Simon Martin: UR Feeling and Eric Bainbridge: Steel Sculptures at Camden Arts Centre

Exhibition Previews: Simon Martin: UR Feeling; Eric Bainbridge: Steel Sculptures, Camden Arts Centre, London, until December 2 2012

Since the late 1970s, Eric Bainbridge has taken advantage of cheap, readily-made materials, re-imagining the stuff of second-hand shops, scrap metal yards and DIY stores, blowing up fake fur and wood effect melamine to comedy proportions or disguising them atop one another in complex balancing acts.

But now he’s started working with steel for the first time, using it in collage-like sculptures combined with lurid velour, woollen blankets and other unusual materials with which to recapture the visual puns of the Surrealists, Dadaists and Constructivists.

The modernist abstraction of David Smith and Anthony Caro are influences, but the latest creations of the 2008 Northern Art Prize nominee are unlikely to look like anything else.

Simon Martin, contrastingly, uses the gallery as a platform to bring in other artists, partly as a forum for discussions and performances to inform a new film about the impact the history of land has on the architecture designed on it.

Louis Ghost Chair, premiered at The Holburne Museum in Bath earlier this year, specifically considers the iconic Louis XV armchair, its modern reinvention seen as a kind of afterlife of classic design.

• Open Tuesday-Sunday 10am-6pm (9pm Wednesday). Admission free. Follow the gallery on Twitter @CamdenArtsCtr.

More pictures: