Phin Jennings

Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show. Born in 1906 in India, where her father worked in the British colonial administration, Colquhoun moved to Cheltenham at a young age and went on to study art at the Slade, where she developed an interest in the esoteric. She was a card-carrying surrealist until 1940, when the group’s British leader E.L.T. Mesens declared that members shouldn’t join other societies. A practicing occultist, she took her cue to leave. Throughout the exhibition, various strains of surrealism and ways of understanding the world serve as a kind of tasting menu for Colquhoun. Here, in a relatively small-scale restaging of her broader exhibition at Tate St. Ives, the jumps between various artistic mediums and grand ideas can be jarring. Spanning painting, drawing and a number of more experimental techniques, the diversity of Colquhoun’s output seems to work against the constraints of the exhibition. What might be an expansive exploration often feels like a whistle-stop tour. Standout moments are deeply –

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image. In its first room, paintings on paper depict bars, cafés, weddings and cabaret shows, replete with voluptuous and lively characters. Though relatively small in scale, each sheet contains multiple scenes that unfold at once. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed. In these works, painted during visits to France early in Burra’s career, everything is voluminous. It’s not just biceps, breasts and bottoms that bulge; at Burra’s hand, pillars, plant pots, light fittings and fruits become equally taut, fleshy affairs. A dainty champagne coup sits in the foreground of Le Bal (1928), dwarfed by the monuments that surround it – from the tubular streamers that hang from the ceiling to the room’s many animated revellers. In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra’s subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today’s context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it’s a style that feels a little hackney

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. This year’s pavilion, ‘A Capsule in Time’ by Marina Tabassum Architects, is a modular wooden structure outfitted with translucent screens that will filter the sun’s light like the leaves of a tree, encouraging inhabitants to bask in its diffused glow. The highly adaptable space with kinetic elements is inspired by shamianas: South Asian tents used for weddings, feasts and other ceremonial occasions.

Having studied at Goldsmiths College with them in the late 1980s, the late Pakistani-born intermedia artist Hamad Butt is often associated with the YBAs. As this impressive survey exhibition, travelling from IMMA in Dublin, reveals, the body of technically ambitious and precisely engineered sculptural work completed before his untimely death at 32 is entirely singular. Navigating the thin boundary between desire and danger, this exhibition will reveal Butt as a subtle master of both chemistry and social critique.

At first, this show seems distinctly uninviting to anyone not deeply in the fold with today’s art scene. It fills three floors with austere works by artists I mostly haven’t heard of. Found objects, subtle installations and elliptical messages abound here; it’s enough to draw a groan from any contemporary art cynic. In the first room, dodging between Gilli Tal’s installation of looming streetlamps and hearing what sounds like an urban field recording by Solomon Garçon, you might feel like you’re navigating a party full of strangers. No artwork is given any context beyond a spreadsheet-like booklet containing the artist’s biographical details and the artwork’s medium, date of creation and exhibition history.  That last, seemingly unimportant detail brings the show to life. Reading through the handout’s fourth column, you’ll see the names of a number of grassroots artist-run exhibition spaces. Almost every artist in the show has been involved in or shown their work at such a venue. Many are now defunct and I’m sure none were ever as well-appointed as this gallery. It is this detail – call it the show’s DIY-pedigree – that animates Fake Barn Country. This is an exhibition about exhibitions This is an exhibition about exhibitions and about exhibition-making as an act of passion, generosity and curiosity shared between artists. Every image, sound and object here is like a mushroom grown from a vast, international and intergenerational network of mutual support and encouragement th