What we're seeing this week

OPENINGS

Chris Cran: It’s My Vault
8 January – 9 May
McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, Ontario
museum.mcmaster.ca

Artist turns curator for this show at the McMaster Museum of Art as Calgary-based Chris Cran selects works from the museum’s impressive 6,000-piece permanent collection to exhibit alongside a painting of his own, The Disputed Sculpture (2007). Cran offers a new perspective on the collection, selecting works which he describes as falling into categories of ‘portraits, landscape to abstraction, collage/wallpaper, and squeeze and stretch’, including works by Art & Language, Raoul Dufy, John Hoyland, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Leon Kossoff, Bruce McLean, Robert Rauschenberg and Gerhard Richter.

Chris Cran, The Disputed Sculpture, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Trepanier Baer Gallery

John Miller: Here in the Real World
10 January – 14 February
Metro Pictures, New York
metropictures.com

In a two-part exhibition that also extends to Mary Boone Gallery at 541 W. 24th Street, John Miller exhibits the ‘Game show paintings’ series that he began in 1998, alongside two relief portrait series, ‘Reality TV personalities’ (started 2009) and ‘Pedestrian paintings’ (started 2013), which are presented here as a frieze. Concerned with the relationship of art and the everyday, Miller selects apparently uncontrived poses to depict in his portraits, and counters the unwitting passer-by with the mediated reality of TV and social media.

John Miller, Everything is Said 21, 2012

LAST CHANCE TO SEE

Somewhere, Here
Until 10 January
AJC Gallery, Hong Kong
ajc-art.com

Gill Rocca lives and works in London, but is a self-confessed fan of the woods. In Somewhere, Here she presents new series of landscapes painted in oil, from miniatures to large-scale canvases. Like much of her work, these eerie scenes are shrouded in fog, devoid of figures, with only street lights, headlamps, and the glowing windows of distant villages to pierce the gloom. With series titles such as ‘Figment’, ‘Near to Nowhere’, and ‘Elsewhere’, these landscapes defy geography and exist instead as dreams or nightmares, as scenes set for something to happen.

Gill Rocca, Elsewhere I, 2014 © Gill Rocca

Arnulf Rainer
Until 6 January
Albertina, Vienna
albertina.at

Opened in 2014 to mark the great Austrian artist’s 85th birthday, this major retrospective spans Arnulf Rainer’s career, from his early Surrealist drawings through to later photographic work. His so-called ‘over-paintings’ are a particular area of focus. Created since the mid-1950s, often with distinctive cross-shaped painting surfaces, these are the works for which Rainer is internationally known. But the long career of this influential artist is shown here to be immense and varied. With dark humour and a sprawling, uncontainable approach, Rainer’s diverse work addresses a multitude of themes, including death, insanity, violence and absurdity.

Arnulf Rainer, Albertina (exhibition view)

Constable: The Making of a Master
Until 11 January
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
vam.ac.uk

‘Landscape is my mistress’, Constable once wrote, and this show sets out to confirm his reputation as its master. This must-see exhibition reassesses the work of the English painter and explores his method in extraordinary detail, comparing vibrant en plein air sketches, full-scale paintings and later mezzotint prints. Initially placing Constable in the context of 17th-century masters of the classical landscape, such as Claude and Rubens, the exhibition goes on to establish his own substantial legacy and influence.

John Constable, Watermeadows near Salisbury, 1829/30. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London