Skye Sherwin
Paul Etienne Lincoln, London
Lincoln's installations are poetic machines of labyrinthine complexity. Resembling a refined version of Terry Gilliam's steampunk creations, they often take years to realise, with each component breeding metaphors and referencing intricate histories. Often they're too complex or expensive to actually create. In fact failure and loss is central to Lincoln's project, and this show focuses on his print publications, a film, and models detailing unrealised works. The centrepiece is a scale model referencing the English physicist Michael Faraday, baroque music and local butterflies; it consists of a mechanical flower cutter, triggered by a recording of Bach to cut a maze in a bed of genetically modified pansies.
South London Gallery, SE5, Thu to 18 Sep
Skye Sherwin
Constellations, Manchester
An exhibition of art that changes and disperses throughout the gallery during its summer-long run, these are art objects that aspire to states of next-to-nothingness. Kitty Kraus's Untitled is a pile of melting ice infused with black ink which leave its rather lovely spillage to dry across the gallery floor. F�lix Gonz�lez-Torres's Untitled is a pile of posters that visitors are invited to take away until the title refers to a spacial blank. In complementary contrast is a show of paintings by Magda Archer appropriately titled Crazy Mad (to 7 Aug). Archer has rebuilt her "beautiful cosy grotto" studio in the gallery to present her collection of intensely concentrated kitsch imagery. "I like to concentrate so hard my eyes are watering," she says.
Cornerhouse, to 11 Sep
Robert Clark
Matt Stokes, Gateshead
Matt Stokes turns the focus of his photo and video art so much on the various peculiarities of punk, northern soul, acid house and rave that his work amounts to something of a cultural anthropological homage. He points out the spontaneity of such phenomena, their determined ability to at least temporarily sidestep mainstream capitalist containment, and their self-contained cultural coherence in a world of cultural dissipation and uncertainty. Stokes celebrates the moves, the clothes and an often unassuming creative spirit that, at its most refreshing, doesn't give a damn whether it's called art or not.
Workplace Gallery, to 30 Jul
Robert Clark
Ren� Magritte, Liverpool
When the Comte de Lautr�amont described his ideal beauty as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella" he defined a new kind of hybrid reality that was to revolutionise 20th-century culture. It is precisely this air of extreme incongruity that has enabled the Belgian Ren� Magritte's work to outlast that of his more predictably wacky French and Spanish surrealist colleagues. Magritte's chief protagonist was not some decadent dreamer or shaman but an apparently thoroughly bourgeois bowler-hatted businessman, the otherworld doppelganger of the deadpan artist himself. But the world in which he operated was one of continuously shifting realities. Curtains, windows, stage sets and a levitating apple cast an air of uncertainty on where the old reality ended and the new weird one began.
Tate Liverpool, to 16 Oct
Robert Clark
Bold Tendencies, London
The summer show organised by young gallerist Hannah Barry on top of a multi-storey car park in Peckham is becoming a regular highlight of the capital's art calendar. Serving culture-parched Londoners some much-needed refreshment in the dry summer stretch, in addition to sculpture installed around the asphalt, it has the draw of an open air bar-restaurant offering a bracingly urban view of the south London skyline. This year ups the stakes with commissions by the likes of Romanian art star Mircea Cantor, whose work collides folk tradition and capitalism; and German-Iranian Bettina Pousttchi, best known for her large-scale photo sculptures. Meanwhile, home girl Jess Flood Paddock's savvy special project is a riff on Peckam's beloved fictional son Del Boy and his notorious old banger, a Robin Reliant van.
Peckham Rye Multi-Storey Car Park, SE15, Thu to 30 Sep
Skye Sherwin
Maurizio Anzeri, Gateshead
The raw materials of Maurizio Anzeri's art couldn't be more banal: 1930s and 40s black-and-white portrait photographs salvaged from junk markets and an embroidery more fitting to the therapeutic meticulousness of the craft shop than to the grand ironic gestures of the white cube gallery. But what he conjures from such unlikely elements is something else altogether. The apparent respectability and posed sobriety of the portraits is infiltrated with a baroque elaboration of finely sewn colours whose delicacy is contradicted by an implication of ritualised defacement. It's as if the early 20th-century Dadaist collages of Hannah H�ch and Raoul Hausmann have been combined with a goth-tribal culture of tattoos and piercings very much of our time. Maybe Anzeri's work would look somewhat formulaic (and admittedly it does get pretty close at times) if it didn't come on so small and so unassuming, so sad and charming.
BALTIC, to 2 Oct
Robert Clark
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/25/cy-twombly-nicolas-poussin-magritte
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