These drawings charting Albrecht Dürer’s learning curve are engrossing. They plot a course from the Nuremberg workshop where he refined his talents through his “journeyman years”, based in Frankfurt, Strasbourg and later, it’s thought, Venice. Inspired by humanism’s emphasis on first-hand experience, Dürer threw away the traditional artist’s copybook, taking lessons direct from nature. Sketches on a single sheet show him grappling with that most difficult subject: the hand. There are insights into his life, such as his boyish self-portrait, the loose sketch of his bride Agnes (pictured), and complex preparatory drawings like The Prodigal Son, knelt in the mud in spiritual agony.
Courtauld Institute Of Art, WC2, to 12 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
In its second biennial festival of digital culture, Frequency transforms medieval Lincoln into an arena for futuristic reverie. There is a “choreographed time” installation in an underground Roman gatehouse, and a display of “analogue liberation” in a 13th-century friary. Collaborative group Me And The Machine invite you to don video goggles and headphones to experience their “spectacle machine”, while choreographer Jean Abreu presents his visceral exploration of self, Blood (pictured).
Various venues, Sat 19 Oct to 26 Oct
RC Photograph: PR
Jeremy Deller champions what used to be called working-class or pop culture, those areas of creativity that might be widely socially shared but have nevertheless tended to go unrecognised by the official arbiters of taste. This impressively researched show concentrates on the impact of the industrial revolution, ranging from the apocalyptic visions of 19th-century painter John Martin through to heavy metal and glam rock. There’s a dramatically lit scene of a forge painted in 1859 by James Sharples, a blacksmith from Blackburn. Then, in a typical Deller shift, there’s a 1973 photo of Adrian Street, a miner’s son and wrestler posing in drag against a pithead (pictured).
Manchester Art Gallery, to 19 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
It seemed no Nicholson was without a paintbrush or pencil. The most famous son, Ben, is represented in this showing of the Mill House Collection with an intimate keepsake: a collage greetings card. There’s also work by Ben’s first wife Winifred, parents William and Mabel, and his brother Kit. Their art suggests a unique domestic world, lit up by the experimental verve of British art during the interwar years. But the linchpin of the show is Kit’s wife, EQ (Elsie Queen, work pictured). A prolific painter, her energy captivated future luminaries Lucien Freud and John Caxton, whose works round out the show.
Pallant House Gallery, to 1 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
Viviane Sassen worked as a fashion model before studying photography and it shows in the intimately empathetic focus of her stunning work. This, her first retrospective, aims to establish Sassen as an art photographer worthy of gallery exposure as well as a fashion photographer. Sassen’s images are so artfully composed it is as if the clothes have become a sculptural extension of the body. Her models tend to be posed in unlikely settings and in distinctly unorthodox poses, crouching crab-like, standing on their heads or lying face-down semi-naked with an array of grapes and cherries arranged in the cleft of their backsides. Yes, the work might well sound somewhat undignified but any objectification is countered by a surreal charm and a tenderness of approach.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Sat 19 Oct to 9 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Tracey Holland’s video installations retain many of the fragmented characteristics of her more familiar photo-collage works. With an accumulation of glimpses rather than a coherent narrative, Holland weaves between mythology, religious iconography and poetic intuition. Her films follow the irrational order of dreams and, at times, suggest the tremulous dread of nightmares. Images of birds’ nests, spiders’ webs, sacred hearts, lone sleepwalkers and galaxy clusters are deeply layered and shadowed to stress ambiguity. It’s atmospheric work, mixing invocations of both pleasure and pain, purposely composed to lure and spook. A recurrent electric flash lights the pervading dark.
Visual Arts Centre, Sat 19 Oct to 18 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
It’s been a while since we’ve seen portraiture from Wolfgang Tillmans. In recent years the photographer has been training his camera on the flotsam of his global travels: gnawed-over crab shells, the froth of a waterfall. Here he returns to one of his favourite subjects: men. The artist’s unnamed “friend” and object of “unrequited love” is captured in close-up, body broken into fragments to be shored up: the fleshy bow of an ear; a slender calf; an eye, its liquid green and amber a window into the soul.
Maureen Paley, E2, to 24 Nov
SS Photograph: PR
Art and design bleed into one another in Pop Art Design, billed as the first ever show to tap the relationship between pop artists and designers from the 50s to the 70s. Work by artist such as Warhol, Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton are paired with designers including Ettore Sottsass and are in perfect tune with the era’s evolving consumer culture. National symbols, flowers and cartoonish nudes repeat across wallpaper or folding screens. There’s a chair inspired by marshmallows and another by an ancient Doric column. Mining the candy-bright language of advertising and the visual punch of familiar iconography, forms are flattened, colours pumped and everything feels up for grabs.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, Tue 22 Oct to 9 Feb
SS Photograph: Paul Louis
