George Condo’s paintings are an exquisitely rendered comedy horror of ugly sex and goofily grotesque existential turmoil. For three decades he served up a rollicking cast of demonic clowns, leering men with mashed-up faces, and man-eating women sporting vampire teeth, winning fans such as Kanye West. His latest “portraits” of dastardly characters at Simon Lee Gallery largely dispense with recognisable facial features in favour of a pile-up of vividly coloured cubist geometries, made human by the suggestion of a startled eye or pair of jug ears. Meanwhile, the Skarstedt is showing his drawings, which conjure spectral monsters with ink, gesso and charcoal.
Simon Lee Gallery, W1, Tue 11 Feb to 22 Mar; Skarstedt Gallery, W1, Tue 11 Feb to 5 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
The German artist Markus Karstieß spent a large part of his recent year-long artist-in-residence stint in Newcastle upon Tyne researching the prehistoric standing stones of the north-east. The concentric circles he found on them have fascinated him and inspired this work. To set the primal scene, he has covered the gallery floor in locally sourced earth and suspended a series of large ceramic cylinders. A soundtrack of the artist striking the variously tuned cylinders fills the space with a spectral chiming. Karstieß has an ear and eye for the innate evocative qualities of his raw materials, meticulously crafting the clay into sculptures that irresistibly take us back to his primal sources of inspiration.
MIMA, to 4 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
As part of the ongoing Platform programme, which enables artists to create work inside Site gallery during their exhibition’s run, the rapper-artist Helen Benigson takes on the politically loaded subject of women’s self-image. She’ll stage communal weight-loss gatherings and performances by Sheffield’s female weight-lifting community. Participants will be transformed into digitised avatars as the artist builds up an organic, multimedia installation.
Site Gallery, Tue 11 Feb to 1 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
In recent years, the Barbican’s Curve gallery has established a reputation for staging modern marvels that people are prepared to queue around the block to experience. This long crescent-shaped space has hosted indoor rainstorms and doubled as an aviary where birds play electric guitars. The hybrid architecture-design-installation art studio United Visual Artists are the latest to elicit gasps and oohs. Their technologically sophisticated light and sound work Momentum (pictured) involves pendulums throwing shards of light and shadow in response to visitors’ movements through the space.
The Curve, EC1, Thu 13 Feb to 1 Jun
SS Photograph: PR
Subtitled, Art And The Lure Of The Sea, this two-venue group show casts a wide net over work by a long list of leading British artists. Lighthouse (North), Catherine Yass’s film capturing a peculiar lighthouse off the Sussex coast (pictured), updates the Romantic take on the sea as an awesome mystery to be plumbed. Filmed not only by helicopter but on and below the waves, her lighthousehas a strange allure. Also, Isaac Julien weds aesthetics to politics in his film Western Union, Small Boats, offsetting the present-day plight of African immigrants illegally travelling to Sicily with the seaside palazzo where Visconti shot his famed film The Leopard.
John Hansard Gallery; The Pavilion At Sea City Museum, Sat 8 Feb to 4 May
SS Photograph: PR
Marcus Coates has set himself up as some kind of urban shaman, continually enacting society’s dislocation from the forces of nature. Here the video Vision Quest: A Ritual For Elephant & Castle is a lament for the lost community spirit of the demonised and soon-to-be-demolished Heygate estate. The film follows Coates wandering south London streets dressed in a silver lamé suit in the company of his stuffed hawk “spirit guide”. He slams himself against garage doors, lies face down on the pavement foaming at the mouth, and screams as a horse-headed performer at the Coronet theatre in the company of doom-disco group Chrome Hoof (pictured). One gradually becomes won over by his conviction that by playing the holy fool he might hit on some vital representations of our discontented collective psyche.
Workplace Gallery, to 22 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Sonia Boyce, Pavel Büchler and Susan Hiller variously reveal suppressed voices. Since the 1980s, Boyce has been concerned with her experience of being a black female artist living through a period of significant change in the politics of gender and race. Büchler’s oblique references to European modernist writers in his meticulously composed installations are always imbued with a poetic sensitivity. But it is Susan Hiller (work pictured) who most reflects the exhibition title by staging multimedia projects like an occultist medium bringing out the spooks from our collective unconscious.
CCA, Sat 8 Feb to 23 Mar
RC Photograph: Adam Reich
The late Richard Hamilton has long been dubbed the “father of pop art”. In the 1950s, works such as his iconic collage of the pin-up girl and muscleman, housebound by all their new domestic gadgets, announced his interest in the gaudy glamour of the consumer landscape. No Warholian slave to mass culture, however, Hamilton approached pop with a keen critical eye. Indeed, as mapped in this first major survey since his death last year, his interests and technical accomplishments were markedly wide-ranging. Paintings are as likely to include images of such politically charged figures as a Christ-like Bobby Sands as they are the uniquely modern vacuity of hotel lobbies. As well as drawing on the old, he was ever-curious about new tech, including 3D photography.
Tate Modern, SE1, Thu 13 Feb to 26 May
SS Photograph: PR
