What to See Across the UK and Ireland This September

Marlene Dumas | Frith Street Gallery, London | 20 September – 16 November

Over the past 40 years, Marlene Dumas has transformed found images of violence, mourning and melancholy in paint, inviting us to look unflinchingly at scenes – and faces – of anguish. From close-up portraits of deranged-looking children to victims of torture, her work drags at us, pulls at our senses and emotions, becoming ingrained in our minds like the afterimage of the sun on the inside of our eyelids. These are works that, to borrow the title of a 1993 painting by the artist, present ‘the image as burden’. For Dumas, the story of Marsyas – with his torment, thwarted ambition and cruel demise – contains something prescient to this moment, reflective of a planet in perpetual war. Mourning, she implies, might well be the contemporary condition. – Sean Burns

Liliane Puthod and Yuri Pattison | The Pumphouse, Dublin | 6 July – 27 October 

According to one well-worn anecdote, the writer James Joyce was approached in Zurich by a young man who asked permission to ‘kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses’ (1922). Joyce refused. His hand, he said, ‘did a lot of other things, too’. This witticism is indicative of a philosophical outlook that takes the sacred and the mundane as inextricable cross-contaminants: the same hand that produced exquisite prose was also responsible for hammering nails, masturbating and wiping between two cheeks. Taking its title from a line in Ulysses, ‘Longest Way Round, Shortest Way Home’ contains two coinciding solo shows by Yuri Pattison and Liliane Puthod. Both practices reveal a shared desire to explore the profundity lurking within the most prosaic of objects. – Tom Lordan

Glenn Ligon | Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge | 20 September 2024 – 2 March 2025

Besides the moon jars, the majority of my works in the show come from the De Ying Foundation; they are installed in dialogue with the museum’s permanent collection. There are also some new pieces, including drawings that I’ve made by doing rubbings on Kozo paper on top of one of my ‘Stranger’ paintings, which uses a James Baldwin text. The neon Waiting for the Barbarians [2021] will be installed on the facade of the museum; it features nine translations of the last two lines of Constantine P. Cavafy’s 1904 titular poem. – Glenn Ligon

Gary Hume | Sprüth Magers, London | 13 September – 19 October

Twenty-five years after Gary Hume represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale, the artist continues to confound expectations with his dynamic body of work, as evidenced by his exhibition of new paintings and drawings at Sprüth Magers, ‘Mirrors and Other Creatures’.     

Flora and fauna – especially avian creatures – remain central themes in his repertoire. However, instead of the garden birds that peppered his earlier work, Hume has lately turned to the regal and altogether more imposing form of the swan. For an artist who takes such obvious delight in the delicate economy of line and form, the swan’s sweeping silhouette (first emerging in the series of drawings ‘Swans’, 2021) is perhaps a logical choice, the motif affording him no shortage of complex, interlocking arrangements. – Finn Blythe

Ernest Cole | The Photographers’ Gallery, London | 14 June – 22 September 

An exhibition of Ernest Cole’s landmark 1967 photobook of the same name, ‘House of Bondage’, revisits the precarity of daily life for Black communities in apartheid South Africa. It contains over 100 monochrome images that record the division of the country’s people across racial lines: Cole captured breezy and lush areas occupied by white people and non-white spaces that seemed cramped and almost uninhabitable. In one untitled photograph, ‘EUROPEANS ONLY’ appears scrawled across a half-empty bench; in another, a sign instructs Black people to enter a building through a backdoor. Cole’s focus on this oppressive municipal signage indicates its prevalence in the country at the time. Towards the end of the exhibition, a display of ephemera, on loan from the Bishopsgate Institute, contains campaign material from the London Anti-Apartheid Group, including posters and pamphlets campaigning for Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and a consumer boycott of South African goods. The cumulative effect of witnessing this material fosters agency and hope, incomplete without the necessity of remembrance. – Simal Rafique 

_{Main image: Yuri Pattison, dream sequence (working title for a work in progress), 2023–ongoing, generative and mutable game engine motion picture/play and score affected by local atmospheric conditions. Courtesy: the artist and Temple Bar Gallery + Studios; photograph: Ros Kavanagh}