At first, Fiona Mackay’s paintings hark back to mid-century US abstraction. On the one hand, her work recalls Barnett Newman’s stripes or Mark Rothko’s fuzzy planes; on the other, the slightly later generation of colour field artists, such as Morris Louis or Helen Frankenthaler, who applied pigment to absorbent canvas so there was no point at which the paint ended and its fabric base started. Mackay brings experiments in making paint and its support one and the same up to date, putting a new-agey, domestic twist on what’s often a male-dominated pursuit. Her paintings are created using batik dye and wax on very thin canvas. The results are unpredictable, giving a playfulness and freedom to Mackay’s creations.
Outpost Gallery, Tue 2 Apr to 21 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Ambika P3’s bunker-like gallery is the setting for Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s installation The Happiest Man. The idyllic vision of singing Russian peasants in Soviet-era propaganda films is obviously a far cry from the reality of those years, and appears here with a sense of irony. As with all the duo’s work, the subject is the enduring appeal of escapist fantasy in the face of failed dreams. The window of a little house where the happiest man lives looks out on the illusory paradise, which says as much about modern dreams as those in the former USSR. The skewed mirror worlds continue in Sprovieri gallery’s concurrent show of Kabakov paintings.
Ambika P3, NW1, to 21 Apr; Sprovieri Gallery, W1, to 11 May
SS Photograph: Agostino Osio
Curated by Iwona Blazwick, director of London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Diane Howse, the countess of Harewood, this show encompasses four centuries of nature studies on paper. The overall theme is less landscape, more an intimate, engrossed engagement with natural forms and forces. There’s a recent drawing by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone, for example, in which he re-visualises a banal plank as a living tree. But we have to go back to 1803 for the most passionate engagement with the organic world, in the guise of a John Sell Cotman drawing, which is deceptively simple and wonderful in its precision.
Terrace Gallery at Harewood House, to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: Mel Booth
It remains a curious fact that the amazing complexity of modern cities has rarely been convincingly captured in art. So this new collection with an urban theme is a welcome contribution. Miao Xiaochun’s gigantic photographic panorama of Beijing’s rush hour sits with Mohamed Bourouissa’s portraits of disaffected suburban Paris youth. Such critical urban perspectives are balanced by a Grazia Toderi video in which the nocturnal cityscape is seen as a hallucinatory dome of pleasurable visions.
Birmingham Art Gallery, to 23 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
We’ll have to wait until 23 May to find out who gets the £16,500 prize money but in the meantime the work of the shortlisted contenders for the Northern Art Prize is here for all to argue over. Margaret Harrison’s feminist provocations are worth a bet, as are Rosalind Nashashibi’s video shorts. Emily Speed’s sculptures and performances will appeal to fans of more out-there art, while the collaborative duo Joanne Tatham & Tom O’Sullivan appear to question the operation of the art world itself with their work of vaudeville comedy and absurdist theatre.
Leeds Art Gallery, to 16 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
There’s a playfulness to the late artist Robert Filliou’s work that one rarely finds in his more sober UK contemporaries; his maxim was that “art is what makes life more interesting than art”. Associated with fluxus, the 60s movement that rebelled against all fixed definitions of art, Filliou’s work existed in the space between the artist’s production and the audience’s response; his art being less about the object than its presentation and interpretation. Work here includes 16,000 dice, with all sides numbered one. Obviously, to engage with Filliou’s art, game-players have to be in a pretty enigmatic frame of mind.
Henry Moore Institute, to 23 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
The artists in this peripatetic show take the simple act of walking in unexpected directions. Some works are truly epic, as with Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s The Great Wall Walk. The duo began their 2,500km hike from opposite ends of China’s Great Wall, met in the middle and, in a grand symbolic gesture, finished their relationship as artistic collaborators and lovers. Others appear slightly more prosaic: Britain’s famed “walking artist” Richard Long takes lengthy rambles through the countryside, making ephemeral sculptures as he goes with stones he finds on the roadside. Perhaps the most intrepid journey is the one undertaken by an urban fox, let loose after dark to run through the National Portrait Gallery’s corridors, in Francis Alÿs’s The Nightwatch.
PM Gallery And House, W5, to 5 May
SS Photograph: PR
Among the many achievements of his 80-plus years, it's Kenneth Anger’s love-hate relationship with Tinseltown’s gaudier side that Anger remains best known for. The kid who learned to dance with Shirley Temple penned the hair-raising account of debauchery from cinema’s golden age, Hollywood Babylon. Giving an intimate insight into his influences and interests, Anger has here installed his movie memorabilia archive just as it is in his LA home, in velvet-red and midnight-blue rooms. Largely focused on the Babylon era, his treasures include photos of Errol Flynn and Bette Davis; sheet music for DW Griffith’s The Fall Of Babylon; and the original programme for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the 1935 movie adaptation in which Anger played one of the forest fairies.
Sprüth Magers, W1, to 20 Apr
SS Photograph: Michael Montfort
