ART

Big names of the past and rising stars of the future, mind-boggling conceptual art and expressive landscapes – plus a new island nation from the Arctic. Steve Wright sets sail for a busy 2012.

One of this year’s arts highlights takes place far from a gallery. This September, Bristol gets a visit from Nowhereisland, the nation formed by artist Alex Hartley from an island in Svalbard (the last landmass before the North Pole) revealed by the melting ice of a retreating glacier. Now officially declared a new nation (you can sign up to be a citizen – see http://nowhereisland.org), Nowhereisland will tour Britain’s south-western coast before being towed up the Avon into town on the weekend of 7-9 Sept (the finale of the Cultural Olympiad) and mooring in the Floating Harbour for a weekend of events and celebrations. An accompanying mobile museum, the Embassy, will be packed full of artefacts, resources and information telling the story of Nowhereisland. Unmissable.

On the fine art spectrum, highlights at Bristol’s excellent Lime Tree Gallery include a solo show by one of Sweden’s most successful painters, the brilliant portraitist and landscape artist Mats Rydstern (from 13 Oct, picture above). Up in Clifton, a renovated Innocent Fine Art will feature a new Collectors’ Gallery, featuring a permanent, changing exhibition with artists including Picasso, Miro and Chagall. Innocent’s first 2012 exhibition, in mid Feb, will feature work by one of Bristol’s finest painters, the brilliantly dynamic and expressive Jamaica Street resident Andrew Hood – alongside paintings by Paul Lewin, who also exhibits this year at Hilton Fine Art in Bath. And Bath’s Adam Gallery gives us some big solo shows featuring 20th-century giants like Eduardo Chillida, Alexander Calder and Joan Miro, alongside big-hitting contemporary painters Barbara Rae and Fred Cuming.

Elsewhere among BrisBath’s army of small, vigorous galleries, Bath’s consistently intriguing bo.lee gallery will give us The Salon, featuring the surreal and nicely disquieting Ione Rucquoi, to coincide with Bath in Fashion (24 Mar-21 Apr). Over in Bristol, Centrespace’s year includes Hinterland (25-29 Feb), in which eight artists get inspired by backcountry folklore and half-remembered legends.

Bath’s Victoria Art Gallery displays The Radev Collection: Bloomsbury and Beyond (8 Sept-18 Nov), featuring works by Alfred Wallis, Modigliani and others; from 11 Feb-21 Mar it gives over its walls to the exuberant abstract colourist Gillian Ayres RA; the annual Bath Society of Artists exhibition makes an early start this year (31 Mar-19 May), while summer (7 July-2 Sept) features automata by Robert Race.

Arnolfini’s 2012 is themed around A Parallel Universe and includes exhibitions, film, performance and events exploring alternative realities and co-existing worlds. Highlights include a first major UK show for rising Indian artist Shilpa Gupta – including her major installation ‘Singing Cloud’, a cluster of 4,000 black microphones suspended from the ceiling that emit sounds that travel in ripples over the surface.

Spike Island hosts a show for the Paris/Bordeaux duo Dewar & Giqcuel (31 Mar-17 June), who spend their time learning craft techniques which they use to create idiosyncratic and deliberately perverse works of art (including this outdoor sculpture of DJ Carl Cox, pictured). Joining this exhibition is The Artists’ Postcard Show, chronicling a century of artists’ postcards from Mail Art to Gilbert and George. Spike’s Open Studios weekend, a highlight of any Bristol art lover’s calendar, returns from 5-7 May.

A cracking line-up of shows at Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery includes Art Fund International (6 Oct-2 Dec), the first in a series of exhibitions showcasing the museum’s new collection acquired using money from the Art Fund. This debut show will include works by the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. Before that, Artist Rooms (30 June-23 Sept) is a touring show of works donated by Anthony d’Offay, featuring a fine-looking collection of contemporary and conceptual art by the likes of Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer and Ed Ruscha.

2012 at the RWA, meanwhile, will include an exhibition focusing on the design of Penguin Books; a celebration of the brilliant landscape and war artist Eric Ravilious that will also explore the roots of British Modernism; and Tremor, an exploration of the complex bonds between art and music featuring work by Brian Eno, Yoko Ono, John Squire and Stanley Donwood.

Street art highlights include, at Bristol’s gallery-cum-artists’ hangout King of Paint, a fine-looking series of solo shows by street art big-hitters including Paris, China Mike, Inkie, Andy Council and Xenz. And talking of Inkie, we’re excited to hear that See No Evil – the vast Broadmead street-art makeover-cum-bloc party which he jointly masterminded this year – is rumoured for a return.

In other festival news, June welcomes the first Bristol Biennial (www.bristolbiennial.com), a two-week visual arts, theatre and film festival drawing in artists, performers and curators from Bristol and way beyond, and themed around the notion of storytelling. Bath Fringe’s visual arts wing Fringe Arts Bath returns from 25 May-10 June, and there’s also a return for Bristol’s biennial Festival of Photography (3-31 May: www.bfop.org), featuring over 100 exhibitions from international and local artists, symposia and talks, art markets and fairs, and open submission competitions.

Photography fans should also catch 4 Decades (19 May-9 June), showing 40 years of street photography by Rupert Hopkins (picture above), from the late 60s demonstrations for Oz magazine in Hyde Park via portraits of Margaret Thatcher, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Seamus Heaney, onto wilderness landscapes in India, Nepal, Japan and Australia. Bath’s Royal Photographic Society unveil the talents of Charley Murrell ARPS, an emerging documentary photographer specialising in real-life portraiture. And the Holburne Museum gives us Art of Arrangement (11 Feb-7 May), an investigation into how photographers have explored still life down the decades, and including works by Roger Fenton, Alexander Rodchenko, Ansel Adams, William Henry Fox Talbot and the brilliant, Somerset-based war photographer Don McCullin.

Back, finally, to the 2012 Olympics: and, in the run-up to the games, museums in both cities are donning the Lycra and trainers. Bristol’s M Shed give us Bristol Urban Sport (23 May- 9 Sept), an inventory of the various sports – regulation and alternative – practised across Bristol’s natural and urban landscapes. Back at Spike Island, Rogue Game (8-30 Sept) is a performance project by Spike studio artists Jonathan Mosley, Sophie Warren and Turkish artist Can Altay which stages three different sports simultaneously on the same pitch before sitting back to watch the ensuing subversion, resistance and happenstance.

Copyright Steve Wright 2012