RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (17 - 24 May)

Posted: 17 May 2013 by Sam Phillips

Dieter Roth: Diaries
Camden Arts Centre, London, until 14 July 2013
The boundaries between art and everyday life were collapsed in the work of German-Swiss avant-gardist Dieter Roth.

_{Dieter Roth, Diaries, undated. Dieter Roth Estate. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. Photographs © Alan Dimmick. Courtesy The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2012.}

Like his friends in the famous Fluxus group of the 1960s, Roth redefined the artistic act and object, painting with processed cheese, displaying ‘order forms’ for works rather than the actual pieces and – significantly for the show opening today at Camden Arts Centre – pioneering the medium of book art. Following their presentation at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery last year, the London venue exhibits the maverick’s diaries, dense with scribbled notes and anarchically applied splashes of paint.

Eva Rothschild and Clare Woods at Roche Court
New Art Centre, Roche Court, 18 May - 14 July 2013
Although Roche Court’s New Art Centre is known primarily as one of Britain’s outdoor locations for contemporary sculpture, it has an indoor gallery that presents a rotating programme of exhibitions – making the Wiltshire centre worth visiting even on a rainy day.

_{Installation view: Left: Eva Rothschild, 'Hansel and Gretel', 2013. Steel, acrylic paint, lacquer, 283 x 160 x 153 cm. Right: Clare Woods, 'Voluptuous Swell', 2013. Oil on aluminium. 250 x 450 cm. © the Artists’ and New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park.}

Their new two-person show features the abstract sculptures of Eva Rothschild alongside landscape-inspired paintings by Clare Woods. They are close friends, having met as students at Goldsmiths, and both show recent work. It will be interesting to see how Rothschild’s angular forms juxtapose next to Woods’ neo-Romantic visions, and vice-versa.

_{William Scott, 'Untitled - Seated Nude', 1956. Charcoal on paper. 19 x 24.75 in, 48.6 x 61.2 cm.} William Scott
Karsten Schubert, until 12 July 2013
Celebrations of the centenary since William Scott’s birth continue this week, as an exhibition opens at London’s Karsten Schubert that shows a lesser-known area of the British artist’s output: nude drawings, dating to the 1950s. In the same way his still-life paintings emphasise the abstract beauty of objects’ shapes, the best of these drawings – such as Untitled—Seated Nude (1956) – reflect the geometry of the human body, albeit rendered here with the immediacy that comes with sketching from life.

Chris Levine: Light
Fine Art Society, until 15 June 2013
The blockbuster ‘Light Show’ at the Hayward Gallery had everyone I knew talking about how wonderful light installations could be. Hot on its heels is an exhibition at Bond Street’s Fine Art Society by ‘light artist’ Chris Levine, now well-known for his iconic holographic portrait of the Queen (Lightness of Being, 2007).

_{Chris Levine, 'She's Light Laser Triptych', 2013. Silkscreen with fluorescent and phosphorescent ink, each panel 870 mm x 870mm, edition of 5.}

The Fine Art Society is giving over both floors of their gallery to Levine, who will create an immersive environment for viewers for the contemplation of his art, which ranges from laser pieces, LED works and lightboxes to silkscreen prints.

_{Ernest Briggs, 'Untitled', 1952. Oil on canvas, 44.25 x 47.75 in (116.2 x 125.09 cm), courtesy Hackett|Mill, San Francisco.} The Bay Area School
Thomas Williams Fine Art, until 22 June 2013
The post-war Californian art scene tends to be underrepresented in British galleries, in comparison at least to East Coast art. So it is welcome that the Bay Area School – an affiliation of progressive painters based in San Francisco in active in the 1940s, 50s and 60s – are the subject of a new show at Thomas Williams Fine Art, the first exhibition on the group outside the United States. Influenced by concurrent developments in the West Coast cultural scene, including beat-poetry and jazz, canvases by artist such as John Grillo, Ernest Briggs and Richard Diebenkorn remind us that post-war expressionist experimentation was not just limited to that of New York and Paris.