5 amazing art shows to see this January

Get the year off to an inspiring start with our pick of this month’s exhibitions nationwide

Paisaje flotando con cuernos (Floating Landscape with Horns) by Ofelia Rodríguez, 1993. Image: courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá

1. Rodríguez’s dreams 

Street market purchases, mass-produced items, photocopies and stuffed toys all find their way into the work of Colombian-born artist Ofelia Rodríguez, often with surreal and dream-like effects. As in the painting above – featuring bull horns mounted on the canvas, framed by bottle teats extruding thread – the artist often plays with symbols of myth, gender and domesticity. Her series of ‘Magic Boxes’ resemble small shrines, incongruously adorned with plastic skulls or toy duck bills. There’s still time to catch her solo show Ofelia Rodríguez: Talking in Dreams at Bristol’s Spike Island art centre this month. The exhibition has taken on an added poignancy due to the artist’s death last year, shortly before it opened.

Until 14 January

spikeisland.org.uk

Mella Shaw’s Sounding Line, 2023, pictured at the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent. Image: Jenny Harper​

2. Sounding the depths

A sounding line is a weighted rope dropped from a boat to measure sea depth. Artist, ceramicist and environmental activist Mella Shaw borrows the name and concept for her latest installation, which took the top prize at 2023’s British Ceramics Biennial and is currently on show in her home town of Edinburgh. Sounding Linewas inspired by the strandings of almost 100 dead whales on the Scottish and Irish coasts in 2018. Many were a deep-diving species, Cuvier’s beaked whale, which only rarely becomes stranded – but is known to do so if confused by sonar transmissions. Shaw used clay made with ash from the bones of a beached whale to craft her strange sculptural forms, inspired by the inner ears of these marine mammals. Each piece is wrapped in rope that vibrates with a sonar pulse, allowing visitors to (literally) grasp how invisible forces might be affecting marine life.

Until 25 February

summerhall.co.uk

Dancers on a Bench, c.1898, a pastel work on tracing paper by Edgar Degas. Image: Lent by Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums) on behalf of Glasgow City Council. Bequeathed by William McInnes, 1944. Photo: © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection

3. Power of paper

‘People call me the painter of dancing girls,’ Edgar Degas once wrote. ‘[I]t has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement.’ Created by building up layers of coloured pastel on tracing paper, the luminous Dancers on a Bench was one of his final pieces capturing the graceful motion of ballerinas. It’s one of around 80 drawings, pastels, watercolours, gouaches and temperas on display in the Royal Academy’s Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec. Works in these mediums were often seen as merely preparatory pieces or sketches, but this show makes the case that the Impressionists and their followers helped elevate such ‘sketches’ into serious works of art in their own right. Look out for pieces by Paul Cézanne, Eva Gonzalès, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh and more.

Until 10 March 

royalacademy.org.uk

The Harvest is the End of the World and the Reapers are Angels, 1989, by Roger Wagner. Image: © Roger Wagner/Private Collection 

4. Heaven on Earth 

This painting by artist Roger Wagner portrays the biblical parable of the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13: 40-42), which illustrates how, at the end of the world, the faithful will be gathered up and non-believers cast away. In Wagner’s depiction, the harvest is a literal one, carried out by angels in a pastoral Suffolk wheatfield. His visionary work follows in the tradition of forebears such as Samuel Palmer and Stanley Spencer, who similarly relocated Gospel scenes to the English countryside. Wagner’s affinity with the latter artist is explored in a new joint exhibition, Everywhere is Heaven: Stanley Spencer & Roger Wagner, at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, Berkshire. For Spencer, his beloved Cookham was a ‘village in heaven’; for Wagner, the equivalent scenes that fire his spirituality and imagination is ‘a small stretch of landscape on one side of a road that winds along roughly to the broadest stretch of the Alde between the Maltings at Snape and Iken church’. 

Until 24 March

stanleyspencer.org.uk

John Akomfrah’s video installation Arcadia, 2023. Commissioned by The Box, Plymouth; co-commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation and Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam, with support of Polygreen Culture and Art Initiative (PCAI), Piraeus, Greece; installation view, Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah, 2023. Image: Sharjah Art Foundation. Photo: Motaz Mawid ​

5. Akomfrah’s Arcadia

Described by The New York Times as ‘an artist who brings order to chaos’, John Akomfrah has consistently turned his film-maker’s lens on some of the most complex contemporary issues, including racism, migration and climate change. The Ghana-born, London-raised artist made his name as part of the Black Audio Film Collective, whose award-winning film Handsworth Songs explored the 1985 riots spurred by civil and racial unrest in Birmingham. Recognised with a knighthood last year, Akomfrah will be representing the UK at the 60th international Venice Biennale this spring. But before that, there’s the chance to catch the premiere of his latest film, Arcadia, at The Box in Plymouth. Through a non-linear narrative and stunning international imagery, the piece explores ‘The Columbian Exchange’ of people, commodities and diseases across the Atlantic that followed the colonisation of the Americas from the 1400s.

Until 2 June

theboxplymouth.com

For more inspiring shows, see The Arts Society Magazine, available exclusively to members and supporters of The Arts Society (to join, see theartssociety.org/member-benefits). And for our online monthly ‘5 amazing art shows to see’, sign up at theartssociety.org/signup