Barbara Hepworth, Giulio Paolini, JD Ferguson: the week’s art shows in pictures

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/04/barbara-hepworth-exhibitions-gallery

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Barbara Hepworth, Kendal

It is hard to look at Barbara Hepworth’s organic abstractions without being reminded of the public-art dross that she inspired. We might well hold her responsible for all the blobs on plinths that became the facade of modernist sculpture during the 20th century; yet, as this representative exhibition proves, Hepworth was an adventurous, forward-thinking artist. She was passionately in love with the look and feel of the English landscape, its roll and tumble, its uplifting ins and outs. “I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour,” she claimed in a statement that few artists today would dare utter without a twinge of embarrassment.

Abbot Hall Gallery, Sat to 28 Sep

Giulio Paolini, London

In the 1960s, while Giulio Paolini’s arte povera peers exhibited sacks of grain and live horses in a gallery, the young Italian sought other ways to reinvent art and deal with his country’s hefty artistic legacy. He turned his attentions to analysing an artwork’s ingredients. This was not just the canvas base and frame of paintings – though he has exhibited those bare essentials – but the relationship between a work’s author and its audience, where it is shown and its place in history. Tracing his evolution from the early days to now, this show includes some of his most radical gestures, including his reproduction of a Renaissance portrait by Lorenzo Lotto, an act of appropriation that treated the work much like Duchamp’s urinal.

Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed to 14 Sep

Allan Kaprow, Wakefield

The Hepworth’s contemporary art space The Calder may not quite match the coolness of New York’s Martha Jackson Gallery, where in 1961 Allan Kaprow first staged the performance-installation YARD. There and then Kaprow irreverently buried renowned works by Hepworth and Giacometti in a haphazard pile-up of old tyres. As befitted the libertarian spirit of the times, the artist invited visitors to freely experience the work by climbing all over it. Kaprow defined YARD as “something that just happens to happen”, thus sparking off the swinging 60s craze for “happenings”. Well, YARD is set to happen once again in Wakefield, guided by Kaprow’s original plans and carried out by an assortment of invited artists.

The Hepworth: The Calder, to 31 Aug

William Cobbing, Middlesbrough

William Cobbing’s art is earthy stuff. Past work has involved him prancing about like a pretend shaman disguised in a cardboard-box costume, sifting hour-glass sand through an empty cast of his head and craftily placing mirrors so they disrupt our world’s surface predictabilities. For this show he has carried out research at Northumberland’s Duddo bronze-age stone circle, which, like Cobbing’s own work, conjures numinous possibilities from otherwise common-or-garden elements. As befits the grandson of the concrete poet Bob Cobbing, the artist also has a way with words, distorting texts including Albert Camus’s existential blockbuster The Myth Of Sisyphus in lumps of primeval muck.

MIMA, to 30 Oct

Judith Bernstein, London

The feminist art agitator Judith Bernstein has long fought fire with fire. Inspired by the blunt misogyny of toilet-door graffiti, her best-known, anti-Vietnam war Screw drawings blew up the weeny phallic fixings to vast proportions. Depicted in angry black charcoal, her punning screws became weapons poised for rape and murder. Today, Bernstein’s righteous ire and black humour remains as strong as ever. For her UK debut show, she’s creating work live on site, with fresh screw drawings offset by paintings from her recent Birth Of The Universe series.

Studio Voltaire, SW4, Sat to 24 Aug

Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool

With promising curatorial mischief, the 2014 Liverpool extravaganza is titled A Needle Walks Into A Haystack, which seems to refer to the artistic propensity for trying old tricks in new settings. Variously overlapping with satellite exhibitions such as the Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ super-showcase of recent art-school audacity (World Museum, 20 Sep to 26 Oct), and the John Moores Prize selection (Walker Art Gallery, Sat to 30 Nov), the Biennial proper takes up venues throughout the city, including for the first time the imposing Old Blind School. Rewarding a summer day’s cultural safari down by the Mersey and beyond, this year’s notable curiosities range from a Bluecoat Gallery reconstruction of the 19th-century painter James McNeill Whistler’s decadent Peacock Room through to the influential contemporary architect Claude Parent’s conversion of a Tate space into a Dr Caligari disorientation of slanted floors and warped perspectives.

Various venues, Sat to 26 Oct

JD Ferguson, Chichester

The Scottish colourist JD Fergusson hailed from Perthshire, a place better known for dreary weather than brilliant hues. But his work captures a blithe postwar bohemianism: sun-kissed southern France and daring women in elegant kit. His nudes were considered radical, though his landscapes of frolicking women with rosy, full frontal flesh have lost the shock factor they once had for audiences. While easy-going sexual fantasy is the keynote for him, Fergusson was also deeply committed to progressing art.

Pallant House Gallery, Sat to 19 Oct

Radical Geometry, London

This show charts the progress of abstract art transplanted from wartorn Europe to a continent bursting with economic and social optimism, specifically within Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Venezuela in the mid 20th century. Yet, while geometric abstraction is the base note, the notions firing the art are anything but uniform. Sometimes these flowerings are directly political, such as the Argentinian group who fused communist ideals with abstraction in the 1940s. In Brazil, however, artists looked to psychology and perception and the now globally renowned neo-concretists were born, creating interactive works such as Lygia Clark’s hinged Creature sculptures.

Royal Academy, W1, Sat to 28 Sep