Karanjit Panesar | Leeds Artwork Gallery | 4 October – 15 June
In Greek mythology, Persephone, goddess of Spring, is kidnapped by Hades, king of the underworld. Her father, Zeus, calls for her launch however, after being tricked by Hades into consuming seeds from a pomegranate and thereby tasting the fruit of the underworld, Persephone is obliged to return for six months yearly, her descent marking the onset of Winter.
Pomegranates loom giant in Karanjit Panesar’s ‘Furnace Fruit’, an exhibition responding to Leeds Artwork Gallery’s collections and the artist’s personal diasporic household historical past. On this meditation on the duality of diasporic id, Panesar attracts on the wealthy symbolism of the pomegranate and embraces latest interpretations of the Greek fable, which recast Persephone as a subversive border-crosser transferring with company between two worlds. – Crystal Bennes
Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie | Spike Island, Bristol | 8 February – 11 Could
Within the introduction to Black Movie, British Cinema (1988), a publication produced after a landmark convention held at London’s Institute for Up to date Artwork, theorist Kobena Mercer famous that the ‘subtle defence of the ethnicity of Englishness developed by intellectuals of the brand new proper demonstrates that the understanding and illustration of British historical past is now a vital web site of cultural contestation’. Practically 40 years on, Spike Island’s simultaneous solo exhibitions by artists Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie discover, within the phrases of the exhibition literature, the ‘representations and (mis)representations’ of latest Black British life. – Vanessa Peterson
Tom Hardwick-Allan | South Parade, London | 6 March – 19 April
The works in Tom Hardwick-Allan’s present exhibition at South Parade are precise reflections of its title, ‘Low Reduction and Foil’: a foil is each the path {that a} hunted animal leaves because it passes via its atmosphere and a plot system by which a personality is outlined by its inverse. The present contains a number of new cast-iron reliefs, made by urgent carved wooden into petrol-rich sand – a technique referred to as imprinting – earlier than pouring melted-down automobile brake discs into this mould. In the course of the interval during which the artist made these works, his father and grandmother had been injured once they had been hit by a automobile that did not brake. This intersection of household, coincidence and materiality reappear all through the exhibition, lending a way of haunting to the works on show. – Hatty Nestor
‘Exploring Arte Povera’ | Mazzoleni, London | 17 February – 2 Could
First coined as a time period by Italian artwork critic Germano Celant in 1967, arte povera (poor artwork) noticed a shift away from conventional approaches to artmaking to as a substitute utilise on a regular basis or unconventional supplies to experiment with kind and aesthetics. In Mazzoleni’s present group present, ‘Previous Bond Room: Exploring Arte Povera’, among the motion’s main proponents will be seen not solely rejecting the media generally utilized in artwork, but additionally reworking the gallery house during which that artwork historically exists – both via tips of the attention or the materiality of the work itself. – Sam Moore
Sadao Hasegawa | a. SQUIRE, London | 8 March – 12 April
A unadorned, muscled youth seems to rocket into house in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His physique throbs magenta, whereas his face – emotionless as a masks – is topped by flamelike hair. Each human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, whereas the ideas of his fingers sparkle: flesh turning into cosmic.
Commissioned by the Japanese homosexual journal Barazoku, the picture crystallizes most of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999. Hasegawa’s erotic fascination with the male physique appeared to burst past physicality into transcendence. He created his personal cosmology – teeming with legendary beasts and hallucinatory romanticism – that discovered a house within the extra earthbound industrial homosexual press of the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s. ‘English Companion Inc.’, at a. SQUIRE, is the primary time Hasegawa’s work has been exhibited in a solo present outdoors his native nation. Had it not been for Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama, nevertheless, his output might need been misplaced completely, after his household declined to handle his property upon his dying. – Daniel Culpan
Most important picture: Karanjit Panesar, ‘Furnace Fruit’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Karanjit Panesar and Leeds Artwork Gallery; {photograph}: Rob Battersby
