Illness meant that we missed publishing our usual pick of the week’s arts, design, film and music events from across Liverpool and beyond this Monday, but its fashionably late sibling, The Weekender, makes up for it…

Friday – Exhibition Opening: Transmissions: Ancestors – Silvia Battista 6pm @ at Bridewell Studios & Gallery –  FREE

Artist collective Material Matters – Angelo Madonna, John Elcock, Patric Rogers, Silvia Battista – explore and interrogate the interrelationship between materiality, myths and eco-ethics. Last seen in these parts with their Into the Wyld residency at Birkenhead’s Williamson Art Gallery, tonight sees the opening of a new chapter. Titled Transmissions, this latest collab looks at ‘correspondences between the animate, inanimate and the metaphysical’ across four parts, with multidisciplinary artist Silvia Battista‘s exhibition, Deep Time, serving as introduction and departure point.

Conference: How To Read An Image 6pm @ FACT Liverpool –  £25.30/£15/£10

The image – a multi-textual, subjective artefact – is today, thanks to our CG, post-truth, increasingly AI-saturated world, a more complex thing than ever before. Luckily for us then that this three-day conference promises a range of insights into how to go about reading one. Speakers including artists, writers and researchers looking at, among other things, the ‘cis gaze’, selfhood and visibility as power, address the question: “how do we read an image when the image feels more real than reality?” Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard never felt so relevant…     

Saturday – Last Chance to See: Linder: The Return of Linderland (until 3 October) @ Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool – FREE 

Linder, who first came to attention with her arresting cover design for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict record sleeve, is now inarguably deserving of national treasure status. At Blackpool’s Grundy, the artist – born and bred in this part of the world – is celebrated in a remixed version of last year’s Hayward exhibition (top), with works spanning five decades of breaking and remaking the mould. Taking the DIY aesthetic and attitude of the post-punk scene as departure point, expect feminist photomontage, drawings, film and ephemera, alongside works by L.S. Lowry and paintings selected by Linder Sterling herself from the Grundy’s collection.

Further Reading: Autumn Exhibitions Round-up

Gig: James Lavelle 7pm @ Future Yard, Birkenhead –  £20 (+ booking fee)

Mo’Wax and UNKLE maestro James Lavelle has worked with everyone from Massive Attack to Mark Lanegan in a genre-straddling career that laughs in the face of the term eclectic. Tonight, his fusion of influences arrive at Birkenhead’s Future Yard.

Gig: Kristin Hersh 8pm @ the Liverpool Philharmonic Music Room – £29.15–£34.65

I’ve followed with interest and admiration Kristin Hersh’s career ever since hearing Your Ghost, on which Michael Stipe duets, on a compilation getting on for 30 years ago. Her debut solo single, it is – as you might well expect – a haunting treat that lives with you well beyond its three minutes or so. Since then, Hersh has continued off the beaten path, making music that eschews the mainstream expectations that she and her then band Throwing Muses fell foul of when they signed for Sire/Warner Bros. And all the better for it; Hersh’s is a voice always worth listening to.

Sunday – Closing Soon: Wide Angle View @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North – FREE

This excellent exhibition of The Architectural Review’s Manplan series – which looked at architecture’s social responsibilities – makes a mockery of RIBA North’s relatively limited floorspace, fitting tightly-curated sections of excellent photography within its confines. Published at the end of the ‘60s, Manplan strove to tackle questions of what a city might be, challenging the culture of the time across issues including Frustration, Local Government and Housing. Today, when cities often seem only to exist to relieve us of what little money we may have, the exhibition reminds us of other ideals, posing questions about social responsibility to citizens.

Mike Pinnington

Images, from top:  installation view of Linder’s Danger Came Smiling, The Pool of Life (2021), photo by Mark Blower (courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery); Rachel Maclean, DUCK (2023). Film still. Courtesy of the artist

It’s been a while since we went away. Now back in the saddle, we thought it was high time we cast our eye across exhibitions gracing Liverpool this autumn – as well as those a little further afield…

Wide Angle View (until 1 November) @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North – FREE 

This fascinating exhibition of The Architectural Review’s Manplan series – which looked at architecture’s social responsibilities – makes a mockery of RIBA North’s relatively limited floorspace, fitting tightly-curated sections of excellent photography within its confines. Published at the end of the ‘60s, Manplan strove to tackle questions of what a city might be, challenging the culture of the time across issues including Frustration, Local Government and Housing. Today, when cities often seem only to exist to relieve us of what little money we may have, the exhibition reminds us of other ideals, posing questions about social responsibility to citizens.

‘Just Come in’: 30 years of Maggie’s Centres (until 29 November) @ Tate Liverpool + RIBA North – FREE

Maggie’s is a charity that works with architects to consider how spaces for cancer support can best be designed. To mark 30 years of their existence, photographer Tabitha Jussa was commissioned to document some of the more than 30 centres offering a variety of support to people affected by cancer across the UK. Currently on display at RIBA North, ‘Just Come in’, says Jussa, explores “the relationship between people and place” that she encountered as she “set about capturing the nurturing and other worldly experience” found there.

Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 and Seema Mattu (until 14 February, 2027); BRB (until 6 December) @ FACT Liverpool – FREE

These fresh out of the box exhibitions tackle a multitude of issues. Singaporean artist Rae-Yen Song’s landscape-traversing show, above, looks at our connections to ecosystems (including insects from FACT’s rooftop garden), ancestors, and the cosmos, drawing on the immigrant experience to reimagine the world. Seema Mattu’s tour bus as installation encompasses music, sculpture, film and digital animation, with a focus on sonic joy, musicality and collectivity via tour Saheli – a group comprised of five South Asian queer women: Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay, MANI JNX, Ushara Dilrukshan, Zahrah Hutton and Mattu. Upstairs in BRB, Liverpool-based artists Livi Wilmore, Mrs Luva-Luva and Ellie Hoskins explore a mixture of the (very funny) mundane, abject and the increasingly blurry separation between on- and offline realms.

Close to Home (until 10 October) @ the Cunard Building, Liverpool – FREE

Close to Home, from Heart of Glass in St Helens, brings together eight years-worth of artist Mark Storor’s work made in collaboration with people with lived and living experience of suicide. Including film, photography, sculpture, poetry and music, the Liverpool city centre exhibition – part of a hugely ambitious long-term project – offers a space for contemplation, reflection and is an attempt to give voice to those affected by suicide. (Given the subject matter, it’s safe to assume Close to Home engages with themes that some people may find emotionally challenging.)

New Faces, New Focus: Stories We Share & Next Up! (until 20 December) @ Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool – FREE

At nearby Open Eye gallery, meanwhile, you’ll find two jam-packed exhibitions. New Faces, New Focus: Stories We Share, is a collaborative endeavour developed in the Liverpool City Region, Armagh and Aberdeenshire, which foregrounds communities whose stories – dealing with themes of journeys, identity and home – are rarely represented in museum collections. Graduate showcase Next Up! includes work from the MA in Socially Engaged Photography, collaboratively run by Open Eye with the University of Salford. This year’s bright young things include early-career photographers, Yaqeen Amir (above), Ella Horniman, Jack Smith, and Helen Constantinou, whose works variously address personal memory; creative opportunity in underrepresented communities; the environment; and material.

Becky Beasley: ‘A Gentle Man (Part II) (1975-2029)’ (until 3 January, 2027) @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool –  FREE

In this touring exhibition (below), described in its interpretation as “a meticulously constructed interior pastoral landscape,” Becky Beasley presents an immersive environment in four parts. Across work, family, chosen family and dying, Beasley proposes a trip through life’s milestones, taking in linoleum covered floor, a series of silhouette lakes, custom-made benches, ceramic and audio works, and a film narrated by Being Human actor Russell Tovey.

Linder: The Return of Linderland (until 3 October) @ Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool – FREE 

Linder, who first came to attention with her arresting cover design for the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict record sleeve, is now inarguably deserving of national treasure status. At Blackpool’s Grundy, the artist – born and bred in this part of the world – is celebrated in a remixed version of last year’s Hayward exhibition (top), with works spanning five decades of breaking and remaking the mould. Taking the DIY aesthetic and attitude of the post-punk scene as departure point, expect feminist photomontage, drawings, film and ephemera, alongside works by L.S. Lowry and paintings selected by Linder Sterling herself from the Grundy’s collection.

Leonard McComb: Nature & Humanity (until 31 October) @ Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead – FREE 

Sculptor, painter, printmaker, draughtsman and teacher, Williamson exhibition Nature & Humanity celebrates Royal Academician Leonard McComb. Across 60 works, including key paintings, drawings, and sculpture, it focuses in-particular on the artist’s interest in ecologies. Situating the exhibition in today’s context, curator Josh Mackarell said: “McComb’s work is not just relevant to our modern times for its beauty and technical brilliance, but also because its environmental outlook speaks to the fundamental debates of our time.”

Making a Mark: Artworks from the Studio Prints Collection (until 30 January 2027) @ Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool – FREE 

Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, and Dorothea Wight are among the artists featuring in current VG&M exhibition, Making a Mark. Drawn from the Studio Prints Collection – which grew out of a workshop established in 1968 by Wight, who was later joined by future husband Marc Balakjian – the exhibition, says curator Sarah Cox, “tells a unique and compelling story about the convergence of technical skill and creative ambition.” It all makes for a cracking insight into complementary artistic practice.

Anthony Shapland – murmur (until 31 October) @ Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham – FREE 

“Starlings are arch imitators. They can replicate the sounds of other birds and their wider environment, including the mechanical noise of traffic crossings and ringtones.” So writes Marie-Anne McQuay, curator of Anthony Shapland’s murmur, an exhibition that uses this idea of mimicry as a metaphor for the masking we each perform in life. Exploring the idea across text, audio-visual, and sculptural works in autobiographical fashion, Shapland dissects social mores more broadly so that we might all find ourselves reflected therein.

Further Reading: Mirror Selves – Anthony Shapland’s murmur

Taking Centre Stage: Female Artists in The Atkinson’s Collection (until 27 February 2027) @ the Atkinson Southport – FREE

Galleries and museums with collections increasingly recognise their responsibility to paint a more varied picture of art history than was, up until alarmingly recently, not thought strictly necessary. Currently at Southport’s Atkinson (which you overlook at your peril), that means taking a closer look at the story of some of its female artists, including Alice Havers, Laura Knight, and Tracey Emin.

Mike Pinnington

Images, from top: installation view of Linder’s Danger Came Smiling, The Pool of Life (2021), photo by Mark Blower (courtesy the artist and the Hayward Gallery); Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊, •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• (2026). Installation view at FACT Liverpool. Courtesy the artist. Photography by Rob Battersby; Yaqeen Amir/Open Eye Gallery; Beack Beasley installation photography, Kieran Irvine; Murmer, Anthony Shapland. Installation view, Tŷ Pawb, 2026. Photography by Harry Meadley  

“A low voice. A chant, or a prayer, a rumour. A sound not meant to be heard. Things not to be said.” In murmur, a multi-disciplinary exhibition of film, sound, light and text, artist Anthony Shapland tackles the selves we deny, and the selves we become…  

You hear it before you see it; loud, descriptive, cacophonous noise, ricocheting around. What is it? A child’s machine gun imitating the real thing? Beatboxers learning but not yet having perfected their trade? A couple of car alarms? Maybe. No, you think, it’s birds, all kinds of them, such is the racket. Someone must have put some feed out, or some old past their sell by date crusts. It is in fact all and none of these things at once – it’s the starlings. Starlings – our little beatboxers as I’ve come to call them; those rapid, plucky, petrol-inflected birds, just doing their thing, believing perhaps that they must pass as some alternate entity to survive. (According to the RSPB, they are an at risk Red List species.)

In her introduction text to Anthony Shapland’s murmur at Wrexham’s Tŷ Pawb, the exhibition’s curator Marie-Anne McQuay observes that “Starlings are arch imitators. They can replicate the sounds of other birds and their wider environment, including the mechanical noise of traffic crossings and ringtones.” And “in Shapland’s practice these glittering, darting birds stand in for other forms of imitation, for growing up in a rural setting while performing as straight; for almost, yet not quite, fitting in.” Survival by performance.

Fitting in comes naturally to some, less so to others. I’ve always felt, for instance, whether on the periphery of the school disco, or listening rather than taking part in conversation in larger groups, that I occupied somewhat awkwardly (of course awkwardly) the latter, ‘less so’ category. More recently, entering the art sector through a side-door, I was oh so conscious of my working classness (even if I hadn’t yet learned to refer to it as such); to borrow aptly once more from McQuay: I felt “camouflaged and hidden, yet also, somehow, in plain sight.” The mimicry of the starling is an elegant, practically universal, metaphor.

In Shapland’s Wales Book of the Year prize-winning novel, A Room Above a Shop, we are introduced to men used to adopting similar survival techniques, even (especially) when possessed of the yearning knowledge that they should have nothing at all to hide. Should have no need to be wary, on guard. In the opening pages of A Room, we meet B, setting out on his annual pilgrimage, climbing a hill that is “a bright map of his childhood. A play track for stunt bikes, a den, a place to be lost, to disappear with siblings. Or away from them. A place to loiter and mitch dull school days out until the bell. A place to be alone with this feeling that he’s different to the others.” Different: in the wrong hands, such a sly, insinuating term.

Continuing his climb, and mulling over such thoughts, B wonders: “How often has he stared into the mirror at this hidden him? An understudy, carefully learning lines and behaviours; waiting in the wings to take the stage. Trying to understand how it is to be in this small town, a boy in this world.”

Shapland does not distinguish between his artistic and writing practice. Both relate to his belief that the world is constructed just as a film is, its mise en scène arranged as if by a director; it is natural to visualise B’s train of thought intertwining with murmur’s themes. There we can imagine the words on the page escaping their fictionalised confines, to be made manifest in text (there is a comfortable and considerate reading area amid the installation), audio-visual, and sculptural artworks. A forest – or nest – of easels holds space in the main gallery; beyond which, a film on large-scale screen features a naked man, determinedly holding his pose even when troubled by the occasional winged interlopers – starlings, of course.

These works acknowledge the mimicry implied, while also speaking to an awakening, a throwing off of the mask, at least in-part, when Shapland left his rural home to go to college (the first in his family to do so), and to his first life-drawing classes. On the easels of Between the Dog and the Wolf (2019) can be found postcard renditions of Sylvia Sleigh’s nudes; these represent, are the result of, a reversal of societal and art historical expectations both. Between the Dog and the Wolf offers cover for a different kind of looking and seeing. In single channel film, Sleeper (2026), meanwhile, we find Sleigh’s 2D work and object of the gaze made flesh (though I’m unsure whether her models ever had to worry about being dive-bombed).

Outside the gallery – subtly playing with our experience of it – Night after night before day’s thoughtful sequencing of light provides a suggestion of the passage of time, and one of the fear and wonder that accompanies twilight; simultaneously, it alludes to night for day, the technique used to simulate night-time film scenes shot in daylight. Elsewhere, the starlings traverse beyond the bounds of the gallery, making welcome appearances in smaller film works dotted around Tŷ Pawb’s covered market. Whether on the lookout, grabbing a coffee, or after locally-made gifts, you’re sure to encounter them. Regular visitors to Tŷ Pawb will be familiar with its piano, atop which there sits sheet music for Tunes for the Starling (1717) – an inclusion that activates and speaks to a meaningful engagement with space as well as, perhaps, the extent to which Shapland feels a certain kinship with these avian proxies.

Elements of autobiography clearly abound, then, but murmur is more nuanced than that – just as life is. It implies the comfortable (and otherwise) wider vocabulary of codes and conduct learned in childhood, and those other codes – often much less familiar – that some wear as snugly as a comfy pair of jeans. It’s found in the cultural capital taken for granted by those from different backgrounds, that the rest must choose to reject or hurry to catch up on – others still oblivious to the race altogether. So while murmur is certainly a self-portrait of sorts, it is also a generous rumination and commentary on social mores – and their many built-in pitfalls. As such, we are all likely to glimpse shards of our own mirror selves therein; remembering those old learned lines as we go, spying fragments of our once-exiled wild twin.

Mike Pinnington        

Images: Murmer, Anthony Shapland. Installation view, Tŷ Pawb, 2026. Photos by Harry Meadley

Anthony Shapland – Murmur, until 31 October @ Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham 

“New mediums gave rise to considerations of how painting and painters might respond.” A trio of works demonstrate that painting’s engagement with photography and film continues to reverberate, finds Mike Pinnington…  

Prior to the 19th century arrival of photography, painting had been the undisputed visual recording device. It wasn’t, of course, always truthful. Nor was it democratic. Gentry and royalty – those able to pay for the privilege – would be flattered; a nip here, a tuck there, long before plastic surgery made such terminology commonplace, and longer still before editing software and apps made aesthetic tweaks the norm. With the possibility of near instantaneous image capture, painting’s role came under scrutiny. As one commentator said in 1839, photography was: “an invention… which could cause some alarm to our Dutch painters. A method has been found whereby sunlight itself is elevated to the rank of drawing master, and faithful depictions of nature are made the work of a few minutes.”   

Subsequent decades saw the birth of cinema (with the Lumière brothers holding the first ticketed screening of moving pictures in Paris, in 1895). And, as the next century dawned concerns grew, moving the artist Henrietta Clopath to remark in 1901 that: “The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colors has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do.”

The rumours of painting’s impending death, however, had been greatly exaggerated. As we know, while its viability is periodically questioned (not least today), rather than its being superseded, what happened instead is that painters adapted to, were catalysed even, by the perceived threat. The new mediums of photography and film gave rise to considerations of how painting and painters might respond; either by going beyond the old tradition of performing the role of mirror on the world, or in open dialogue.

Writing on the conversation between film and photography, David Campany has said that the mediums remain significant for each other, “not just technically but aesthetically and artistically. Each has borrowed from and lent to the other. Each has envied the qualities of the other. And at key moments each has relied upon the other for its self-definition.” The exact same can said of painting, in view of such technological arrivistism. Painting’s engagement with both photography and film, at times simultaneously, continues to reverberate through the discipline, a point richly demonstrated by a trio of contemporary works now on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery.

Via the woozy ambiguity of Eva Helene Pade’s 2025 painting, I mørket (In the dark), we are transported back to early 20th century Germany and the expressionism that represented a conscious move to address the challenges posed by new means of capturing the world. Marked by an urge to represent emotion, interiority and spirituality as opposed to facsimile, from Kandinsky to Schiele, Munch to Dix, this was a movement delving deep beneath the surface of its subject matter. Often, these were paintings of women – either muse or hysterics – by men. In the case of Pade’s modern-day take, however, in work she has described as a ‘surrender to the more metaphysical parts of the paintings,’ we find an artist depicting active female protagonists rather than passive subjects. I mørket (In the dark) – vivid, and the longer you look at it, somehow destabilising – feels at once fresh, relevant and literate.

Ella Kruglyanskaya, an artist who said that she wants her paintings to feel cinematic, is contending with the canonical problem of the representation of women. Her 2024 work, Odalisque in Blue (small) – featuring a naked female figure viewed from behind, looking back at us over her shoulder – finds Kruglyanskaya referencing the intersectional issues contained within the ‘Orientalist’ movement’s objectification of enslaved women. Situating representation of women in a contemporary context, her paintings blur disciplinary lines between art, illustration and the ubiquity of social media image-making. Speaking in a 2016 TDN interview about the sources and themes that proliferate in her practice, she said: “pop culture, art history, the history of painting, and the culture of cinema, photography – I think they all play into each other, back and forth.”

Gilles Deleuze has said that “The encounter between two disciplines doesn’t take place when one begins to reflect on another, but when one discipline realizes that it has to resolve, for itself and by its own means, a problem similar to one confronted by the other.” Along with the breadth of cultural reference points, what we see most often in the paintings of Ella Kruglyanskaya, which imply a tussle towards resolving the problem of representations of women, is a resolute decision that her women can rarely be construed as mere subjects of the gaze – a gaze often returned with a large helping of knowing side-eye. As Laura Robertson has observed: “the Female Gaze in Kruglyanskaya’s work stares right back.”

The language of cinema is more explicit still in Mise en scène (2025), a luminous and seductive painting by Louise Giovanelli. Drawn from a found image of a 1970s film, its title, from the French, means ‘to place on stage’, and refers to the means by which visual elements are arranged in a film – including props, the set and, of course, actors. In Giovanelli’s painting, the camera’s lens lands on and captures a woman seemingly amidst, lost even, in pure ecstasy. Superficially at least, it suggests a particular reading, one of sexual pleasure. In fact, belying assumptions borne of a lifetime’s worth of mainstream portrayals of women on screen, she is delighting in another act, that of taking communion.

The spectre haunting each of these works and, indeed, this piece of writing, is neither photography or film, but Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, which introduced the theory of the ‘male gaze.’ In a later, 2003 essay, Stillness in the Moving Image: Ways of Visualizing Time and its Passing, Mulvey wrote: “I was preoccupied by Hollywood’s ability to construct the female star as ultimate spectacle, the emblem and guarantee of its fascination and power. Now, I am more interested in the way that those moments of spectacle were also moments of narrative halt, near stillness, that figure the halt and stillness inherent in the structure of celluloid itself. Then, I was concerned with the way Hollywood eroticized the pleasure of looking, inscribing a sanitized voyeurism into its style and narrative conventions. Now, I am more interested in the ways in which the presence of time itself can be discovered behind the mask of storytelling.”

Mulvey goes on to say that “new technologies allow the spectator time to stop, look and think.” But Giovanelli (and others channelling similar concerns), demonstrates that ‘old’ technology can be equally adept at providing that space; in the stillness of painting can be found a space that takes us beyond (the albeit still relevant) ‘woman as image’ narrative this trio of works might at first suggest.

Mike Pinnington

Works discussed are on display in the Walker Art Gallery‘s Contemporary displays 

Images, from top: Installation view of Louise Giovanelli, ‘Mise en scène’ (2025) at Walker Art Gallery © Pete Carr; other installation shots: Eva Helene Pade’s 2025 painting, I mørket (In the dark); Ella Kruglyanskaya’s 2024 painting, Odalisque in Blue (small); and Louise Giovanelli’s 2025 painting, Mise en scène, all MP

Reckoning with uncertain times, a group exhibition taking its name from a century old movement is a tonic, says Mike Pinnington…

Z – A – U – M. ZAUM. With its roots in the early 20th century Russian futurist movement, this was the name given to a language of experimentation beyond meaning (‘za – beyond’; ‘um – mind’). Developed by radical modernist poet, Aleksei Kruchenykh, it is said to have inspired Malevich (he of the black square), in “trying desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world…” with a new painterly language of colour and form outside established perimeters. Never fear: “In our art,” said Kruchenykh, “we already have the first experiments of the language of the future.”

ZAUM lends its name and, more than a century on, some of its intent, to an ambitious group exhibition currently on display at 50MV, an artist-run space in Sefton’s Waterloo. Across its 15 works, there is the suggestion of striving for new, different ways to address and reckon with our own uncertain times. Bridging the gap between then and now is Sir Terry Frost (1915–2003), renowned for his use of Cornish light, colour and shape, all of which informs the strikingly beautiful Newlyn Yellow (1996).

The space, though (formerly home to a high street newsagents), is otherwise populated with works made this decade (the majority of them this year), making this an exhibition of our moment, one that has otherwise come to be defined by an art that commonly, understandably, is overtly wrestling with the socio-political concerns of the day. ZAUM!, however, like its anti-language namesake, possesses a more gnomic – some may say more sophisticated – quality, implying philosophies, and answers, just out of reach.

James Bacchi-Andreoli (who, alongside Luke Skiffington, is the exhibition’s co-curator) mentions processes of accident and chance, unplanned encounters, and of losing and finding, all of which seem present in his gesso and coloured pencil odyssey, Inside Outside 1 – a fragmented cut-up grid of cul-de-sacs, wrong turns and happenstance. There is, similarly, something of the labyrinthine in the painstakingly hand-chiselled angular furrows of Sasha Holzer’s Walnut (above).

Jane K Morter‘s sculptural piece, meanwhile, seems to evoke a lost futures moodiness, with the brutalism-inflected wall work, Lightfold. Molly Thompson’s architectonic acrylic on panel construction, Transitional Measures, with what the artist describes as ‘off-kilter geometries’ invites us to adopt a topographic perspective; David Ryan’s eye-catching Zones 8 goes further still, putting one in mind of a zoomed out, abstracted Google Earth screen grab.

Alongside all of this form, there is certainly no lack of colour. Mike Carney‘s Untitled (above, detail) has a pleasingly outside-the-lines quality in its bleed of inky greens, oranges and blues on non-porous Yupo paper – a study in ‘visual and aural abstraction,’ says Carney. Clem Crosby’s fabulously named Almighty Meat is a frenetic riot of mostly primary colours, while Christopher Peterson’s Untitled is a tablet-like rune of symbology, its layers suggesting a puzzle to be solved. Safe to say: the chromatically inclined amongst us are covered.

Questing, colour and form are all here, then, combining multiple nods to the heyday of abstraction with an up-to-the-minute hue. A tonic of an exhibition, ZAUM! offers works defying current expectations of the visual arts landscape. To paraphrase the poet Kruchenykh: might we already have the first experiments of a new language of the future?

ZAUM! is on display @ 50MV Gallery until 28 June

Images: Installation photography, courtesy Luke Skiffington; Sasha Holzer, Walnut (2026); Mike Carney, Untitled (2024, detail)

Mike Pinnington

The great American road trip – the frontier and its trappings – serve as departure point for artist Ed Ruscha, and this tightly focused exhibition of his works, finds Mike Pinnington…

In 1956, Ed Ruscha – an artist JG Ballard said had ‘the coolest gaze in American art’ – embarked on a journey that, in many ways, would foreshadow a career and its concerns to follow. Leaving his Oklahoma City birthplace behind, he made his way west, driving along dusty highways and byways, to Los Angeles. En route, he was struck by the stark expanse of the landscape.

Signs of life came mostly in the form of gas stations, those uncanny waystations which punctuated his trip and the liminal spaces along the storied Route 66. Many of these he would capture with his camera, resulting in the photographs that led in 1963 to his first, now iconic artist book, Twentysix Gasoline Stations (as well as an accompanying series of paintings, drawings and prints). These works speak to the great American road trip – the frontier and its trappings – and serve as departure point for a close, ongoing engagement with the signs and symbols of the US.

From its landscape and self-image (commonly projected onto the silver screen) – all of it a reflected, blurry version of what used to be called the American dream – Ruscha’s work gives us a front-row seat, inviting us along for the ride. Such aspects are brought together in tight focus in Tate Liverpool’s ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha.

The artist has said: “When I got going on the books … it was really the red meat of my work.” Fittingly, then, the show begins with the handsome ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), a monochromatic black and white work on paper that reads as declaration of intent, and as a reminder of Ruscha’s beginnings and continuing interest in graphic design. Nearby, a vitrine protects, among other items, second and third editions of Twentysix Gasoline Stations; above it, a 1970 lithograph presents a framed tactile-looking depiction of the book. If the constraints of viewing printed matter in this way frustrate somewhat, an adjacent digital display allows for a relaxed, leisurely look at this and other publications that echo throughout the following works herein.

From route 66, we nose our way through West Hollywood, arriving at the Sunset Strip. Drawn from photographs made in 1966 for Ruscha’s book Every Building on the Sunset Strip (a series he revisited in 1995), the examples on display here invoke nothing if not the locale’s mythology. Shimmering with the heat haze of the blazing California sunshine, they call to mind movies made – and, no doubt, merely dreamt and imagined – here, at such industry haunts as Greenblatt’s Deli. Reminding us of Hollywood’s genius and propensity for artifice, Ruscha used razor blades and sandpaper to simultaneously deface and emphasise the filmic quality of these images.

Cinema and its history is rich subject matter for artist and audience. In Pools #1–#9 (1968), we recall the moneyed leisure/ennui on show in The Swimmer, made the same year. Frank Perry’s picture finds Burt Lancaster’s Ned Merrill swimming home via neighbourhood pools on a journey of middle-aged existentialist self-discovery. 1975’s semi-abstract Miracle #64, meanwhile, is at once shaft of celestial projector light, and a foreshadowing, at least to my mind’s eye, of David Lynch’s then yet to be made film, Lost Highway (1997). In that, it somehow suggests, perhaps even informs, and is drawn into, the mobius strip time loop of that film’s narrative; the two somehow meet along the road, to become fellow travellers, emphasising the enduring and fruitful conversation enjoyed between art and film.

Elsewhere, tools of the graphic design trade are once again to the fore; in Los Francisco San Angeles Portfolio (2001) and BLVD.-AVE.-ST. (2006), we see small- and large-scale experimentation with geometric patterns and grid systems the artist calls ‘metro plots’.  With PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL and DAILY PLANET (both 2003), Ruscha enlists his wonderfully named Boy Scout Utility Modern typeface, in ambiguous, intertextual works – one seemingly a reference to delaying the inevitable, the other environmental and pop culture comic book reference both – juxtaposing the text of their titles with vast mountainsides.

In the onomatopoeia of HONK (1962), we are brought neatly back to that grand North American symbol of liberation, the means by which Ruscha became Ruscha, the automobile. MAD SCIENTIST (1975) and HOLLYWOOD TANTRUM (1979) imply La La Land tropes – on-screen and off – touching yet again on visual art’s complex relationship to cinema. Like many a great film, ARTIST ROOMS: Ed Ruscha, is over before you know it; not, however, before one final nod in the direction of the intersecting of life and the movies, with the irresistibly apt – forgivably on-the-nose – selection of THE END #40 (2003). A staple of closing credits, it serves here as marker of the close of this exhibition – while leaving you yearning for an extended director’s cut.

Mike Pinnington

Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha continues @ Tate Liverpool until 14 June

Images: Ed Ruscha, Standard Study # 3 1963 © Ed Ruscha; Edward Ruscha, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS 1976; Ed Ruscha, Greenblatt’s Deli (Sunset Strip Portfolio) 1976, printed 1995 © Ed Ruscha; Ed Ruscha, HONK, 1962. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Ed Ruscha  

“This exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver.” Stephen Clarke rides shotgun through Tate Liverpool’s Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha… 

The text-based artwork, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS (1976), acts as the frontispiece to Tate Liverpool’s exhibition Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha at RIBA North. The exhibition is a road trip, with Ruscha as the driver and his artist books acting as our guide. Our first stop is the seminal publication Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1963). This small book contains photographs taken by Ruscha along the highway, Route 66, between Los Angeles and Oklahoma. On a touch screen monitor next to its display case the viewer can leaf through a digital copy; and see other complete copies of seven of Ruscha’s classic books. These selected publications provide our itinerary, each one focusing attention upon the built environment – a suitable subject for a gallery at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Tanked up on gasoline, we are on the move. Our route is punctuated by text-based artworks. The large letters OK (1990) suggest that it is okay to continue our journey and, perhaps, reference Oklahoma as OK is the state’s abbreviated form as it would appear on a vehicle licence plate. It is worthwhile noting that Ruscha is an ‘Okie’ – a migrant to Los Angeles who has had to learn how to read this city. Our next guidebook is Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), an accordion-format book that unfolds to nearly twenty-five feet in length. We literally have to travel along this continuous image – the viewers’ eyes in motion as the book is read. In the gallery, six photographic prints represent the Strip. On the negatives for the prints Ruscha has applied a razor blade and sandpaper to distress each picture. The result is that we become aware of the artist’s hand that disrupts our view through the car window.

The next punctuation point is another text-based piece, DANCE? (1973). This piece uses foodstuffs – coffee, egg white, mustard, chilli sauce, ketchup and cheddar cheese – to produce the letters that stain the canvas. DANCE? functions as a juncture between the diners and nightclubs pictured in the photographs of the Strip and invites the sort of physical activity that could take place in the next series of photographs of swimming pools from the artist book Nine Swimming Pools and a Broken Glass (1968). These pools seem to be the communal spaces of apartment complexes or, more likely, roadside motels. Motion is arrested as the still, uninviting pools wait for guests to arrive. Around the corner are photographs from Thirtyfour Parking Lots in Los Angeles (1967). It is a fanciful leap to consider drivers parking up to take advantage of the empty pools; however, both sets of work await intervention. The question function of Dance? becomes ‘Park?’ and ‘Swim?’

America, Her Best Product (1974) is the next punctuation and effectively introduces artworks that reference street maps. A set of aerial photographs of parking lots taken from a helicopter gives us the bird’s eye view or downward gaze that is the vantage point of the following painting and etchings. The painting BLVD. – AVE. – ST (2006), is dissected by thick pale bands across a light grey speckled ground which connotes the surface of the Los Angeles roads. The harshness of sunlight is apparent in the grey tones whilst a band of bright orange at the top of the canvas adds to the feeling of heat. This painting is supported by a group of small, coloured etchings that are comprised of lines and street names – reinforcing the reference to map reading. It is at this point in our journey that we move on to higher ground.

Snow-capped mountains that seemingly have no place in the hot desert of southern California are the background for two large paintings. These are overlaid with text: one reads DAILY PLANET (2002), while the other promises Pay Nothing Until April (2003). Are these billboard adverts that we drive past? A strong connection is made to the movie industry since The Daily Planet is the workplace of Clark Kent, and the snow-capped mountain is the logo for Paramount Pictures. At the close of this section the piece Miracle #64 (1975) depicts a strong shaft of light shining from the top left corner that cuts through the darkness of the background. It is often interpreted as a depiction of light emanating from a film projector, or alternatively a heavenly intervention; it could be seen more prosaically as the overhead light from a streetlamp.

The penultimate punctuation point is the word painting HONK (1962). Situated high on the wall, thus disrupting the flow, the piece breaks the silence of Miracle #64. At the close of this exhibition, references to the film industry take centre stage as the text pieces MAD SCIENTIST (1975) and HOLLYWOOD TANTRUM (1979) connote cinematic drama. Perhaps, the fate of the screenwriter was enacted by the minor drama of Royal Road Test (1967) – on display as a digital book – that documented Ruscha dropping a vintage typewriter from a speeding Buick. Did Ruscha take on the role of the scientist undertaking a mad experiment or was the typewriter thrown through the window as an act of aggression?

The exhibition closes with a final text-based artwork. THE END #40 (2003), is a depiction of the last few seconds of a movie, caught between frames. The two words, ‘The End’, are cut along the horizontal plane and so simulate the motion of the film. The dynamic of this exhibition has been the viewer moving through the landscape of southern California; however, the main concern has been the relationship between Ruscha’s books with his paintings, prints and photographs. The centrality of his publications is evident: it is clearly affirmed that Ruscha is the artist that does books.

Stephen Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Critical and Contextual Studies, University of Chester

Artist Rooms: Ed Ruscha continues @ Tate Liverpool until 14 June

Images: Edward Ruscha, ARTISTS WHO DO BOOKS 1976; Ed Ruscha, OK (State I) 1990. ARTIST ROOMS Tate and National Galleries of Scotland. © Ed Ruscha; Edward Ruscha, DAILY PLANET 2003 &PAY NOTHING UNTIL APRIL 2003

We know that they are melting, never to return. We know that they are so intrinsic to Icelandic culture that there is grief around their loss; a funeral was held for Okjokull, Iceland’s first glacier to disappear, and which once covered six square miles of deep ice.  

“Exploring the work of ChihChung Chang is to better understand the slippage between stories we think we know and those as experienced by living, breathing places – and the communities calling them home.” Mike Pinnington digs into the artist and cultural researcher’s multi-site contribution to Liverpool Biennial 2025…

On the site of a former Chinese boarding house in Liverpool’s Great George Square there is a blue plaque commemorating the contribution to the city’s history by Chinese seafarers forcibly deported from the city in 1946. A shameful, underexposed chapter in the UK’s post-Second World War history, the policy separated thousands of seafarers from their families. That its unveiling, coming in July 2024, is so recent speaks to the complex, disproportionate relationship between Britain, this city, and the oldest Chinese community in Europe.

As if to reflect this complexity, there are many strands to Taiwanese artist and cultural researcher ChihChung Chang’s multi-site Liverpool Biennial contribution. To engage with the fruits of Chang’s research is not unlike prying off the thin though stubborn façade of place to get to the real, human stories beneath; at other times, it is more akin to setting forth on a voyage of discovery. Exploring the work of this cultural cartographer is to better understand the slippage between stories we think we know and those as experienced by living, breathing places – and the communities calling them home.

Across a satisfying multi-disciplinary installation at city centre venue, Bluecoat, an outside companion piece situated in Liverpool’s China Town, and a film in the nearby Pine Court Housing Association, the works speak to interwoven threads, allusions and tensions to unpick, consider and address. They each tell a part of the story in and of themselves, but – as with much of this Biennial – it is best to think of them as constituent parts. To experience each complementary aspect as parts of a whole is to see Chang’s research coalesce into a bigger picture.

At Bluecoat, you’ll find narratives of social history that reference family, community, biography, industrial decline, and cultural regeneration via post-modernity. In a Taiwan-set film of cultural histories told in three chapters, various objects relating to shipping (with a model vessel playing the role of anchor work) and a Chinese Arch come together to form Port of Fata Morgana. It situates art as both tribute – to home and family – and a self-portrait of sorts. This is the stuff of the artist’s life – the place, upbringing and people that have influenced him, one way or another, and inspired the research that lead him here.

Pushing beyond those initial, substantial layers, Port of Fata Morgana (named for the mutable, inconsistent nature of once bustling port cities) instigates a process of identifying and interrogating the commonalities and differences shared by communities separated by language, history and thousands of miles (6,199 if we’re counting). Here, Chang bridges historical, cultural and geographic gaps, by putting his home of Kaohsiung in southern Taiwan in conversation with Liverpool, his artworks’ temporary home.

A multitude of resonances have surfaced in the process. Both Kaohsiung and Liverpool are declining port cities, whose busiest, most profitable shipping days are behind them; they have each been rejuvenated of late, through necessity, by a belief in and commitment to culture as a driving force. These resonances initiate a departure point from which we can dig deeper, and consider the impact on people and places when surroundings and their meaning shifts – planned or otherwise – and vice versa. What does it mean for a place to become a microcosm for a changing world?

A work which gets to the heart of how the warp and weft of place and communities – especially ports – might be felt, is Keystone (2025), a collaboratively made paper mural found in Liverpool’s China Town (on Grenville Street South). Depicting a Chinese Arch, its title responds directly to the BEDROCK theme of Liverpool Biennial; an architectural keystone is structurally crucial. But it might also speak to and acknowledge the strength and diversity within the community it reflects, and the components that make powerful meaning within it.

With facilitation from Liverpool’s Pagoda Arts, whose mission it is ‘to introduce Chinese Culture to a wide and diverse community’, Keystone – artwork as connective tissue – is the manifestation of workshops in which residents were invited to share their stories of and relationships to Liverpool. Sparking these stories, participants were asked to bring along a meaningful object that they felt was important to them and their place in the city, from which they made rubbings in charcoal.

In an accompanying film of these workshops showing at Pine Court, it is clear that its contributors represent a spectrum of ages and backgrounds. Keystone, then, is both representation and in recognition of different generations of people who have helped develop this particular ongoing volume of the story of a city. In it, you can see images of items, text and people’s signatures, along with the artist’s own rubbings. You can pick out Mersey Docks signage; a plaque commemorating David Lewis, department store founder; and Liver Birds standing in for the traditional Chinese dragon – a creature representing power, prosperity and good luck. Taken from across the city, these rubbings link China Town’s communities and heritage to Liverpool at large, as opposed to the limitations of a specific setting.

A cross-section of the culture and society of which they are all part, this isn’t a picture or representation of any one unified story. Nor, I don’t think, is it meant to be. Instead it establishes a place for the many interweaving lives and narratives from the diaspora to be told. Memories, emotions, dreams of the city – these are literal imprints of the community embedded in Liverpool’s urban and psychological landscape.

Rendered in simple monochrome it may be, but Keystone is nothing less than a visualisation of the belonging and adding to that takes place therein, one layer of sediment atop another. It is a living rather than fixed monument, in a way that even the grandeur of the 44ft Imperial Arch that marks the gateway to China Town – a gift from Shanghai to celebrate the twinning of  the cities 25 years ago – can’t be.          

Mike Pinnington

Liverpool Biennial 2025: BEDROCK continues until 14 September at various venues across the city

Images, from top: ChihChung Chang, ‘Keystone’, 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025. Photography by Rob Battersby; ChihChung Chang 張致中, ‘Port of Fata Morgana’, 2024. Liverpool Biennial 2025 at Bluecoat. Photography by Mark McNulty; ChihChung Chang, ‘Keystone’, 2025. Liverpool Biennial 2025. Photography by Rob Battersby