1 Beyond Caravaggio
The sensual immediacy of Caravaggio’s art pierces your mind like a shaft of light in a prison cell. This painter of sex and death, bright white flesh and the depths of night not only left behind some of the greatest paintings on Earth when he died in 1610, but also inspired followers Europe-wide to emulate his potent realism. Artemisia Gentileschi’s baroque feminism and the paintings of Caravaggio’s probable boyfriend Cecco are among the surprises in this entrancing show.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 June to 24 September
2 Portraying a Nation
Look on the decadence, darkness and social dissonance of the Weimar Republic through the unblinking eyes of two of its greatest artists. The paintings of Otto Dix and photographs of August Sander portray Germany in the 1920s in contrasting ways; the objective sobriety of Sander faces the grotesque painterly imagination of Dix. They both create galleries of diverse Germans in an age of anxiety and crisis.
Tate Liverpool, 23 June to 15 October
3 Into the Unknown
Science fiction is more than a literary and cinematic genre. It is a great playground of the imagination, where we work out how technology can change who we are. This exhibition surveys its fabulous realms from the fantastic steampunk visions of Jules Verne to 21st-century dreams of our cyborg destiny. Artists including Conrad Shawcross and Larissa Sansour go back to the future.
Barbican Centre: The Curve, EC2, to 1 September
4 Benedict Drew
The obsessively choreographed beauty of Busby Berkeley films and the decayed mutant landscapes of Max Ernst are among the sensory stimuli in a politically charged multimedia installation called The Trickle-Down Syndrome. Drew is a digital surrealist who creates bizarre and haunting images of a society in crisis and minds overfilled with information. Here, he explores free-market theory in a way that is unlikely to inspire any born-again Thatcherites.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, to 10 September
5 Simon Patterson
With its witty replacement of stations on the London tube map with such heroes as Ken Dodd and Martin Heidegger, Patterson’s 1992 lithograph The Great Bear helped to popularise conceptual art in Britain. This exhibition surveys how his fascination with how we categorise reality has shaped his works over the last 25 years. He also investigates curious objects from local museums including relics related to the forged “missing link”, Piltdown Man.
De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea, to 3 September
