The Best Shows to See Across the UK This Spring

Karanjit Panesar | Leeds Art Gallery | 4 October – 15 June

In Greek mythology, Persephone, goddess of Spring, is abducted by Hades, king of the underworld. Her father, Zeus, demands her release but, after being tricked by Hades into eating seeds from a pomegranate and thereby tasting the fruit of the underworld, Persephone is obliged to return for six months every year, her descent marking the onset of Winter.  

Pomegranates loom large in Karanjit Panesar’s ‘Furnace Fruit’, an exhibition responding to Leeds Art Gallery’s collections and the artist’s own diasporic family history. In this meditation on the duality of diasporic identity, Panesar draws on the rich symbolism of the pomegranate and embraces recent interpretations of the Greek myth, which recast Persephone as a subversive border-crosser moving with agency between two worlds. – Crystal Bennes

Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie | Spike Island, Bristol | 8 February – 11 May

In the introduction to Black Film, British Cinema (1988), a publication produced after a landmark conference held at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, theorist Kobena Mercer noted that the ‘sophisticated defence of the ethnicity of Englishness developed by intellectuals of the new right demonstrates that the understanding and representation of British history is now a crucial site of cultural contestation’. Nearly 40 years on, Spike Island’s simultaneous solo exhibitions by artists Danielle Dean and Dan Guthrie explore, in the words of the exhibition literature, the ‘representations and (mis)representations’ of contemporary Black British life.  – Vanessa Peterson

Tom Hardwick-Allan | South Parade, London | 6 March – 19 April

The works in Tom Hardwick-Allan’s current exhibition at South Parade are exact reflections of its title, ‘Low Relief and Foil’: a foil is both the trail that a hunted animal leaves as it passes through its environment and a plot device by which a character is defined by its inverse. The show comprises several new cast-iron reliefs, made by pressing carved wood into petrol-rich sand – a method called imprinting – before pouring melted-down car brake discs into this mould. During the period in which the artist made these works, his father and grandmother were injured when they were hit by a car that failed to brake. This intersection of family, coincidence and materiality reappear throughout the exhibition, lending a sense of haunting to the works on display. – Hatty Nestor

‘Exploring Arte Povera’ | Mazzoleni, London | 17 February – 2 May

First coined as a term by Italian art critic Germano Celant in 1967, arte povera (poor art) saw a shift away from traditional approaches to artmaking to instead utilise everyday or unconventional materials to experiment with form and aesthetics. In Mazzoleni’s current group show, ‘Old Bond Room: Exploring Arte Povera’, some of the movement’s leading proponents can be seen not only rejecting the media commonly used in art, but also transforming the gallery space in which that art traditionally exists – either through tricks of the eye or the materiality of the work itself. – Sam Moore

Sadao Hasegawa | a. SQUIRE, London | 8 March – 12 April

A naked, muscled youth appears to rocket into space in Sadao Hasegawa’s That Floating Feeling (1980). His body throbs magenta, while his face – impassive as a mask – is crowned by flamelike hair. Both human and ethereal, he exhales a stream of starry breath, while the tips of his fingers sparkle: flesh becoming cosmic.

Commissioned by the Japanese gay magazine Barazoku, the image crystallizes many of the themes of the Tokyo-based graphic artist, who died in 1999. Hasegawa’s erotic fascination with the male body seemed to burst beyond physicality into transcendence. He created his own cosmology – teeming with mythical beasts and hallucinatory romanticism – that found a home in the more earthbound commercial gay press of the 1980s and ’90s. ‘English Companion Inc.’, at a. SQUIRE, is the first time Hasegawa’s work has been exhibited in a solo show outside his native country. Had it not been for Tokyo’s Gallery Naruyama, however, his output might have been lost entirely, after his family declined to manage his estate upon his death. – Daniel Culpan 

^{Main image: Karanjit Panesar, ‘Furnace Fruit’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Karanjit Panesar and Leeds Art Gallery; photograph: Rob Battersby}