Dawn Mellor’s paintings turn stars into psychotic clowns, pox-ridden pariahs and murderous zombies. However, they’re less of an attack on celebrities themselves than the weird miasma of hate and desire they generate, from the judgments levied in women’s magazines to the outer reaches of the blogosphere. Specially created for Southend, her latest series features one of the Essex seaside resort’s most famous daughters, Dame Helen Mirren, who once called the town “England’s armpit” in an interview. It’s the love-hate relationship that Mirren and other stars have with their hometown that interests Mellor, recasting the actor in a layered take on class and identity.
Focal Point Gallery, Mon 14 Jan to 30 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Jennifer Steinkamp has been at the forefront of digital art since her distinctly trippy fusion of abstract painting and animation first brought her fame in the 1990s. Here, she dishes out cosmic eye candy, with disorienting twinned projections of jostling asteroids painted in pretty pastel shades. A complementary show of Joanne Greenbaum’s abstract paintings from ongoing series 1612 makes for a great double act. Nearly 100 new works line the walls, all 16 x 12in, but her shapes, scribbles and bursts of colour progress with the playfulness of improv jazz.
Greengrassi, SE11, Fri 11 Jan to 23 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
That “time will tell” seems nowhere truer than in Gerard Byrne’s film installations, revisiting key moments from 20th-century cultural history. Take surrealists like André Breton and Yves Tanguy, who might have considered themselves at culture’s bleeding edge back in 1928 with their chin-strokey round table on eroticism. Yet with the discussion they published transformed by Byrne into a stilted 1970s-style TV play for A Man and a Woman Make Love, they seem hopelessly uptight and out of date. Clad in boho neckerchiefs, tweed suits and braces, they make nettling pronouncements on everything from homosexuality to female pleasure. Other forward-thinkers of yesteryear given the Byrne treatment include Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, Jean-Paul Sartre and Carl Andre.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Thu 17 Jan to 8 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
Defecting in 1982 from communist Czechoslovakia, Jitka Hanzlová moved to Essen in West Germany. There, she began a series of landscapes of lost places and several series of portraits of figures isolated in an otherwise deserted countryside. There are images of nocturnal forests, with trees, grass, ferns and snow-shrouded undergrowth picked out against a darkness that resonates with primal spookiness. The portraits tend to be of rather cultured-looking young ladies posed awkwardly amid the unlikely backdrop of an uncultivated wilderness. Overall, an atmosphere of melancholic displacement comes across in the work. There’s a sense of yearning for somewhere back beyond the horizon.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, to 3 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
On the face of it, Nick Fox’s Nightsong installations hark back to the romantic symbolism of such legendary late-19th century decadents as Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans. A drawing is adorned by gold dust that was apparently gifted to the artist by his first lover. A nocturnal film, The Holy Island of Lindisfarne, plays against a lyrical backdrop of the 1951 Teresa Brewer song Longing For You. It’s intimate art, half in love with heartbreak, longing and loss. In the hands of less skilled artists, such unashamed use of personal confession might come out all cliched. However, with Fox it comes over as distinctive, and deeply lovely.
Vane, to 2 Feb
RC Photograph: Colin Davison
Dame Laura Knight was a mid-20th century British painter whose admittedly talented work was surely compromised by an attachment to an almost Victorian taste for fanciful storytelling. While her brushwork related to the radical technical boldness of French impressionism, her subject matter mostly inclined towards bonneted maidens and weatherworn fishermen. Yet this show of Knight’s English landscapes represents the popular painter at her best, when she had eschewed the sentimental narratives of her figure compositions for a refreshing and honest delight in the storms and sea sparkle of the North Yorkshire coastline, or the dramatic roll and dip of the Malvern Hills.
Worcester City Art Gallery, to 10 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Louis XIV, former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and Chelsea Set lynchpin Christopher Gibbs are among the powerbrokers alluded to in Roman Vasseur’s exhibition, Designs Towards A Meeting Place For Future Events Of Universal Truth. That title sets the scene for an exploration of cultural contradictions: moments when art has either played into or upended the mechanisms of power. Within an elegant metal display, paintings, prints and texts bring the artist’s references together. These include digital prints of Gibbs’s ceramics and a text painting inspired by the Sun King’s maxim, I Am The State. For Vasseur, one of the show’s most potent symbols is a napkin inscribed with a diagram of the Laffer curve, a key concept for Reaganomics.
Cubitt Gallery, N1, Thu 17 Jan to 17 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
A long-time character of the north-east art scene, Norman Cornish began working down the local pit from the age of 14. It was not until 1966, at the age of 47, that he finally packed it in for the artistic life. A month later he made the almost obligatory trip to Paris, where he produced these watercolours and drawings of the cafe and street life of what still remained the world’s most attractive cultural capital. He once said of Paris: “You find yourself lost in the middle of this humanity with its special flavour.” While always verging on caricature illustration, Cornish’s studies ultimately disarm through their ever-present humanistic empathy. These are pictures full of delightful observations of the bowed quirkiness of a gait or the peculiarity of a gesture.
Northumbria University Gallery, to 8 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
