Once again this lively art jamboree takes over every conceivable space in the city, including the Tate, Bluecoat and Open Eye galleries, as well as non-gallery spaces such as the Cunard Building.The theme of Hospitality is fairly all-embracing but the Biennial’s excitement depends on its mismatch of creative interventions. The public commissions will draw most attention, with Argentinian Jorge Macchi and Israeli Oded Hirsch promising to sculpturally disrupt the city’s malls, while Liverpudlian Paul Rooney’s characteristically touching installation Here Comes Franz at the Victoria Gallery is a real highlight. Also, don’t miss the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery, which demonstrates that painting is still very much alive.
Various venues, to 25 Nov
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Bridging Home (2010), by Do Ho Suh Photograph: PR
This is a show that demands repeat visits, if only because its contents – culled from the best of David Roberts’s collection – is set to constantly change throughout its five-month run. Inaugurating the art foundation’s big new space in an old furniture factory, curator Vincent Honoré is mixing up greatest hits with new commissions. Conceived as a symphony, the exhibition’s three movements are structured around works by a clutch of the 20th and 21st century’s major artists. Louise Bourgeois’s Echo, a thin pencil of painted steel resembling folded fabric or flesh, fits in alongside Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings and the conceptualist work of Pierre Huyghe.
David Roberts Art Foundation, NW1, Fri to 23 Feb
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Fuji (1996), by Gerhard Richter Photograph: PR
Maria Nepomuceno’s sculptures call to mind primordial jungle flowers, sea creatures, and comic-book aliens, but they could only have come from one place: Brazil. Using traditional local materials including rope and beads, this young Rio-based artist weaves and sews organic shapes in hot carnival colours. In another life her creations could have been floppy straw hats or laundry baskets. Instead, her coloured straw spirals outwards and upwards into wonderfully wonky dioramas, while her coiling weaves suggest strands of DNA. For all its local flavour, Nepomuceno’s work moves from the everyday to the epic and universal in a blink. One of her most engaging motifs in this sense is the pod-like hammock: an essential object accompanying Brazil’s indigenous people from the cradle to the grave.
Turner Contemporary, Sat to 17 Mar
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Drawing and sculpture might seem mutually exclusive to some: one using the free movement of insubstantial line, the other occupying substantial quantities of unmoving space. Yet, as this show testifies, sculptors have always drawn and these days artists are inclined to have the most fun messing up genre boundaries. Aleana Egan sets up atmospheric installations by recomposing the gallery with linear spatial tensions, while Anna Barriball’s obsessive accretions of graphite strokes take on a monumental import.
Leeds Art Gallery, to 11 Nov
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Untitled II (2008), by Anna Barriball Photograph: PR
Embarrassment can be as creatively important as the more traditionally-sanctioned procedures of inspiration, expression or understanding. The embarrassment in Pilvi Takala’s videos brings into painful focus the unwritten rules we conform to daily in order to function every day. Secretly filmed, they often feature the Finnish artist awkwardly infiltrating and subtly upsetting scenarios. For a central piece here she took up a marketing trainee post at Deloitte’s HQ in Helsinki. Her work colleagues react with increasing unease and anxiety as Takala spends an entire day in the lift and another sitting at her desk staring into space. “Oh hi!” she says to a workmate, “I’m just doing some thinking … Brain work.”
Site Gallery, to 10 Nov
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Players Breaching Experiments, by Pilva Takala Photograph: PR
Alongside innovators such as Chloe Sevigny, Rita Ackermann was one of the foremost “It-chicks” to emerge from the grungey 1990s. Yet, while the Hungarian painter recently had her first museum survey and remains a fixture of downtown New York, she hasn’t had an exhibition in Britain for 15 years. The demonic Lolitas that have been a staple of her punkishly provocative work since she first made her name, are absent in this latest series. In their place she’s conjured a cast of sinister amorphous figures, inspired by a paint spill in her studio. Gnome-like profiles, skeletal faces and female torsos emerge from bright dashes and drips of paint recalling Egon Schiele’s tortured nudes and later expressionist outpourings.
Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly, W1, Tue to 3 Nov
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Fire by Days The Fool II (2012), by Rita Ackermann Photograph: Genevieve Hanson
Rick Copsey’s Paintscape photo-series looks like photographs of seascapes but they’re really of wet paint drying. Despite his use of distinctly non-traditional picture-making processes, Copsey is a landscape painter who is in the business of enticing makebelieve and mystification. His thinking might be more in line with Baudrillard’s concepts of hyperreality – “a real without origin or reality” – but he also harks back, as have many contemporary artists recently, to Kant’s “formless and shapeless” sublime. But Copsey’s trick-visions of natural forces at work are less an empathetic depiction of the elements than perhaps a play of illusions for an age where so much experience is digitally mediated.
Untitled Gallery, to 27 Oct
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Paintscape 5, by Rick Copsey Photograph: PR
For all the ethereal charm of their work, there’s nothing wishy-washy about the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the focus of the Tate’s autumn blockbuster. This Victorian gang’s paintings of wan redheads amid thorny landscapes of psychedelic intensity carry the heady whiff of artistic and social revolution, libido and drugs. Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (work pictured), the PRB have attained a mythical image as Romantic artists par excellence: the rock’n’rollers of their day, shaking the establishment with sexed-up visions of religious subjects and British fables.
Tate Britain, SW1, to 13 Jan
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Lady Lilith (1866-1868), by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Photograph: PR
