Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester to 19th March

DEANNA PETHERBRIDGE to 4th June

Birmingham-born Idris Khan says: ‘It is a challenge to not define my work as a photograph, but using the medium of photography to create something that exists on the surface of the paper and not to be transported back to an isolated moment in time.’ He draws inspiration from the history of art, music, philosophy and theology, layering and manipulating images and text in a way that concerns memory, experience and society. Now in some cases he goes directly to painting and drawing without the photography.

Here ‘ Eternal Movement’ (2012) is a photograph inspired by part of the Hajj where devotees walk back and forth seven times between two mountains near Mecca, and ‘The Rite of Spring’ (2013) is created from layering together photographs of Stravinsky’s entire score; but there is also work in black gesso and ink, and ‘Death of Painting’ (2014), a series of five oil works on paper. Inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s iconic and influential black square painting, Khan composed his own black squares by writing a text with thick oil sticks over and over again.

Deanna Petherbridge is a former professor of drawing at the Royal College, and has always championed drawing and its place in architecture. Here more than 40 monochrome works follow her extensive travels, dealing not only with buildings and landscapes but her reactions to industrialisation and warfare. Her condemnation of present conflicts is expressed in the 2016 triptych ‘The Destruction of the City of Homs’. The exhibition coincides with a new monograph, Deanna Petherbridge: Drawing and Dialogue (Circa Press £24.95).