What connects mantelpiece treasures with museums’ curated exhibits or shop window displays? How different are the stories up for interpretation in those personal collections of family memorabilia and the official histories written in antiquities? Haim Steinbach has been exploring these questions since the 1980s, when he turned from fashioning post-minimalist paintings in lino to creating poetic assemblages with objects on shelves. In this survey of his four-decade career, he creates strange formal poetry with items that veer from humdrum to downright weird – a bottle of cleaning fluid, a corny statue of Orphan Annie (pictured), and a pasta-encrusted shoe included – as well as other people’s artworks and antiques.
Serpentine Gallery, W1, Wed 5 Mar to 21 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Outsider art typically dazzles with its detail, be that psychedelic colour, intricate patterns or esoteric scripts and symbols. Its subject, though, is invariably the life of the mind, and arguably this is what makes it so compelling. Here, Chaz Waldren’s felt-tip pen works (pictured) create joyful landscapes that, at times, conjure a similarity with the curling dragons of Asian landscape painting. The young Japanese ceramicist Shinichi Sawada, meanwhile, works relentlessly on stout knobbly monsters whose skins are decorated with hundreds of bits of clay. Be he fashioning horses, tigers or dragons, Jason Pape’s ceramic creatures, on the other hand, are as smooth and delightfully bulbous as melons.
Pallant House Gallery, to 27 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
The Keywords in question are taken from Raymond Williams’s influential 1976 book analysing the cultural vocabulary of the time. Consequently, the show comes across as a historical survey of artistic discontent during the subsequent Thatcher years. Nevertheless, since key aspects of Thatcherite cultural policy seem to have recently resurfaced, there are several works here whose subversive power it may well be worth revisiting. Jo Spence’s anti-domestic photographs have lost little of their courage; Helen Chadwick’s Carcass, a sculptural vat of putrescent vegetable matter, continues to rot on; while Sunil Gupta’s Heaven (pictured) looks back at London’s gay scene.
Tate Liverpool, to 11 May
RC Photograph: PR
Sarah Maple is an artist who likes to get in people’s faces. The British-born Muslim’s assertive approach has landed her in plenty of trouble: she has been criticised for making the most of being a Muslim pin-up. Her art doesn’t flinch, either: one self-portrait has the naked artist holding a placard that proclaims The Opposite To A Feminist Is An Arsehole. It is, of course, this very ability to precisely irritate tired cultural presumptions that marks her out to be a creative force to be reckoned with.
Golden Thread Gallery, to 15 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Writer and curator Brian Dillon’s appetite for destruction starts in the 18th century, with the craze for classical ruins switching to Britain’s crumbling landscape. Turner’s picturesque Tintern Abbey has nothing on Victorian art star John Martin, however. His historical painting of Pompeii in flames amps up ruination to an epic scale worthy of an action movie. As life’s pace has quickened and with mass annihilation a reality, ruin lust now seems stronger than ever. Artists picking over the wreckage here include Jane and Louise Wilson photographing the modernist edifice of the Nazis’ Atlantic Wall (pictured) and Tacita Dean, who looks at the decline of celluloid film.
Tate Britain, SW1, Tue 4 Mar to 18 May
SS Photograph: PR
Hampstead’s cultural heroes get their dues this month. First up is architect Ernö Goldfinger, best-known for west London’s divisive Trellick Tower and lending his name to Ian Fleming’s villain with the Midas touch. The modernist terrace home he designed on Hampstead’s Willow Road is currently hosting artworks by Ryan Gander that playfully riff on the man and myth. Meanwhile, the 17th-century Fenton House is the setting for portraits of the sons and daughters of this artists’ quarter-turned-millionaire ’hood, with Barbara Hepworth, Edith Sitwell, Judi Dench and Marianne Faithfull (pictured) among them.
2 Willow Road (Sat 1 Mar to 2 Nov); Fenton House (Sat 1 Mar to 29 Jun), both NW3
SS Photograph: National Portrait Gallery London
This first substantial Tess Jaray exhibition for a quarter of a century reveals a determination to deepen an insight she first had while travelling through Italy as a scholar in the 1960s: that seemingly empty space could itself be the subject of painting. Adapting the pastel-toned atmospheric resonance of Italian Renaissance artists such as Giotto, Jaray developed an abstract painterly language of struts, chevrons and zigzags that traverse the canvas (pictured). More recent works have quoted the hypnotic elaborations of Islamic architecture, yet throughout Jaray’s images have remained distinctively her own. Indeed, she comes across these days as peculiarly ambitious and optimistic.
Lakeside Arts Centre, to 27 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Jonathan Owen’s art is one of highly skilled and sophisticated cultural sabotage. He takes 19th-century marble statues of classical subjects and re-carves them into surreal mysteries (pictured). The Ingleby is to be congratulated for its refreshingly inventive idea of accompanying Owen’s exhibition with John Smith’s innovative 1976 video The Girl Chewing Gum. Filmed on an east London street, the footage has a voiceover that seems to pre-empt documentary and push it towards hallucination: “I want the girl with a bag under her arm to walk to the right … I can see a blackbird with a wingspan of nine feet…”
Ingleby Gallery, Sat 1 Mar to 19 Apr
RC Photograph: John McKenzie
