RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (2 - 8 Aug)

Thomas Scheibitz
Baltic, until 3 November 2013
Baltic in Gateshead has just opened an extensive survey of recent work by the celebrated German artist Thomas Scheibitz, comprising over two hundred works produced over the last half-decade.

_{Thomas Scheibitz: ONE-Time Pad (installation view), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2013. Courtesy the artist and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: Colin Davison.}

Scheibitz’s style is idiosyncratic, combining a Pop artist's interest in signs and signifiers with an architect’s interest in built form and an abstract artist’s penchant for areas of bold, unmodulated colour. The show promises an understanding of the painter and sculptor’s working processes, with archive and preparatory material like models on view.

_{Leonardo da Vinci, The bones, muscles and tendons of the hand, c.1510-11. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2013.} Leonardo da Vinci: The Mechanics of Man
The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, until 10 November 2013
Leonardo was highly skilled with the scalpel as well as paintbrush and pen. Renowned for his anatomical studies, he dissected more than 30 corpses and filled notebook after notebook with detailed drawings of what he found inside.

The accuracy of these representations has long been lauded by experts but, for the non-medics among us, a new exhibition at The Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh’s Palace of Holyroodhouse makes their advancement even more clear: contemporary medical images, from MRI scans and ultrasounds to 3-D computer visualisations, are shown alongside the High Renaissance master’s sheets.

Eduardo Paolozzi RA
Cass Sculpture Foundation, until 26 October 2013
To coincide with the entertaining exhibition of Eduardo Paolozzi RA’s collage works at Chichester’s Pallant House (mentioned in a recent blog here), the Cass Sculpture Foundation – nearby at Goodwood – presents ‘Sculpting History’, a show that takes in works in diverse materials that the Scottish sculptor made over a five-decade period.

_{Eduardo Paolozzi, 'Yantra', 1973-74. Cast, extruded and welded aluminium. Courtesy Neville Holt & Estate of Eduardo Paolozzi.}

As in his assemblages on paper at Pallant House, the Academician’s sculpture borrows images from sources far and wide, from the human and animal figures to the abstract arcs of steel of modern architecture.

_{Chantal Joffe RA, 'Jessica', 2012. Oil on board. 305 x 150 cm, 120 x 48 1/8 in. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London. © Chantal Joffe. Photography © Stephen White.} Cinematic Visions – Painting at the Edge of Reality
Last chance: Victoria Miro, until 3 August 2013
Coming to a close on Saturday, a group show at London’s Victoria Miro focuses on how the tropes of moving image media – from film to internet video – has influenced modern and contemporary painters.

Newly elected Royal Academician Chantal Joffe and RA Schools alumna Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, currently nominated for the Turner Prize, are shown alongside other important painters such as Alice Neel, Chris Ofili, Cecily Brown, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans, making for a show with a dizzying array of aesthetics.

Merlin James
Last chance: Parasol Unit, until 10 August 2013
There is a little more time to catch another painting show, this time a solo presentation of the Welsh artist Merlin James, which runs at Parasol Unit in London until the following Saturday. His works are rich in both metaphorical and physical textures, with canvases of enigmatic architectural forms and figures in landscapes often amalgamating dust and debris alongside acrylic.

_{Merlin James, 'Effet de Lune', 2011. Acrylic on canvas 47 x 62.5 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York © Merlin James}

A highly perceptive writer on art (previously he was an editor at the Burlington Magazine), James’s works reach back into art history, drawing an influence from pioneers of modern painting such as Honoré Daumier, the subject of a show this autumn at the Royal Academy.

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

• Royal Academy of Arts