RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (30 Aug–5 Sep)

Tom Phillips RA
Flowers Gallery, 4 September - 12 October 2013
Academician Tom Phillips’ rich and varied works have often shared an interest in found materials, bringing new life to images, texts or substances that have been ignored or dismissed.

_{Tom Phillips RA, 'The Screens (Triptych)', 2013. Oil and collage on board. 17 x 23 cm. AFG 51512.}

For his latest exhibition at Cork Street’s Flowers gallery, he repurposes his own discarded material from his studio: his plastic palettes covered in oil paint. In a highly original move, he has brought together kaleidoscopic fragments of these palettes in new configurations, producing semi-figurative and abstract wall-based collages that have a glow akin to stained glass.

_{John Stezaker, 'Fall XII', 1992. Collage 16.1 x 10.8cm. © the artist, courtesy the artist and The Approach.} John Stezaker
Contemporary Art Society, 4 September - 4 October 2013
Another British master of collage who comes under the spotlight from this week is John Stezaker, a photographer who uncannily combines found black-and-white prints in a technique that harks back to the Surrealist heyday.

The winner of last year’s Deutsche Börse Photography Prize and the subject of a show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2011, Stezaker now commands high prices for his works, meaning that a recent purchase of two pieces for York Art Gallery is particularly welcome.

The Contemporary Art Society, who supported the acquisition, show the works from next week in its London space, alongside other works from York’s collection that examine similar ideas. Fans can book for the artist talk on 12 September.

A Universal Archive: William Kentridge as Printmaker
University Gallery, until 11 October 2013
Newcastle’s University of Northumbria Gallery has been programming an interesting range of exhibitions of late. From today it stages a touring exhibition of prints by William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most significant contemporary artists.

_{William Kentridge, 'Ubu Tells the Truth', 1996-97. Image Courtesy David Krut Fine Art New York and London. The artist and David Krut Fine Art.}

Kentridge’s graphic works have the same haunting style as the stop-motion animations for which he is famed – figures in movement are presented as dark-black silhouettes, or imposed over grey-scale or dark backgrounds. Over 100 etchings, engravings, aquatints, silkscreens, linocuts and lithographs explore key Kentridge themes such as migration, displacement, memory and identity.

Ben Nicholson: Lyric and Line
Bernard Jacobson, 5 September - 11 October 2013
Modernist master Ben Nicholson embraced the possibilities of etching late in life, at the age of 69. As a presentation of these works at Bernard Jacobson Gallery on Cork Street will show when it opens this week, these prints in the 1960s – which are both abstract and representational – saw the British artist renew his interest in the power of very simple lines and shapes.

_{Ben Nicholson, 'Single form', 1967. Etching, Edition of 50. 42.6 x 52.3 cms (16.77 x 20.59 ins)}

If anything they seem closer to some of his restrained pre-war Concrete Art pieces than his more complex post-war works. "The bite of the steel point into the metal is a terrific experience when all goes right,” Nicholson said at the time, “and the necessity I am finding to reduce the idea to a series of lines is interesting."

The New Situation: Art in London in the Sixties
Sotheby's, 4 - 11 September 2013
The latest issue of RA Magazine – which is just hitting doorsteps – has a lovely little interview with John Kasmin, the art dealer and collector whose gallery helped launch the careers of David Hockney RA et al in the Swinging Sixties.

_{David Hockney, 'Portrait of Kas and Jane', 1965. Private Collection.}

A man who has exquisite taste in both modern art and antiquities, Kasmin curates a week-long exhibition at Sotheby’s that includes some signature pieces by some of the decades most influential artists – from an open-form steel and aluminium sculpture by Anthony Caro RA to a Pop Art acrylic-collage by Peter Blake.

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and Acting Editor of RA Magazine

• Royal Academy of Arts