Chester Contemporary: Centred on the Periphery
Chester-born artist Ryan Gander directs this new walking biennial, which features a spoken-word and choral work by Elizabeth Price, Swiss duo Fischli and Weiss, film by John Akomfrah, helicopter blades and a jet fighter in an abandoned shop by Fiona Banner, and much, much more, including Gander’s bespoke cocktails and an original themed tattoo.
• Around Chester, 22 September to 1 December
Ridykeulous
It’s queer, it’s feminist and it is against “heteropatriarchal culture at large” and, possibly, the art world. Phew. Ridykeulous, founded in 2005, uses humour as a weapon in this amalgam of installation and moving image. Artists Nicole Eisenman, AL Steiner and “guest dyke” Sam Roeck, present Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Inverted Wines and Deviant Videos.
• Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, 23 September to 7 January
Hélio Oiticica: Waiting for the Internal Sun
Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica was a glorious talent. A founder of Tropicália, his art was informed by Afro-Brazilian culture, hardcore abstraction and conceptualism. Late 1960s counterculture, life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, politics and exuberance, samba and capes, kitsch and cocaine, ecstatic colour, exile and loss are all in there.
• De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, 23 September to 14 January
Marina Abramović
Twice postponed but finally here: whatever you do, do not make eye contact or Marina will get you. That said, Abramović is a force of nature, a phenomenon. The RA’s retrospective of 50 years of confrontational performance works and encounters, many restaged by younger performers, as well as new works made for the exhibition, will be unmissable.
• Royal Academy, London, 23 September to 10 December
Rubens and Women
This baroque genius changed the way western art portrayed women, and was in huge demand from patrons such as French regent Marie de Medici. Rubens rejoices in bodies of all shapes and ages, in an art that liberates the flesh. Here we’ll see how his relationships with women inspired that abundance.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 27 September to 28 January
Sarah Lucas: Happy Gas
Lewd, ribald and provocative, Lucas’s work is as sophisticated as it is abject. With a great feel for form and presentation, her collisions of figures and furniture, kapok-filled tights, old mattresses, cigarettes and bronze are a bricolage of ideas and form, the found and the invented. Happy Gas is very much the artist’s own take on her art so far.
• Tate Britain, London, 28 September to 14 January
Frans Hals
The bumptious humanity of Hals’s people fills what should be an unforgettable show. This Dutchgolden age artist worked his entire life in the small city of Haarlem, portraying its people, from poor house supervisors to the poor. Is Hals in his honesty the peer of Rembrandt? This may prove it.
• National Gallery, London, 30 September to 21 January
Philip Guston
The controversial postponement of this travelling retrospective in 2020 led to the departure from Tate of one of its best senior curators. Guston was born in Montreal to a Jewish family that had fled Odesa, and his sour, caustic and melancholic paintings often featured hooded Ku Klux Klansmen and scenes of blunt stupidity and violence. Presaging Trumpism and the rise of the “alt-right”, along with a bleak view of his own temperament, Guston was a great painter for terrible times.
• Tate Modern, London, 5 October to 25 February
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine
The largest retrospective of the Japanese photographer to date. Sugimoto’s Time Machine includes black-and-white photographs of natural history dioramas, cinema interiors in which whole films are captured with a single long exposure, seascapes and portraits (whose subjects are the wax figures from Madame Tussauds), photos of buildings and intensely coloured photographs of prism-refracted light. Haunting, uncanny, beautiful and disturbing.
• Hayward Gallery, London, 11 October to 7 January
El Anatsui
This promises to be the most beautiful Turbine Hall spectacle in years. Perhaps Africa’s greatest living artist, and the most resourceful user of found stuff anywhere, El Anatsui, who comes from Ghana and is based in Nigeria, creates shimmering, painterly cascades of light and texture from everyday rubbish. He will make a cathedral of this space.
• Tate Modern, London, 10 October to 14 April
Nicole Eisenman: What Happened
Carousing queers in Brooklyn beer gardens and scenes of lesbian domesticity, the rise of the American right and Black Lives Matter: Nicole Eisenman charts her surroundings, and her personal and public life, in rich and complex paintings and sculptures that are by turns goofy, wry and adventurous.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 11 October to 14 January
Artes Mundi 10
Seven artists from around the world respond to environmental crises, the mismanagement of natural resources, conflict and the legacies of colonialism. Always fascinating, and with its £40,000 prize, the 10th edition of the Artes Mundi biennial has expanded across Wales. How many visitors will catch it all?
• National Museum and Chapter, Cardiff; Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea; Oriel Davies, Newtown; and Mostyn Llandudno, 20 October to 25 February
Burma to Myanmar
A blockbuster with a difference that not only surveys 1,500 years of art and history but also seeks to explain the political crisis of modern Myanmar. How did it fall into civil war and dictatorship? The show singles out British colonial rule as a poisonous derailing of a brilliant culture.
• British Museum, London, 2 November to 11 February
Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement in the UK 1970-90
Featuring more than 100 women artists, Women in Revolt! traces the evolution of art and collectivity during a period of turmoil and resistance. The Women’s Liberation movement, Greenham Common, punk and Rock Against Racism, the Aids pandemic and Section 28 provide the backdrop. This long overdue show includes everything from painting to performance, film and sculpture.
• Tate Britain, London, 8 November to 7 April
Lumiere
Ai Weiwei stars in this event that promises to illuminate one of Britain’s most beautiful cities with Light Art in brilliant colours. There’s a historical fit, for the idea that light can be art was pioneered in the middle ages when Durham Cathedral was built. See modern answers to its stained glass.
• Durham venues, 16 to 19 November
The Printmaker’s Art: Rembrandt to Rego
The age of mechanically reproduced art began in 15th-century Germany, where artists instantly saw how the new invention of printing could disseminate pungent, unforgettable images. This panorama of the medium ranges from the nightmares of Goya to the experiments of Picasso to the prints of Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili. • Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2 December to 25 February
Architecture and design
Madelon Vriesendorp: Cosmic Housework
From mysterious creatures made of laundry detergent bottles to chandeliers of pointing fingers, the weird and wonderful work of Dutch artist, sculptor and magpie collector Madelon Vriesendorp will take over the Cosmic House this autumn. Vriesendorp was a close friend and collaborator of the late postmodern architectural theorist Charles Jencks, whose cosmic symbolism-stuffed home promises to be wittily subverted by her mischievous interventions.
• The Jencks Foundation at the Cosmic House, London, 11 September to 31 May
Scottish Collection Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland
A new home for the world’s finest collection of Scottish art is set to open its doors in September, following a £40m, decade-long project by Hoskins Architects. Deftly excavated beneath the listed gallery building and above railway tunnels, the project provides 10 new galleries to showcase works by the likes of Anne Redpath, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Boys, with big picture windows promising spectacular views over the city.
• National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, opens 30 September
Japan: Myths to Manga
Armies of Tamagotchi, Pokémon and Transformers are set to descend on the Young V&A in October in the form of an exhibition charting the influence of folklore and myth on Japanese pop culture. The show will take visitors on an atmospheric journey from the country’s soaring mountains to its enchanted forests, bustling cities and churning seas via Hokusai, Studio Ghibli and a bunch of playable taiko drums.
• Young V&A, London, opens 14 October
Aviva Studios, Manchester
Part aircraft hangar, part experimental theatre and all industrial heft, the new permanent home of the Manchester international festival will finally open this autumn, four years late and with its original budget almost doubled. Previously named after the edgy Factory Records label, and now named after a corporate insurance giant, the building, designed by OMA, includes a 5,000-capacity warehouse venue and a 1,600-seat flexible auditorium, promising to be a great northern shed of the arts.
• Opens 13 October
Skateboard
Do you know your Ollie from your Bluntslide? Devoted skateboard fans will have to grind and flip their way through Holland Park to the Design Museum this October for the first UK show chronicling the history of skateboard design. Travelling from drought-stricken Californian swimming pools to puddle-soaked British car parks, the exhibition will showcase rare boards and ephemera, from quaint 1950s decks to the slick graphics of the Sky Brown x Skateistan Almost board.
• Design Museum, London, 20 October to 2 June
