This 17th-century wild-child painter made Caravaggio look like a choirboy. A proto-Romantic who was rumoured to have lived with a gang of roving thieves at one point, his paintings are renowned for such tantalisingly diabolical subjects as black sabbaths and bandits alongside flagrant cleric-baiting fare. This is the first major showing of his art in Britain in 37 years.
Dulwich Picture Gallery until 28 November Photograph: PR
The Mexican installation artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer brings to life the unnerving suspicion that the artwork is observing the observer. Using biometric scanners, surveillance cameras, computers and video projectors, his sculptures keep their eyes on you, record and react to your presence, even feel your pulse.
Manchester Art Gallery until 30 January Photograph: PR
Ego and the Id (2008), by Franz West, part of the sprawling mix-up of contemporary art from a vast range of sources that is Liverpool's biennial.
Various venues, until 28 November. Photograph: BMA
American sculptor Donald Judd was a master of geometric minimalism. His sculpture, reduced to its most essential elements, attained an almost unprecedented purity of abstract form. When he turned his hand to the furniture exhibited here, he retained the aesthetic rigour of his sculptures. The shelves and tables could fit well within modernist architecture, yet his beds and chairs pay little attention to the organic curves of the human body. In contrast, the woodblock prints of the 18th-century Japanese artist Kitagawa Utamaro are surely some of the sexiest images of all time. Utamaro knew how to seduce the eye: those unforgettable little white toes curled so beautifully in orgasm glimpsed amid rhythmical swathes of exquisite fabrics.
Ikon Gallery, 22 September to 14 November Photograph: The Trustees of the British Museum
Adel Abdessemed is not the first artist for whom big bold one-liner art has translated into art market success, though his work has a bleak political punch rooted in personal experience that sets him apart. An Algerian-born Berber, he left his wartorn homeland in 1994 and his themes of exile and global conflict are writ large. The centrepiece of the show is this gargantuan memento mori Habibi, a scaled-up replica of his own skeleton.
Parasol Unit until 14 November Photograph: PR
There's a beguiling dynamism to Russian artist Anna Parkina's works. Urban life is filtered through collages of inky works reminiscent of Raymond Pettibon, magazine cut-outs, photocopies and paint. Everything from TVs, guitars and Hitchcockian birds through to fashion imagery, traffic and the facades of cheap new building developments have thrummed across her canvases. Rather than the raucous information overload that might suggest, Parkina invites new ways of seeing, arranging her material with an offbeat rhythm that it's easy to slip into.
Focal Point Gallery, 20 September to 6 November Photograph: PR
There's high seas adventure, political intrigue and fishy tales in this group show exploring the contested borders of the sea. Uriel Orlow's installation The Yellow Fleet takes its inspiration from the story of 14 cargo ships, whose crews found their own social system, including an Olympic games, while they were stranded for eight years on the Suez canal. Social microcosms take a nasty turn in a video of Paul McCarthy's 1981 work Death Ship, where the scatologically inclined performance artist plays tyrant captain. Mathieu K Abonnenc uses movie clips to chart slave trade voyages across the Atlantic. And the sea becomes a site of libidinous fantasy in João Pedro Vale's Moby Dick-inspired curiosities, including whales teeth printed with sailor-on-sailor erotic imagery.
Gasworks, until 7 November Photograph: PR
Contemporary artists turn into experimental cartographers in Ground Level, an exhibition that stresses the role map-making plays in determining our overall worldview. The artists here, including Stephen Willats, Maria Theresa Alves and The Atlas Group, break the rules, pose awkward questions and lead us astray.
Quad Gallery, to 31 October Photograph: PR
