This riveting show is a reminder that geniuses are made, not born. Its focus is 1901, the year 19-year-old Picasso rocked up in fin de siècle Paris, hungrily devoured the styles of Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Degas, and set about painting Moulin Rouge decadents. Resuscitating his early love for El Greco, he imbued his new subjects – the inmates of the Saint-Lazare women’s prison – with the qualities of religious icons. It all comes together in Evocation, where his dead friend Casagemas, rides to heaven escorted by prostitutes and the Virgin Mary.
The Courtauld Institute, WC2, Thu 14 Feb to 26 May
SS Photograph: PR
The art, music and fashion glamour era of the early 1970s is rediscovered here for its breakthroughs in the diverse realms of camp, androgyny, and unashamed glitter-ball hedonism. Subtitled The Performance Of Style, the show kicks off with Andy Warhol bestowing his glamorous 15 minutes of fame on all and sundry, and David Hockney immortalising the chic middle class of Mr And Mrs Clark And Percy. But the exhibition’s highlights could well lie in its darker subsequent psychological undertones as Gilbert & George revive East End music hall absurdities and social crudities, and the painter Sigmar Polke flees Communist East Germany for the glitz of capitalist western Europe only to see it as a hallucinatory nightmare.
Tate Liverpool, Fri 8 Feb to 12 May
RC Photograph: PR
Opting out of the university art education system in 2007 and co-founding the “alternative” Islington Mill Art Academy, Maurice Carlin has set himself up as an artist taking a critically oblique view of mainstream communications. Here, Carlin experiments with projectors and printing on Manchester and Salford streets. He defines his agenda as “drawing attention to the underneath and overlooked elements within the day-to-day world”.
Castlefield Gallery, Fri 8 Feb to 17 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Wysing Arts Centre’s artist’s residency program has seen this fledgling creative hub play host to some of the most interesting emerging talents from Britain and beyond over the last year. This exhibition brings everyone’s work together for a fine send-off. It boasts a new silent film by Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price, and a publication of the most recent Paul Hamlyn award winner Ed Atkins’s ribald, experimental writing. Other rising stars include Jess Flood-Paddock whose fragile, cracked plaster sculpture is an upscaled, abstract interpretation of a human bone. Artist film-maker Emma Hart’s lusty offerings look like they might lick you to death with their clay tongues, while Salvatore Arancio’s creations have a seductive rainbow glaze that belies their abject appearance.
Wysing Arts Centre, Sun 10 Feb to 24 Mar
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Rosemarie Trockel is one of Germany’s most compelling artists. Since she pounced into the 1980s art scene with her machine-knit paintings of swastikas and Playboy bunnies, she’s been consistently inconsistent in unpicking assumptions about women and art. Her output includes surrealist furniture, gorgeous ceramics and portrait photography of beautiful youth. At 60, Trockel’s eschewed a greatest hits, self-homaging survey show here. With curator Lynne Cooke, she’s put together a cabinet of curiosities, pitting her own works against wondrous artefacts and outsider artworks that span centuries.
Serpentine Gallery, W2, Wed 13 Feb to 7 Apr
SS Photograph: Jan Benjamin Dörries
These exhibitors would have once been marginalised as outsider artists, a term that’s had its day when so many of our university educated creatives strive for the authenticity of outsider weirdness. After his wife died in 1922 the fisherman Alfred Wallis took up painting “for company” and produced some of the most convincing seascapes of the 20th century. The paintings of the Texas fisherman Forrest Bess were recognised by the New York gallery scene of the 1950s, and Frank Walter might have seemed ordinary until a back room in his isolated hillside shack was found to contain tiny visionary paintings.
Ingleby Gallery, Sat 9 Feb to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
Here, work by four titans of the US postwar scene – John Cage, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham – is set dancing around that of the 20th century’s great game-changer, Marcel Duchamp. The French iconoclast’s pioneering work that was more about thinking than traditional making, had a deep influence on the quartet. See Rauschenberg’s Combines, painted sculptural assemblages of his belongings and street junk; Cunningham’s choreography of ordinary movements; Johns’s spare paintings; and Cage’s experimental compositions, such as his famous silent score, 4’33”. In an environment with music and performance staged by contemporary art star Philippe Parreno, their works sit alongside Duchamp’s readymades, including his wheel, bottle rack and famed urinal.
Barbican Gallery, EC2, Thu 14 Feb to 9 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
Accompanying the national shoe collection at Northampton Art Gallery, Tom Hackett’s installation is of 1,000 pink silicone sculptures moulded from jelly shoes gathered from the shores of Lac De Sainte-Croix, France. Hackett, who has long been up to imaginative mischief-making, touches upon the simple fact of lost footwear poignantly memorialising the human presence that has vacated it. Yet a further level of playful intrigue is added by a series of works titled Flip Charts From The Therapy Room that appear like mocking versions of the mind maps often used at institutional staff-development events. The various elements at times add up to a questioning reflection on the creative process itself.
Northampton Art Gallery, Sat 9 Feb to 14 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
