At heart of the Philippe Vandenberg’s work is a primal poetry, one that emerges both from the images he brought to life and from his formal invention. Mysterious figures—naked primitive men surrounded by animals (horned bulls, wolves, lions, donkeys)—populate the terrain of his dark, painterly landscapes. For instance, in D’après ‘l’Ennemi intérieur’ (After “The Enemy Within”), 2003, on an unevenly painted and repainted ground—white, with a very faint pastel-hued haze of yellow, pink, blue, and green—a group of four men on their hands and knees are surrounded by a field of

The title of Steve Bishop’s exhibition “An Escalator Can Never Break, It Can Only Become Stairs” hints that machines may lead “lives” of their own, which carry on even after the plug has been pulled. And indeed, the works in the show bore out this hypothesis. At the entry, on a temporary L-shaped wall dividing the gallery in two—creating a main exhibition space and a narrow corridor to one side—hung the monochromatic “painting” How Can One Thing in General Be Many Things in Particular?, 2012. This powdered-steel rectangle reproduces with precision the finely textured, nondescript gray

Brazilian artist Geraldo de Barros’s first UK show, “What Remains,” is a beautiful and tightly focused exhibition curated by Isobel Whitelegg of Nottingham Contemporary and Karen McQuaid of the Photographers’ Gallery. One of Brazil’s pioneering avant-gardists, de Barros rose to prominence in the 1950s. He interrogated and tested various models of abstraction and figuration across a very diverse body of work, beginning his career as a painter before moving into photography in the late ’40s. The exhibition focuses on two discrete but interrelated series of photographs, the “Fotoformas” of 1949–51