1 Surreal Encounters: Collecting The Marvellous The English art collector Edward James created a dream palace in his Sussex home: the sofa was a luscious pink replica of Mae West’s lips designed by Salvador Dalí. He also owned a portrait of himself by René Magritte, which showed the back of his head as he looked into a mirror in which the same view is repeated. The art he accumulated stars in this exhibition along with the collections of Roland Penrose, Gabrielle Keiller and Ulla and Heiner Pietzsch. It highlights the paradox that surrealism aspired to revolution yet produced some of the most collectible art of the 20th century. After all, what is more luxurious than unbridled fantasy?
Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Sat to 11 Sep
2 Whitstable Biennale
Ah, the English seaside: saucy postcards, fish and chips, and bold contemporary art. It is difficult nowadays to visit a south coast town that does not have a cutting-edge gallery, but Whitstable has its own twist: a biennale that brings a smorgasbord of subversion into town to provoke the seagulls and draw in metropolitan punters. This year’s delights include work by Alice Butler, Tessa Lynch, Louisa Martin, Lucy Pawlak, Trish Scott (work pictured) and more.
Various venues, Sat to 12 Jun
3 Félix González-Torres
The generosity of this artist, who died from Aids in 1996, is touching and inspiring. His installations are – literally – gifts. You can take a sweet from his piles of sweets, a poster from his stacks of posters. González-Torres did interaction before anyone else, and more warmly. The exchange between his art and audience is involving and haunting: to see his art is to touch his art and to take it home is to remember him.
Hauser & Wirth, W1, to 30 Jul
4 Rubens’ Ghost
Don’t worry, Dulwich Picture Gallery is not really haunted by the 17th-century baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. Instead, this exhibition reveals recent scientific findings about the artist’s work: the “ghost” is an x-ray image of his Venus, Mars And Cupid, painted between 1630 and 1635.
Dulwich Picture Gallery, SE21, to 3 Jul
5 Botticelli Reimagined
The afterlives of a Renaissance genius echo on here, from overheated Victorian fantasies to Dolce & Gabbana dresses. The pre-Raphaelites saw Botticelli as a dream artist and the surrealists shared their fetish; one of the most haunting remakes here is by Magritte.
V&A, SW7, to 3 Jul
