George Shaw: The Sly and Unseen Day
8 February 2011 – 15 May 2011
Baltic
Gateshead, UK
www.balticmill.com

This major exhibition of the work of British artist George Shaw brings together forty paintings from 1996 to the present day. Within a practice that has encompassed drawing, video-making, performance and writing, Shaw is best known for his expansive body of painting. Based upon photographs taken of and around his childhood home on the Tile Hill Estate, Coventry, Shaw’s landscapes are at once familiar and unnerving.

Cerith Wyn Evans
4 February – 27 March 2011
Bergen Kunsthall
Bergen
Norway
www.kunsthall.no

Cerith Wyn Evans’ exhibitions often combine an all-round sensory experience with intricate juxtapositions of fragments of meaning. With a background in experimental film and video art in the 1980s, he has primarily worked since the 1990s with spectacular installations where a number of media such as sculpture, photography, film, text, light and sound form natural elements. At Bergen Kunsthall he lets the specificity of the spaces form the point of departure for an integrated installation, which fills all four exhibition halls. With effects like light and sound, he explores the long stretch and the strict symmetry along the axis of adjacent rooms that is so characteristic of Bergen Kunsthall’s exhibition architecture.

Cordy Ryman: Windowboxing
15 January – 5 March 2011
Conner Contemporary Art
Washington, DC 20002
www.connercontemporary.com

Cordy Ryman presents a new series of playful works created with paint, wood, metal, Velcro and scraps recycled from his studio floor. Ryman, whose New York solo show was identified this fall as “one of the sleepers of the season” by Roberta Smith, is known for continuous experimentation in constructing, altering, and reconstructing painted geometric forms. The show title, “Windowboxing” (i.e., the solid border that wraps around a tv image when a widescreen picture is refit into a narrower format), suggests how the artist’s adaptive process may shape our perceptual experience.

Carey Young: Memento Park
5 February – 20 March 2011
Cornerhouse
Manchester, UK
www.cornerhouse.org

Carey Young’s celebrated and pioneering work focuses on the interconnections between economic systems, legal language and contemporary culture. Using a variety of media and settings she often uses found tools, language and training processes from the worlds of the multinational corporation and global law firm, altering them to create fictional and absurd scenarios which explore notions of performance, autonomy, criticality and imagination. Positioning herself as an insider to these predominant systems, she takes a stance between complicity and resistance as she criticizes them playfully through the use of their own methods and language.

Anri Sala
3 February – 25 April 2011
Musée d’art contemporain
Montréal, Canada
www.macm.org

For his first solo exhibition in Canada, and his largest in North America, Anri Sala presents a dozen recent major works, including videos, photographs, a sculpture and an installation created specially for the museum. Visitors move seamlessly through the show as if it were a single piece, for the artist considers the process of exhibiting his works as important as that of producing them. Sala reconfigures the space in an innovative way to establish new relationships between the works.

Dan Perjovschi: Hong Kong First
29 January – 17 April 2011
Para/Site Art Space
Hong Kong
www.para-site.org.hk

Dan Perjovschi is well known for having brought the narrative of political cartoons into the realm of the museum through site-specific wall drawing installations. These installations deal with the idea of the everyday and are a comment on the economic and political condition of the 21st century. The artist has translated a medium more usual of the small size format into large scale and monumental wall drawings that engage in the architecture of the location, pushing the meaning and limits of the exhibition space. These site specific projects are conceived by Dan Perjovschi as ongoing series in progress that connect the different art galleries that host his exhibitions. For this exhibition the artist responds to the political and economic positions of the city and contextualizes this discourse regionally and globally.

Tom Burr: Gravity Moves Me
4 February – 17 April 2011
FRAC Champagne – Ardenne
Reims, France
www.frac-champagneardenne.org

Tom Burr’s work (sculpture, installations, photography, collages, drawings) revisits the formal vocabulary of the Avant-garde and Neo-Avant-garde, and mixes references to literature, film and music, Pop iconography, homosexual culture, underground aesthetics, architecture, design and fashion. His conceptual investigation questions the manner in which identity, particularly sexual identity, is constructed, or whether conversely it is constrained by society and its physical spaces. Though the works in this exhibition are intrinsically linked to each other, they are also directly connected to Deep Purple, a monumental sculpture which Tom Burr created in 2000 and which has been installed in the courtyard of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne since 2008.

Daniel Sinsel
28 January – 13 March 2011
Chisenhale Gallery
London, UK
www.chisenhale.org.uk

This new body of work by London-based artist Daniel Sinsel explores classical themes of space, volume and illusion through small handcrafted paintings and sculptures that combine art historical references with a personal iconography. Sinsel focuses on the nature of painting and the particular qualities and associations of the materials he uses – including silk and gold, as well as terracotta, pasta and nutshells.

Michaël Borremans: Eating The Beard
20 February – 1 May 2011
Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
Stuttgart, Germany
www.wkv-stuttgart.de

The scenarios composed by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans in his pictures, which are frequently small-format and intimate, hark back to positions and genres from art history as well as to the pictorial languages of photography, theater, or cinema. This comprehensive solo exhibition presents over one hundred works by Borremans. Alongside paintings, drawings, and filmic works from the past ten years, there is a series of new works that are being exhibited in Germany for the first time.

Kirsten Stoltmann: I Am So Happy
19 February – 16 March 2011
Emma Gray HQ
Los Angeles, US
www.emmagrayhq.com

Kirsten Stoltmann practices her own self-help version of sincere irony by taking on the tropes of new age language and affirmation meditations. I AM SO HAPPY is a bedazzled 8ft x 4ft collage, covered with 762,431 and a half colored fake gems. It is as much a declaration of wish-fulfillment as it is a self-mocking acceptance of a less than ecstatic state of mind. By doing “busy work” and occupying her hands for twelve straight months in fastidious exertion, Stoltmann soldiered away, maintaining that she can (hopefully) work her way out of the abyss, perhaps to the ultimate place – nirvana.