If you haven't been tempted to visit the newly revamped Armory show in New York this week, there are plenty of exhibitions opening across the UK. The full list is here and our selection of highlights is included below.
We've noticed several exhibitions with a focus on drawing that look especially strong. The evening conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist may have sold out, but Franz Erhard Walther's show at The Drawing Room showcases a marvellous range of his work. One of Germany's most prominent artists, this selection includes Walther's ground-breaking work from the late 50s to the 70s, as well as his latest graphic novel Dust of Stars. Over in West London, Faggionato Fine Art open with Elisabeth Scherffig's tender, monochrome mark-making and Gimpel Fils have a fine selection of drawings by Alan Davie. Added to which, 43 Inverness Street open Lines in Drawing next week with work by Paul Noble and Victor Pasmore among others.
Haunch of Venison launch their new gallery space in Fitzrovia with a show by Scottish artist Katie Paterson, which includes canons firing colour-matched confetti daily at 1pm. Recreating elements of work first performed at the Venice Biennale last year, Paterson translates some of the brightest explosions in the universe into a human scale.
Further afield, Gallery North have some fine paintings by Lisa Milroy, and Beaux Art Bath will tempt you with landscapes by Stuart Edmondson if you're visiting the Literary Festival this weekend. Looking at craft elements of the listing, the Bluecoat Display Centre have a show of work by celebrated folk artist Julie Arkell and Devon Guild of Craftsmen dedicate their gallery to the colour Blue.
Don't forget you can search by location and our listings include all exhibitions, not just the ones opening this week.
With all good wishes, Jago and Craig
artexhibition: highlights
 | Craig Fisher - Pretty Disastrous James Freeman Gallery, London N1 0PD 08/03/2012 to 31/03/2012 Walking into a Craig Fisher installation is like stepping onto a cartoon film set, only to find that the plot has turned decidedly sinister. Violence and Velcro, disaster and decoration - Fisher’s world is a stitch-up of contradictory ideas. |
 | Elisabeth Scherffig - Vitrea Faggionato Fine Art, London W1S 4JR 07/03/2012 to 12/04/2012 Scherffig concentrates deeply on the matter and form of her subject, to bring into the light, through the elemental process of mark-making, its most fundamental and intrinsic qualities. With small repeated monochrome marks, in chalk lead on slightly textured Arches paper, Scherffig patiently describes matter inch by inch; the hardness of the material itself – industrial rubble, rusted steel, fractured glass – transformed by the soft chalk lead marks into a muted, dreamlike image. |
 | Franz Erhard Walther - DRAWINGS - Frame / Line / Action / Drawn Novel Drawing Room,London SE1 5TE 08/03/2012 to 28/04/2012 The first solo exhibition of Franz Erhard Walther in the UK. The exhibition includes ground-breaking work from the late 1950s, 60s and 70s together with the artist’s latest retrospective and autobiographical drawing project: Dust of Stars, A Drawn Novel. The graphic novel sheds light on the ideas and motivations informing his life-long practice and, in particular, the importance of drawing. |
 | Ian Penney - From Here and There Rebecca Hossack Gallery London W1T 2NA 12/03/2012 to 31/03/2012 Penney focuses on his work as a paper-cut artist, creating works which mirror his fascination with pattern, composition and the graphic image. These paper-cuts deal with the ephemeral, whimsical and beautiful, through imagery reflecting the natural world and our human interaction with it. |
 | Johan Zoffany RA - Society Observed Royal Academy of Arts 10/03/2012 to 10/06/2012 This exhibition constitutes a radical re-evaluation of the extraordinary life of this brilliant and enigmatic artist. Born near Frankfurt in 1733, Zoffany moved to London in 1760. Adapting to the indigenous art culture and patterns of patronage, he created virtuoso portraits and subject pictures that proved to be highly desirable to a wide range of patrons. His work provides a unique appraisal of key British institutions and edifices: the art academy; the Court; the theatre; the bourgeois family; and the British Empire. |
 | Katie Paterson - 100 Billion Suns Haunch of Venison, London W1K 5ES 09/03/2012 to 28/04/2012 Haunch of Venison London presents a solo exhibition of Scottish artist Katie Paterson and the UK premiere of her project 100 Billion Suns. Paterson strives to communicate unimaginably large or distant occurrences in nature, transforming them through the medium of everyday objects or materials and reducing them to a human scale. Her projects use sophisticated technologies, from satellites to telescopes to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements with nature, geology and cosmology. |
 | Thomas Ruff - MA.R.S Gagosian Gallery, London WC1X 9JD 08/03/2012 to 21/04/2012 Ruff has been testing the limits of his medium for more than two decades, producing photographs in series with subjects that range from domestic interiors to the planets, from modernist architecture to abstract psychedelia, from specific portraits to generic internet pornography. He has appropriated images from sources including scientific archives, newspapers and, more recently, the internet. |
 | Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude National Gallery 14/03/2012 to 05/06/2012 Turner created a revolution in painting at the beginning of the 19th century, responding to a modern industrial landscape with a freer style and new approaches to composition. Yet a lasting dialogue with the 17th century painter Claude lay at the heart of these developments. This exhibition offers the chance to compare closely related works by Turner and Claude and discover the extent to which Turner was inspired by Claude's mastery of light and landscape. COMING UP |
 | Lisa Milroy - Ivory Lamp Mars Vine Bone Gallery North Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST 06/03/2012 to 04/04/2012 Lisa Milroy has selected 23 paintings to present the use of black in her work. In her approach to still life painting, black and white embody the visual, conceptual and emotional register from which she has explored an on-going fascination with the relation between presence and absence, the material and immaterial, and things that can be seen yet remain unknown or inaccessible. Milroy won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1989 and a major survey of her work was held at Tate Liverpool in 2001. |
 | Alison Turnbull Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh EH8 9YL 10/03/2012 to 05/05/2012 Alison Turnbull’s contemporary abstract paintings, from star charts and architectural plans, distil colour, rhythm and pattern to create images of startling clarity. They stress the inherent aesthetic qualities of information, otherwise presumed to have a purely functional quality, while demonstrating how the process of painting can record analytical and intuitive relationships. This exhibition includes new work, recent paintings and a new site-specific work based on Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours and Minerals from National Museums Scotland. |
 | Blue - a Flow Gallery touring exhibition Devon Guild of Craftsman
Bovey Tracey TQ13 9AF 10/03/2012 to 22/04/2012 Blue explores the different ways artists use this colour within their practice. Accompanying the show in the Riverside Gallery: Tracing the Blueprint examines the social history of indigo dyeing in Hungary and South Africa, with fair trade items on sale. |
 | David Blandy - Passage of the Soul Phoenix Gallery, Exeter EX4 3LS 03/02/2012 to 17/03/2012 Recent works investigating the artist's cultural identity through the prism of popular culture. Includes new animated film Anjin, hiroshima inspired video Child of the Atom, and an installation of Blandy's hacked arcade games pitting his alter-egos against each other. Blandy's work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. CLOSING SOON |
 | STEWART EDMONDSON - New Paintings Beaux Arts (Bath) 10/03/2012 to 14/04/2012 Edmondson's work is a homage to the landscape around his Dartmoor home and, with a small portable fisherman’s hut as his only buttress against the wild Devon weather, the major part of his works are done in situ. They include seascapes from trips to the nearby south coast, and to the Penwith peninsula in Cornwall. |
 | Karen Ingham - Wonder Chamber Ffotogallery, Cardiff CF5 1QE 10/03/2012 to 14/04/2012 Wonder Chamber encapsulates the interdisciplinary nature of Ingham’s practice which embraces natural history, medical science, art history, museology, theatrical spectacle and lens-based media. In particular, Ingham is concerned with notions of layering and concealing and revealing dichotomous states through optical science and illusion. Wonder Chamber acts as an imaginary museum bringing together many of the key works Ingham has been developing over the past few years. |
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