RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (19 - 25 April)

Lucy and Jorge Orta reveal artwork at St Pancras Station
Some of the best public art interrupts the visual consistency of the urban environment, providing the possibility for an unexpected experience.

Lucy + Jorge Orta, 'Cloud: Meteoros'.

Nowhere perhaps is that intervention more necessary than the repetitious daily commute, which is why a surreal new site-specific installation at St Pancras Station by artist duo Lucy and Jorge Orta is so welcome. Suspended from the glass and metal roof high above the train platforms; The Cloud: Meteoros comprises two fluffy clouds on top of which human figures pose.

Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2013
The Photographers' Gallery, until 30 June 2013
The show that accompanies the prestigious annual award from the Photographers’ Gallery is an essential exhibition for anyone interested in modern and contemporary photography. The prize more often than not succeeds in representing the range of different approaches to medium, and this year’s presentation, which opens to the public today, appears no exception.

_{Mishka Hennner, 'SS98, Cerignola Foggia, Italy', 2012. © Mishka Henner. Courtesy of the artist and The Photographers’ Gallery, London.}

The four nominated artists include conceptualist duo Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, whose limited-edition publication intervenes in the very pages of copies of Bertolt Brecht’s revered photo and poetry cut-up War Primer (1950); documentary photographer Chris Killip, whose recent show in Paris revisited his photojournalism in the north of England in the 1970s and ’80s; Cristina De Middel, whose contemporary series ‘The Afronauts’ stages photographs that reflect on the Zambian space programme in the 1960s; and Mishka Henner, for a group of images appropriated from Google Street View that show prostitutes waiting on the streets outside cities of Southern Europe.

Richard Patterson
Timothy Taylor Gallery, until 1 June
British painter Richard Patterson was one of the many Goldsmiths College graduates to feature in the Royal Academy’s seminal ‘Sensation’ exhibition in 1997. But while many of his fellow artists of the YBA generation have continued to exhibit regularly in the UK, Patterson moved to the US, where he now lives and works in Dallas. Timothy Taylor Gallery in Mayfair gives Londoners a welcome opportunity to see some of his canvases painted over the last fifteen years.

_{Richard Patterson, 'Your Own Personal Jesus', 1995/2011. Oil on canvas. 82 1/2 x 124 3/8 in. / 208.3 x 315.9 cm. © Richard Patterson; Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London.}

Patterson’s Your Own Personal Jesus (2011) recreates the painting Motocrosser II (1995), a piece on view in ‘Sensation’ that was lost in the 2004 fire at storage facility Momart, which destroyed many of Charles Saatchi’s art acquisitions. Here the artist paints the image, in a laborious Photorealistic style, of a motobiker model roughly and readily covered in bright paint. In other works he mixes Photorealism and gestural abstraction in a very different way, with a type of painterly collage in which some areas of the canvas are illusionistic representations, others expressionistic scrawls.

_{Frank Cohen and Nicolai Frahm. Courtesy David Bebber.} The Dairy opens its doors
Opens 25 April 2013
For about a decade there has been much talk of British entrepreneur and art lover Frank Cohen opening up his private collection of contemporary art to the public.

Now it’s actually going to happen – next Thursday, in a building in Bloomsbury that was formerly a milk depot. The project is in collaboration with the Danish collector Nicolai Frahm, and their first show will be of Swiss artist John Armleder.

To find out more, and for a few obligatory milk related puns, read Emma Crichton-Miller’s interview with Cohen and Frahm in the Spring issue of RA Magazine.

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine

• Royal Academy of Arts