Eli Cortiñas: Awkward Studies and a Decent Take on Serious Matters

Confessions With an Open Curtain, 2011 (still from single-channel video)

The film Confessions with an Open Curtain is my favourite piece in this show. So much can be gleaned from the back of a person, perhaps she is waiting for someone, or someone has just left her alone. Maybe she has entered a room to find it unexpectedly empty. Even emotions like shock and sadness can be seen through a posture viewed from the back. All of these are possibilities for the women on the screen.

Notes From Venice: Ostaria al Garanghelo and Manet Returns to Venice

Annabel Dover, our Garageland Venice Correspondent, gives us her guided tour of this year's Venice Biennale. Today we start with Manet and a light meal; stay-tuned, there's more to come.

'Food first, then morality' Bertolt Brecht.

When I posed in the RA life room years ago, my fellow subjects were the flayed smuggler in a case and Stubbs' horse cast, respectively crouching and standing nobly. These two figures bring to my mind Venetian speciality cuisine: Sfilacci di cavallo (frayed, dried horse) a smugglers treat, and the mud loving goby fish with its gormless expression, floating open mouthed along the milky waters of Venice, squeezed into a net and onto the plates of Ostaria al Garanghelo, a small, cosy restaurant furnished with knick-knack tat, Venetian glass lights and friendly waiters and waitresses.

The Scandalized Mask at Josh Lilley

A couple of strides in from the door of Josh Lilley Gallery is a faux-wood, round-legged, knee-high coffee table. Its surface has been causally strewn with Hello and Men’s Health magazines. Behind it, bright-blue upholstered chairs with grey legs are arranged in twos, back-to-back. More seating lines the walls, breaking at the corner to make room for a potted plant. This is, without doubt, the quintessential waiting room, but there is no receptionist sat at the gallery’s white desk, and the space is eerily still.

Subodh Gupta: What does the vessel contain, that the river does not

Cast ashore Savile Row’s Hauser & Wirth, Subodh Gupta’s What does the vessel contain, that the river does not is driftwood…Keralan found, London abounding.

From India’s muddied docks, Gupta’s seventy-foot boat has drifted upstream to this post-industrial, fluorescent-lit gallery space, where the detritus of its migration is pellucid. That is, the artist’s weathered vessel is the receptacle of a tired soul in transit. Caught between belonging and displacement, arriving and departing, it is the embodiment of intermediate existence. Liminality is Gupta’s poetry.

Scott of the Hepworth

William Scott (1913-1989) is one of the forgotten painters of twentieth century British modernism, something that The Hepworth Wakefield is trying to correct in a show that mainly focuses on his almost abstract work of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Scott's paintings of this period feature reoccurring motifs – frying pans, pears, bowls, kettles and fish – but rather than depicting them in a downbeat kitchen sink manner they exemplify the thing that makes British modernism compelling, they bring a pragmatic realism into the abstract mix.

William Scott, Still Life with Orange Note, 1970

Four Sculptures on the Top Floor of Tate Modern

There is much more to the current exhibition of Saloua Raouda Choucair’s work at the Tate than just four sculptures. Her geometric paintings are evocative of traditional Islamic design and yet are curiously contemporary and her nude studies are colourful, vibrant and patterned, yet unremittingly flat and slyly redolent of recognisably famous compositions; however, in the case of this blog post, there are four sculptures I would like to focus upon, three of which are Choucair’s.

Poem Wall, 1963-5

Jimmy De Sana: Suburban Color Sex Pictures

Perfectly sparse in its hang, Wilkinson Gallery has given these photographs the right amount of room. The viewer has to move deliberately to the next photograph, there is no feeling of rushing on from one image to another. Often these works need, or even demand, a double take. What may at first seem ridiculous becomes serious and darkly violent before then tipping into the surreal.