1 Louise Bourgeois
The greatness of Louise Bourgeois is more obvious with every passing year. Her art magically connects the 21st century with the giants of early modernism, for this pupil of Fernand Léger was nothing less than the last of the surrealists. This exhibition reveals a series of late etchings in which she explores her unconscious. Bourgeois kept working to the end of her life because her imagination was so stuffed with strange visions. Now her mind is preserved in art, a modern wonderland.
Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, Sun to 1 Jan
2 Guerrilla Girls
Get Into The Met Museum? (1989). Photograph: Guerrilla Girls
The seminal feminist art gang come to London to unveil disturbing data on the representation of women in art. The brutally simple truth-telling of the Guerrilla Girls is brilliantly effective. Their classic poster that sticks a gorilla head on a nude by Ingres and asks: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” is backed up by statistics on the puny presence of female artists in the New York institution’s collection. Now the European art world gets the same no-nonsense treatment.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Sat to 5 Mar
3 Philippe Parreno
Tate Modern continues its project of never getting great epic-scale American artists to work in its vast Turbine Hall by asking a quite good French one to occupy it instead. Parreno is probably best known for Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, the arty football film he made with Douglas Gordon, but that’s just one of his many collaborative projects, which include quasi-curatorial interventions in architectural space. Expect an ambient orchestration of bodies, sound and movement. He shoots, but does he score?
Tate Modern, SE1, Tue to 2 Apr
4 Richard Serra
The most powerful sculptor alive does what he does best and unveils his latest spooky, sublime works in steel. Brown and red, rough and curved, the rich textures and always unexpected scale and shapes of Serra’s heavy duty abstract masterpieces punch you in the face with the sheer might of their reality.
Gagosian Britannia Street, WC1, Sat to 25 Feb
5 Gerald Laing
Brigitte Bardot and Anna Karina appear as pixelated icons in the early works of this British pop artist. His best art is beautifully of its time: Laing takes newsprint images and bathes them in abstract colour to ethereal effect. In his last years, he returned to his pop roots to create glamorous portraits of Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham. I hope he got some satisfaction.
The Fine Art Society, W1, to 13 Oct
