1 Alex Katz
The simplicity of Alex Katz’s work is beautiful to behold. He reduces the pain and labour of painting to a bold archetypal summation of people and places that never misses its mark or fails to be poignant. Like a haiku or the most beautiful pop song you ever heard, his paintings are perfect, unpretentious wonders that make you see life afresh.
Serpentine Gallery, W2, to 11 Sep
2 In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive And Were Full Of Joy
Elizabeth Price is one of the most imaginative artists in Britain. Once she was an indie pop star, now she makes film art and won a well-deserved Turner prize for splicing together medieval architecture and a 1970s shop fire. Here, she turns her dark vision on to the work of other artists, curating, among others, Brancusi, Fuseli and Francesca Woodman.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester to 30 Oct
3 Joseph Grigely
Going deaf at the age of 10 gave Joseph Grigely a special and considered relationship with the written word. He uses writing to converse, asking people to “speak” with him on scraps of paper from which he then creates installations. In this exhibition, he explores the archive of the late art critic Gregory Battcock, which he discovered in an abandoned warehouse in 1992.
Marian Goodman Gallery, W1, Tue to 29 Jul
4 Superwoman
Was the Soviet Union feminist? It certainly put women into roles that were forbidden in the west, such as fighter pilot. You could also say it oppressed everyone equally. Like all exhibitions that resurrect Soviet propaganda art, this one risks wallowing in semi-ironic nostalgia for a system that killed millions, but its survey of images of women from the 1917 revolution to the USSR’s dissolution looks absorbing nevertheless.
5 Alice In Wonderland
Amazingly, André Breton, leader of the surrealist movement, left Lewis Carroll out of the list of the movement’s predecessors in his 1924 manifesto, but other modernists were more grateful. Carroll haunts James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and has been artfully filmed by Jan Svankmajer. This exhibition jumps down the rabbit hole into one of Britain’s most beguiling creations.
