There’s been a tendency for the Young British Artists’ work to be absorbed into the traditional canon, yet Sarah Lucas’s oeuvre retains its crudity and cheek. While most of the pieces here play on sculptural themes – Jubilee 2012 is a pair of platform boots cast in concrete, a pretty straightforward monumental statuary format – life study, as referred to by NUDS, comes as a series of stuffed nylons; Lucas’s unashamed vulgarities celebrate our own imperfections.
Henry Moore Institute, to 21 Oct
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Jubilee (2012), by Sarah Lucas Photograph: PR
It’s no exaggeration to say that in the early-80s two local bands, Joy Division and the Smiths, turned Manchester from a city of post-industrial gloom into an internationally recognised centre of contemporary culture. Here, the New York-based Kelley Walker and Paris-born Berlin resident Cyprien Gaillard pay the city their creative respects from afar. Gaillard’s haunting film follows the tower blocks of New Jersey to a soundtrack of Smiths classic Asleep, while Walker introduces her collage-complex with a simple folded-out record sleeve featuring their single Panic.
Manchester Art Gallery, to 1 May 2013
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Three details from the Kelley Walker mixed media installation Photograph: PR
When Austria’s Alfred Kubin first sketched these nightmares during the early years of the 20th century, they must have come across as quite decadent or a sign of mental illness. Sigmund Freud had just published The Interpretation Of Dreams as the young Kubin sought refuge in improvised graphic fantasies from a disturbed upbringing, which included the loss of his mother and a nervous breakdown by the age of just 20. These days, of course, the proto-surreal weirdness of his beastly animal-human hybrids would not look out of place on the bedsit walls of any teenage goth. Yet, despite – or maybe because of – Kubin’s technical awkwardness and inadvertent absurdist humour, his most bizarre imaginings can still give a frisson of unease.
Nottingham Contemporary, to 30 Sep
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Mythical Creature (1903), by Alfred Kubin Photograph: PR
It might initially seem small and unassuming but there’s a palpable element of danger to Kitty Kraus’s work. The German artist’s sculptures resemble minimalism’s reduced forms but lack its industrial hardiness: conjoined panes of glass are held together with tape, and lightbulbs are buried in inky blocks of ice, treading a fine line between destruction and fleeting beauty. The spidery stains and broken glass left by the ice-encased bulbs resemble abstract paintings, while beams of light are also projected through mirrored cubes to form intricate, skewed patterns.
Focal Point Gallery, to 22 Sep
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Untitled (Spiegellampe), 2007, by Kitty Kraus Photograph: PR
Chinese art star Zhang Huan has come a long way from the works that first confirmed his controversial talent in the 1990s. Back then, as an impoverished young artist subject to tightly enforced state censorship, he used the only material he had to hand: his body. Those first performances were surreal, masochistic and heavy with symbolism. However, having given up extreme live art in 2005, Huan’s now better known as a champion of traditional forms like woodcarving, bringing fresh life to ancient techniques with the aid of a huge team of assistants in his Shanghai art factory. His latest paintings, which depict historical figures alongside the anonymous faces of family albums, are rendered in what has recently become his signature medium: incense ash from Buddhist temples.
White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, to 26 Aug
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Soldier (2008), by Zhang Huan Photograph: PR
The first big London show for this Luxembourg artist duo includes their presentation for last year’s Venice Biennale. Their installations present an intriguing marriage of chic interior design and slapstick surrealism with apocalyptic overtones: chairs flop on the floor as if they’ve had their spines pulled out, candlesticks droop, and paint falls away from walls. It’s like seeing a show home reflected in a fairground mirror, or a freeze frame of the moment after a bomb goes off, the furniture just starting to melt, caught in a toxic heat haze; everything is pristinely white, like a minimalist pad or a world turned to ash.
Arts Gallery, University Of The Arts, WC1, to 24 Aug
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Dining Room, by Martine Feipel and Jean Bechameil Photograph: PR
This timely exhibition attempts to rescue the reputation of the Limerick-born Seán Keating (1889-1977), sidelined as a painterly political illustrator, a populist reactionary in an Ireland largely cut off from the modernist innovations of Europe and the USA. Keating is instead presented here as an astute history painter throughout a period of troubled national politics. At a time of economic crisis and increasing emigration, Keating’s figurative compositions do look relevant, so maybe it’s best now to place him historically with those artists who painted the US social scene long before Pollock and Warhol revolutionised the cultural landscape; painters such as Grant Wood and Norman Rockwell. Populist illustrators perhaps, but great ones nevertheless.
Crawford Art Gallery, to 27 Oct
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Sacred and Profane Love (1937), by Seán Keating Photograph: PR
One of the global art calendar’s biggest events, the next Unilever Series commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, will be unveiled this week. Or rather it won’t. This year’s artist, Tino Sehgal (pictured), creates undocumented experiences rather than objects. For his previous projects, museum attendants have stripped, started singing or simply whispered in people’s ears. More elaborate productions have involved teams of performers, drawing gallery-goers into semi-improvised encounters that unfold like elaborate games. Whatever Sehgal cooks up here for the Turbine Hall, it’s certain to have us looking at the world anew.
Tate Modern, SE1, Tue to 28 Oct
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Tino Sehgal at Tate Modern Photograph: Andrew Dunkley
