The Best Shows to See Across the UK and Ireland This January

Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby | Goldsmiths CCA, London | 8 November – 12 January 

Exclusively drawn from digital sources, the works in the debut institutional exhibition by London-based duo Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby feel like screenshots: pictures posted, forwarded, reframed. Running found images through digital thermal-transfer printing software – which renders data and noise into a surface residue of long lines, like woodgrain – the artists then meticulously copy these warped images by hand. The resulting pencil drawings, as in Contact (Forum) (all works 2024), have the silvery feel of an industrial antique, like metal printing plates, somehow both hard and soft, impersonal and warm. – Matthew McLean

James Lomax | Sid Motion Gallery, London | 14 November – 18 January 

As its title suggests, James Lomax’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ presents several dualities. The exhibition, which includes a set of photographs and a series of concrete casts, engages with the states of freedom and imprisonment. Much of the work on display was conceived during a residency the artist completed earlier this year at HMP Grendon in Buckinghamshire; two works in the exhibition were first displayed within the prison, only accessible to those who live or work there. In this second iteration at Sid Motion Gallery, the work is presented in one of two states: with daylight rushing in through the gallery’s large windows or with four streetlamps illuminating the gallery space at dusk. These artificial lights, of a variety no longer used on British streets but still found in the country’s prisons, shine a different light on Lomax’s monochrome casts, their harsh yellow obscuring most of the works’ more intricate details, transfiguring their colours and turning the artist’s output into two distinct shows. – Juliet Jacques

Bharti Kher | Yorkshire Sculpture Park | 22 June – 27 April 

Responding to postcolonial power structures, the hybrid pieces in Bharti Kher’s survey exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park position gender and identity as sites of revolt where ideological thinking can be shaped and shifted. Featuring works spanning nearly 25 years, ‘Alchemies’ reconstructs the artist’s experience as an ‘outsider’ growing up as part of the Indian diaspora in the UK before relocating to India as an ‘expat’. Kher’s figures and bindi-abstractions split representational signs to elicit a sense of foreignness, refusing to belong to a singular space or time. – Pia Singh

María Berrío | Victoria Miro, London | 21 November – 18 January 

The nine large-scale collaged paintings in María Berrío’s solo exhibition, ‘The End of Ritual’, depict claustrophobic scenes in which perspectives appear distorted, angles are flattened, and figures have skewed proportions. The artist constructs intricate collaged surfaces by splicing and layering delicate Japanese paper, painting sections in watercolour and occasionally drawing over the paper with charcoal to form seamless, mixed-media works. The meticulous process by which Berrío carefully builds up images results in compositions that collate fragmented memories, identities and histories. – Sofia Hallström

Hamad Butt | Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin | 4 June – 5 May 

When heated to 130.5°C, iodine crystals transform into a purple gas, which can be hazardous if ingested. Hamad Butt’s sculptural installation Familiars Part 1: Substance Sublimation Unit (1994) contains such crystals, which undergo this swift change when they encounter a powerful electric element. Here, they are vacuumed within cylindrical Borosilicate glass vials, which form the rungs of a ladder displayed horizontally against a wall behind a barrier. 

A quiet drama and spectre of danger permeates ‘Apprehensions’, the most comprehensive survey to date of Butt’s work. Organized by the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s exhibitions curator, Seán Kissane, with independent academic and curator Dominic Johnson, the show takes place across three floors of a white house set aside from the museum’s central courtyard. Kissane and Johnson’s ambition with the show is to recuperate Butt’s career and situate this brilliant and formally ambitious practice in the canon. – Sean Burns

^{Main image: James Lomax, Letters (please keep) (detail), 2024, reinforced concrete, welded aluminium frame, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sid Motion Gallery; photograph: Francis Ware}