With surrealism and sound, fauna and flesh, there is much to tempt you indoors this June. Here’s some monthly highlights for contemporary art written for Culture24.
Cage Mix: Sculpture and Sound, BALTIC, Gateshead
Eight artists who work with the ideas and writings of John Cage are brought together by design rather than chance. Their schemes for musical notation and scoring are here overlapped and juxtaposed as in the avant garde composer’s early work Fontana Mix.
Spencer Tunick – Everyday People, The Lowry Gallery, Manchester
Photographer Spencer Tunick responds to the paintings of LS Lowry with mass nudity on location in Salford and Manchester. May be seen as a comment on the passing of industrialisation or at least a curious thing you don’t see every day.
A Horse Walks Into A Bar, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester
We relate to the animal world in so many ways that here nine different artists make use of video, painting, performance, photography and sculpture to explore the issues. Mark Wallinger, Richard Billingham and Corey Arnold are among the humans.
Venice @ Golden Thread Gallery, Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast
Four names represented Eire and Northern Ireland at Venice last year and this is a chance to both shows: from the North, Sarah MacWilliam, and from the South, Sarah Browne, Gareth Kennedy and a Browne/Kennedy hybrid called Kennedy Browne.
Francis Alÿs – A Story of Deception, Tate Modern, London
Here is another famous Belgian for inclusion in the much-loved parlour game, albeit one who lives in Mexico. Even this transposition seems like one of Alys’s poetic stunts, most of which should be documented in this major, comprehensive show.
Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, Pallant House, Chichester
Pallant House brings another less explored chapter of art history to light with a show of surrealism from rarely shown female artists. Carrington, Varo and Horna were respectively an English painter, a Spanish painter and a Hungarian photographer.