Gavin Turk’s art world gambits have been a bit hit and miss over the years, from anarchic YBA stunts to serious-minded sculpture. This survey takes in his 20-year journey down a well-trodden path tackling authorship, authenticity and appropriation: a portrait bust imagines Turk himself as the bowler-hatted, shotgun-nosed figure in Magritte’s L’Ellipse, typical of his arch one-liners whose novelty is quick to fade. However, other jabs at art and value, like his eerily realistic painted bronze sculptures of street finds such as stuffed black bin liners, are truly unsettling.
Ben Brown Fine Arts, W1, to 13 Jun
SS Photograph: Gavin Turk
An intriguing and apt pairing of exhibitions: one a show of recent abstract paintings by the French artist François Morellet, the other a survey of 200 years of traditional paintings on barkcloth from islands of the Pacific. The tapa barkcloth images come across like Oceanic op art: stunning geometric lozenges, zigzags and snakelike squiggles, interwoven with spirit familiars and mythic creatures. In 1952, Morellet was inspired by such works from Fiji and the Solomon Islands to create a series of small abstract canvases with a comparable aesthetic allure. Here, he has enlarged the size to a scale of 4:1 simply because, as he says, he can now afford and dare to do them bigger.
Ikon Gallery, Wed 1 May to 14 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
It’s almost half a century since Garry Fabian Miller first climbed on to the roof of his home in Clevedon and took a series of photographs looking west across the Severn estuary. All of the 80 images were snapped from the exact same spot with the same camera, focusing on a horizon fixed halfway up the identically exposed frame. Only the light and weather changed to subtly alter the atmospheric tones. Here, 40 previously unexhibited images are shown alongside Fabian Miller’s more recent abstract prints. Both sets of works present meditations on the timeless mystery of the sea-sky horizon, a symbolic interzone that, in the artist’s words, offers “the possibility of understanding our place within the world and its purpose”.
Ingleby Gallery, Thu 2 May to 13 Jul
RC Photograph: PR
Ellen Gallagher has spent the last 20 years creating intricate, dazzling works that probe racial politics and cultural history with a light touch. This survey stretches from her early 90s paintings fusing minimalism with minstrel show stereotypes to her more recent celebrated aquatic fantasies of a black Atlantis. Gallagher turned to art after a stint on a schooner studying oceanography, and her drawings and paintings run wild with the exotic: in one exquisite watercolour (pictured), a seaman has tentacles for legs and a huge Afro that seems part hair, part schools of fish. She makes good use of sci-fi and vintage African-American women’s magazines, too, in collages playing up the not-so-tacit racism in comic-book tales of alien otherness or ads for wigs and skin-lightening treatments.
Tate Modern, SE1, Wed 1 May to 1 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
Charles Saatchi’s taste can be erratic. Beyond the fame his YBA patronage brought him, he’s had the wrong kind of press for splashing out on one-hit wonders, chasing elusive new art movements, or lowering the stock of artists who no longer interest him by dumping their work en masse. The good news, though, is that this exhibition of work by recent British graduates is worth a visit. Stand out moments include Nicolas Deshaye’s sculptures, where industrial materials suggest human innards or waste. Steven Allan’s paintings of banana men (pictured), on the other hand, suggest Philip Guston’s angst-ridden cartoonish creations, but with dense dark surfaces that recall something much older, like the seasoned faces in Albrecht Dürer’s prints.
Saatchi Gallery, SW3, to 30 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
Sheffield’s Site Gallery continues to shine in these difficult times. For the past seven years, its Platform programme has enabled artists to set up studios temporarily in the gallery. This show selectively brings together many of the works so produced, including an installation by Elizabeth Price, who went on to win the 2012 Turner prize. Her video projection has a distinct air of paying homage to the experimental spirit of early 20th-century modernism, a tendency echoed in several of the accompanying exhibits. Most impressive is Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone’s evocative film (pictured), documenting their recreation of a movie set originally designed in 1936 by László Moholy-Nagy.
Site Gallery, to 1 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
In this age of ecological concern, our relationship with animals is fraught with guilt and ambivalence. So it’s no surprise that seven contemporary artists here present natural life as shadowed by a creepy uncertainty; animals as spooks that have come back to haunt us. The Australia-based artist Patricia Piccinini’s 2012 Ghost is an ape-like spectre dangling from the gallery ceiling and seeming to poke fun at our social sobriety. Accompanying it is her hermaphroditic Sphinx, a grotesque mix-up of male and female genitalia. Elsewhere, there are drawings of Tanzanian wild dogs and a Polly Morgan model of tiny birds perching on an octopus’s tentacles.
The New Art Gallery Walsall, to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: Tessa Angus
This month-long arts festival offers everything from vaudeville to dubstep, plus an artist-run flea market. The highlight, though, promises to be next week’s unveiling of Siobhán Hapaska’s new installation The Sky Has To Turn Black Before You Can See The Stars (pictured, Goods Shed, 4 to 12 May). A Belfast native, Hapaska is known for her surreal, poetic riffs on conflict, discord and hope. Here, uprooted olive trees are strung up within a cube of scaffolding. The trees – which have been rigged to motors – shudder and shake in what might be a death rattle or a bid for freedom. Hapaska has a deft way with both the immediate and the symbolic: it’s said that when the olive trees are gone, civilisation will end.
Various venues, Wed 1 May to 31 May
SS Photograph: PR
