RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (8 – 14 June)

Posted: 07 June 2012 by Sam Phillips

Polly Morgan: Endless Plains
8 June – 31 July 2012
British artist Polly Morgan is a master of the Victorian art of taxidermy, gaining acclaim from 2005 for bringing back to life in uncanny sculptures and assemblages everything from squirrels and rats to exotic birds. Morgan now presents her largest installation to date at All Visual Arts in London’s Kings Cross – piglets, stags and bats promise to feature in macabre works that probe life cycles of sustenance and symbiosis.

Installation view 'Polly Morgan: Endless Plains' at AVA. Courtesy All Visual Arts. Photo: Tessa Angus.

Nancy Holt, 'Sunlight in Sun Tunnels', 1976.

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Nancy Holt: Photoworks
8 June – 25 August 2012
Haunch of Venison in London launches an exhibition of the American Land Art pioneer Nancy Holt, an artist who surprisingly given her status within the movement has never previously been presented in a solo exhibition in this country. The show focuses on her photographs of her site-specific sculptures and imaginative interventions in the landscape, including her seminal piece Sun Tunnels (1973–76), four monumental concrete tunnels in the Great Basin Desert in Utah that are positioned to frame the rising and setting suns on two annual solstices.

Daiwa Foundation Art Prize
8 June – 19 July 2012
The Japan House Gallery, located in a grand Georgian townhouse in the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park, stages its exhibition of shortlisted artists for the Daiwa Foundation Art Prize.

Left: The selectors, Masami Shiraishi, Martin Gayford, Grayson Perry, Mami Kataoka and Jonathan Watkins in front of Haroon Mirza's work. Photo: Ginny Jory. Right: Haroon Mirza, 'Frame for a Painting', Installation View. Photo: Ginny Jory.

Academician Grayson Perry and RA Magazine contributor Martin Gayford were among the judges who shortlisted audio installation artist Haroon Mirza and printmakers Tom Hammick and Jennifer E. Price for the award. It was announced on 7 June that Haroon Mirza has won the £5,000 cheque and the accompanying opportunity to show at a major Japanese gallery.

SNAP 2012: Aldeburgh Festival
9 – 24 June 2012
This weekend sees the start of SNAP 2012, a presentation of contemporary art across the sites of the Aldeburgh music festival in Snape Maltings, Suffolk.

Launched last year to success, the exhibition features works that include paintings by Maggi Hambling and Glenn Brown, a sculpture by Gavin Turk video, a video installation Emily Richardson and a text-based piece by RA Schools graduate Matthew Darbyshire.

Shirazeh Houshiary
Until 27 July 2012
The sculptures and paintings by the Iranian-born London-based artist Shirazeh Houshiary, on view at the Lisson Gallery until the end of July, appear animated by powerful physical forces, from the calligraphic explosion of steel Lacuna (2011) that hangs from the wall to the pencil, pigment and acrylic piece Delirium (2012), in whose centre storm clouds seems to gather into a tornedo.

Left: Shirazeh Houshiary, 'Delirium', 2012. Pencil pigment on black and white aquacryl on canvas and aluminium. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery. Right: Shirazeh Houshiary, 'Lacuna', 2011. Cast stainless steel. Courtesy the artist and Lisson Gallery.