Hope Springs: The Northwest Art Scene in 2015

So now the Christmas season is over and it’s the new year, full of resolutions we won’t keep, exercise we won’t do, rent we can’t afford and dreams we won’t fulfil. Do I sound particularly grumpy about it all? Well, yes, because it’s January and everything is grey and everyone is allowed to be a bit glum. Plus it’s pretty bothersome isn’t it, I mean after 2015 there will be 16 and then 17 and so on and so forth. Bloody endless…

Let’s focus on the positive. There are things to be excited about. 2015 is without a doubt going to be a great year for art in the Northwest, so much so that we can't even fit it all in; so we have concentrated on taking you up to springtime, guiding you through a selection of the very best shows that should be on your radar. Then comes summer, with all its swimming and ice cream and all that niceness. I feel cheered up already.

January

DaDaFest’s latest exhibition at the Bluecoat, Art of the Lived Experiment, and Robert Heinecken’s Lessons in Posing Subjects at Open Eye both close on 11 January and are well worth a look-in. If you’re heading to the Bluecoat don’t forget to see Brian Catling’s animatronic work in the attic space. The Heinecken show focuses on the post-war American photographer who described himself as a ‘para-photographer,’ rejecting traditional cameras and equipment and preferring to experiment with the image as an expanded practice with light transfers, collage and Polaroid.

• Space/Time Metamorphosis No.1, Robert Heinecken, 1975

Next up for Open Eye is also going to be a good one: Metamorphosis of Japan after the War charts the transformative and creatively energetic period in the country between the end of WWII and the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The exhibition runs from 22 January to 26 April.

A highlight of this month will be the Bluecoat’s Hayward Touring exhibition, Listening (24 Jan-29 Mar), arriving from a stint at The Baltic, Newcastle. The show features some exciting current and emerging artists including Haroon Mirza (with a worrying sound insulation chamber) and Prem Sahib (with a ‘throbbing inaccessible disco’!), along with the established and the great such as Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Imogen Stidworthy, Christian Marclay and Ed Atkins.

At the end of January we also see the start of Cactus’s new exhibition programme with a solo project from Candice Jacobs (a co-founder of Nottingham’s artist-run space Moot). After that, expect promising solo projects from Jack Brindley and Charlie Godet Thomas later in the year – check cactusgallery.co.uk or @Cactusliverpool on Twitter for updates. 

Finally, it is absolutely killing me that I haven’t managed (or rather, that I tried and failed – see last issue) managed to get up to Blackpool to see Haunted House at The Grundy yet. Closing on 17 January, the exhibition takes the secret or unknown lives of objects or artworks when they are not on show, packed away in drawers or boxes (which the show features). Along with works from the collection the exhibition features a pretty stellar lineup of artists including Olivier Castel, Martin Creed, Graham Gussin, Susan Hiller, David Hockney, Susan Philipsz and Aura Satz.

February

You can catch (just – it runs until 1 February) Castlefield Gallery's 30th birthday celebration exhibition, 30 Years of the Future, which has asked artists, curators and thinkers such as JJ Charlesworth, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Emily Speed – who have all contributed to the gallery's history – to nominate artists who they consider to be shaping the future of contemporary art.

This month also sees Preston's Harris Museum re-launch their exhibition programme with a 15-month programme under the overarching title and Samuel Beckett quote, 'Dance First, Think Later.' Exploring notions of performativity and the human condition, tragicomedy and absurdity, the Harris are inviting artists to respond to the museum's collections, the museum itself and Preston as a starting point. Running 12 February-11 April, Dance First, Think Later will open with an exhibition co-curated by artist Harold Offeh called The Varieties, using Offeh’s practice and early 20th-century clown, acrobat, filmmaker and impresario Will Onda as a starting point.

The major event this month will be the reopening of The Whitworth on 14 February. Launching the programme will be a large-scale survey exhibition of Cornelia Parker, for which the artist has made a brand new commission. There is, of course, much more in store: expect YBAs on their Hydra holidays, Turner watercolours, paintings, prints and sculptures from the 1960s, Laure Prouvost, Bridget Riley, Richard Hamilton and many more artists, projects, commissions and events besides. Keep track of the full schedule at whitworth.manchester.ac.uk.

March

Castlefield have a lot of good things planned for this year. On 5 March, to coincide with Manchester’s Wonder Women festival, they open Superior Goods and Household Gods, a new exhibition co-curated by Castlefield Gallery and artist Sarah Hardacre with print, sculptural collage, film and performance commenting on the pervasive nature of consumerist ideology and its effect on our desires. Then, excitingly, coming up later in the year Castlefield’s annual Head to Head exhibition will see Magnus Quaife up against French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist and critic Roland Barthes. Opening in December, if you can bear to think about another round of Christmas already.

• Untitled, Cathy Wilkes, 2014

Now that Transmitting Andy Warhol has shut up shop, it’s all change at Tate Liverpool with three new major projects from Cathy Wilkes, Leonora Carrington and György Kepes all opening on 6 March. A 2008 Turner Prize nominee, Wilkes will mount the largest display of her work to date in the UK, charting her practice over the last decade. Tate have paired Wilkes with Leonora Carrington, who moved from the salons of London and Paris in the 1930s to Mexico by way of war-time Paris and a relationship with German artist Max Ernst. Known for her painting practice, she also worked with film as an actor, artistic director and costume designer. This exhibition brings together a theatrical presentation of her filmic output alongside a selection of paintings from the 1940s to the 1980s. On the ground floor, meanwhile, find the first UK solo show of Hungarian-born artist, designer and educator György Kepes (1906-2001), including photographic work and collages dating from Kepes’ early years in the United States, and showcasing 40 works newly acquired by Tate. 

April

Japanese ‘Bijin-ga’ or images of beautiful women, African Mende masks, ancient Egyptian artefacts, paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries and contemporary video art: The Eye of the Beholder at The Atkinson, Southport, has been open since January but closes on 26 April and is a survey of ideals of beauty and the obsession with physical perfection through the ages. Also on at The Atkinson in the spring and until 9 August is the satisfyingly Brideshead Revisited project V&A Recording Britain. The Recording Britain collection, held by the V&A, is the result of a unique documentary project initiated by Sir Kenneth Clark at the start of WWII. During this period more than 90 artists were commissioned to make ‘sympathetic records’ of vulnerable buildings, landscapes and lifestyles.

• Flashback, Anish Kapoor

Over at Yorkshire Sculpture Park this month, Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986 looks promising, focusing on the emergence of a generation of younger artists in the UK in the 1970s/80s who began to really make it on the international scene. This exhibition will be the first to survey this important moment in British sculptural making and will include work from Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker and Alison Wilding among many others. The exhibition runs from 1 April to 21 June.