Manet jolted 19th-century painting into a modern world of fashionable flaneurs and forward-thinking femmes, capturing odd instances that knock you for six. Most famous is his mysterious naked woman glimpsed in a park with two fully-dressed dandies; or his no-nonsense nude, Olympia, a prostitute-as-businesswoman. These are streetwise paintings, attuned to the hustle and bustle of contemporary Paris. Manet’s portraits, the focus of this exhibition, are similarly switched on to the city’s restless energy. Repeatedly, they play up a sense of chance encounters and fleeting pleasures, and one of the many masterpieces here, The Railway, simply depicts a woman waiting on a wall. It’s a perfect example of the strange beauty of the moment.
Royal Academy, W1, Sat 26 Jan to 14 Apr
SS Photograph: PR
Becky Beasley’s sculptures and photographs have a lot to say, but seem to get tongue-tied. At least, the pared-down objects – including planks of wood, little boxes, shelving, screens and accompanying photographs of the above – give little away. Here, she alludes to the American writer Bernard Malumud and Duchamp’s installation Etant Donnés, while offsetting her latest works with shows of Richard Hamilton’s Interiors prints and work by Victorian photographer Charles Jones.
Spike Island, Sat 26 Jan to 31 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
The Hayward’s first crowd pleaser this year is a showcase of artists working with light sculpture. There are big names such as Dan Flavin, renowned since the 1960s for strip lights, and Jenny Holzer, who creates intrigue with her LED displays. Austerity is matched with plenty of the light fantastic; Conrad Shawcross’s room bathed in mosaics of light and shadow, for instance. Meanwhile, young artist Katie Paterson finds mystery in incandescent lightbulbs. Her midnight blue Lightbulb To Simulate Moonlight is designed to last as long as the average human life, and its reflection on mortality is made more poignant by the fact that her chosen technology is already obsolete.
Hayward Gallery, SE1, Wed 30 Jan to 28 Apr
SS Photograph: John McKenzie
The German artist Kurt Schwitters spent his last eight years as a refugee, working in a freezing Lake District barn. But his isn’t a name you’d immediately associate with Britain. A cult figure in the annals of 20th-century modernism, in the 1920s he rubbed shoulders with Dadaists and constructivists, while pursuing his vision of art made from anything, which he dubbed “Merz”. This show reveals he never lost his spark, with collages and rare portraits painted to make ends meet later on in his life.
Tate Britain, SW1, Wed 30 Jan to 12 May
SS Photograph: Aline Gwose
Arranged around seven key subdivisions – crisis, enclosures, exodus, life, sex, spectres and work – everything here has been produced since the fall of the Berlin wall and the rise of global capitalism. Exhibitors such as Edinburgh-based photographer Owen Logan and Raqs Media Collective reflect this global reach, and there’s plenty of irony, with Serbian performance artist Tanja Ostoji presenting an image of herself naked, entitled Looking For A Husband With EU Passport, and Andreas Gursky’s equally sharp photo piece Chicago Board of Trade II.
Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, to 21 Apr; CCA, Glasgow, Sat 26 Jan to 23 Mar
RC Photograph: Borut Krajnc
With an overlapping show at Margate’s Turner Contemporary (Fri to 6 May), Rosa Barba’s northern exhibition focuses on film as a sensuous and haunting medium. The flickering 16mm and 35mm film, the whirring projectors, suspended screens and electrical sound equipment trailing a complex of wires are all foregrounded as much as the filmed images. Given Barba’s sensitivity of touch, the pile-up of movie paraphernalia tends to amplify the audience’s suspension of disbelief rather than distract from it. Subconscious Society, the central installation here, is a plaintive collage of recollections set in Manchester’s Albert Hall Methodist mission and Margate’s derelict Dreamland amusement park, as Barba maps out the traceries left on our landscape by the industrial age.
The Cornerhouse, Sat 26 Jan to 24 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
This first UK solo show by this young Beijing-based artist reveals her to be a figure of rare personality and individuality. Her paintings, installations and video works embody an almost painful vulnerability, as abstract black paintings turn out on closer inspection to contain delicate filigree traceries. A video piece titled From No 4 Pingyuanli To No 4 Tianqiaobeili features the artist recounting her childhood reminiscences of her parents and, as the monologue concludes, the artist removes a razor blade from inside her mouth. Blades are a favourite and ambiguous motif, suggesting both delicate sensitivity and violent threat. The video All My Sharpness Comes From Your Hardness follows the artist as she dons a pair of ice skates and attempts to dance across the concrete floor of a city street.
Chinese Arts Centre, to 2 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
The artist known as Guggi is the same Guggi who until 1984 regularly got all dolled up and pranced about as part of the theatrical Irish post-punks the Virgin Prunes. These days his paintings reveal a much more reflective personality. Indeed the recurring images tend to be more intimately domestic than spectacularly rock’n’roll. A series of clay resin and fibreglass sculptural bowls echo the simple vessels that have recurred throughout his work for years. His paintings look carefully improvised, as if one evocative lead is followed by another in a process of almost poetic free association. While the most recent paintings include fragments of poised text and experiments with painterly graphics that might hark back to his formative punk years, there remains throughout a subtle air of intimate and meditative composure.
Kerlin Gallery, Fri 25 Jan to 23 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
