RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (6 – 12 Sep)

Eileen Cooper RA
Art First, 10 September – 12 October 2013
While helping the development of younger artists in the RA Schools as Keeper of the Royal Academy, Eileen Cooper has continued to progress her own painting and drawing practice over the last two years.

_{Eileen Cooper, Rabbit And Fox, 2013. Oil on canvas, 122x153cm. Photo: Justin Piperger. Courtesy Art First.}

To coincide with the artist’s 60th birthday, Art First in Eastcastle Street dedicates two floors to Cooper’s recent large-scale canvases and charcoals: entitled Edge to Edge. The show presents pictorial spaces in which figures expressively dance, play and pose, their energy pushing beyond the boundaries of the canvas and paper. The situations Cooper creates in these works are characteristically enigmatic, always engaging the imagination of viewers as well as their eyes.

Richard Serra
Alan Cristea Gallery, 11 September – 8 October
Since the late 1960s, American artist Richard Serra has produced minimalist sculptures in non-traditional materials such as rubber and metal, examining the properties of such substances both on small and larger scales – from Shovel Plate Prop (1969), a deadpan examination of gravity in Tate Modern, to his captivating swirls of oxidised steel on permanent display in the Guggenheim Bilbao .

_{Richard Serra, Trajectory And Extension Etchings Installed at Alan Cristea Gallery London. Photo: FXP Photography. Courtesy Alan Cristea Gallery.}

But a show at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art last year revealed the extent that drawing has been an alternative part of his practice, and from 19 September London’s Courtauld shows a new suite of his works of crayon on plastic. To coincide, Alan Cristea Gallery presents his prints for the first time in the UK. Serra’s recent etchings feature minimalist black forms (reminiscent of the dropped-from-space monoliths in Kubrick’s 2001), although if one gets up close one can enjoy the richness of their intaglio textures.

James Welling
Maureen Paley, 6 September — 6 October 2013
American photographer James Welling – the subject of a show at Maureen Paley, London, from this weekend – has had a similarly significant influence on his chosen medium as Serra.

_{James Welling, 'Maidenhead', 2012. Inkjet print (Epson 9800 print on Museo Silver Rag). 28 x 42 in. © James Welling, courtesy Maureen Paley, London.}

Since the 1970s he has pursued a wide range of photographic styles in tandem, from shadowy photograms and highly abstracted images of scrunched foil to architectural photography and images of light sources. Across all his diverse projects the quality control is high and a sense of restless experimentation palpable. This latest exhibition sees Welling visit the rural sites and subjects painted by Pennsylvanian realist painter Andrew Wyeth.

_{Jonathan Yeo, 'Damien Hirst', © Jonathan Yeo.} Jonathan Yeo
National Portrait Gallery, 11 September 2013 - 5 January 2014
Over the last decade Jonathan Yeo has become a chosen portraitist for powerful figures, from A-list celebrities (Nicole Kidman, Sienna Miller and Kevin Spacey) and politicians (Tony Blair and David Cameron) to influential artists (Damien Hirst and Grayson Perry RA).

A display of his work at the National Portrait Gallery from Wednesday shows why. Yeo foregrounds his sitters’ facial features and expressions with a high impact realism, but their clothes and backgrounds are more abstracted – mottled and blurred in a romantic style that lends his subjects grandeur.

Sotheby’s at Chatsworth
Chatsworth, 9 September - 27 October 2013
Academicians Thomas Heatherwick and Tony Cragg are among a strong selection of artists showing sculptural works in the splendid gardens of Chatsworth, Derbyshire, from Monday, as part of a show staged by Sotheby’s.

_{Thomas Heatherwick, 'Pavilion', 1993. Acrylic, wood and aluminium. 400 by 610 by 340cm.}

The former contributes his piece Pavilion (1993), a skeletal wood and aluminium form that is a very modern take on the kind of neo-classical follies one finds in the ground of such properties. Cragg contributes Declination (2005), a painted scrunch of bronze whose highly artificial green-yellow tone contrasts with the natural greens of leaves and grass. Other artists on view include Marc Quinn, Mario Merz, Jaume Plensa and Manolo Valdes.

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

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