Lisson Gallery is a rock on London’s art map. From its Bell Street base, it has weathered decades of art world change, from the 1970s conceptualists such as Art & Language and the 1980s generation of new British sculptors like Richard Wentworth and Anish Kapoor, to its current international roster, which boasts Ai Weiwei. This show is something of a UK artists’ greatest hits. Golden oldies include Kapoor, represented by a recent stainless steel wall sculpture (pictured), and Tony Cragg whose towers of rubber, stone and metal from the late 1980s could be model skyscrapers in a sci-fi fantasy. The newbies take in conceptual comedian Ceal Floyer and Haroon Mirza, whose layered constellation of sound and visuals uses LED lights, video and music samples.
Lisson Gallery, NW1, Fri 15 Nov to 11 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
This three-woman show is an object lesson in the elemental, pared-down and barely there. Laura Aldridge’s ceramics are pit-fired with banana skins and seaweed. The resulting slabs of clay, tinged with black and pink, have a fleshy, scrunched-up look, like rumpled sheets or misshapen noses. A minimalist with a love of the overlooked, Hayley Tompkins takes a more ethereal approach. First seen at this year’s Venice Biennale, her Digital Light Pool works are petri dishes of luminosity, made from disarmingly simple ingredients. Sue Tompkins, meanwhile, uses language seemingly caught on the air, bits of pop songs, poetry and phrases used piecemeal in her performances, paintings and text works.
Supplement, E2, Sat 9 Nov to 8 Dec
SS Photograph: PR
Setting the urban theme here is William Raban’s Thames Film (pictured), a wonderfully reflective trip down London’s vast estuary. As seagulls swoop amid the girders and cranes of the docklands, a TS Eliot voiceover reads from Four Quartets, the poet’s meditation on time passing. Further overlaps are provided by the voice of John Hurt and Bruegel the Elder’s 1562 painting Triumph Of Death. The city archived here is as much a fluid state of mind as it is a concrete edifice. We also get black-and-white photo-realism (Edith Tudor-Hart’s portrait of a Viennese market trader) and Vanley’s Burke’s study of a Manchester bookshop. But it’s Raban who takes us to the heart of the cruel and beautiful capital.
Holden Gallery, to 13 Dec
RC Photograph: PR
Alison Turnbull and Matt Calderwood’s shows, responding to the De La Warr Pavilion’s modernist seaside architecture, pitch between chance and control. Turnbull’s paintings (work pictured) comprise orderly configurations of lines, rings and dots inspired by building blueprints, exploring man’s attempts to bring vast cosmic forces to heel. Calderwood, meanwhile, has given his sculptures over to the unruly forces of nature. His welded steel abstractions have been sent out on to the roof terrace wearing nothing more than billboard paper, left up there to endure months of salty air and bleaching sun. Indoors, he’s coated his gallery in white newsprint, to fade and be marked by sunlight over the course of the show.
De La Warr Pavilion, Sat 9 Nov to 23 Feb
SS Photograph: Peter White
This extensively researched exhibition reveals connections between leftwing political thinking and the imagery and marketing strategies of artists, ranging from the late 18th-century power plays of the French revolution to the super-sell made familiar from London’s recent Frieze art fair. Jacques-Louis David’s masterly 1793 painting of assassinated revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat bleeding to death in his bath sets a tragic tone today’s hardly dare tackle. A hand-sewn banner by Deller and Kane carries the slogan “Sex Workers Of the World Unite”, while the Guerrilla Girls produce posters protesting the lack of female representation in Sotheby’s auctions (work pictured). There’s even The Office of Useful Art, a leftish education centre designed to welcome in the Liverpool hoi polloi.
Tate Liverpool, to 2 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
The Danish-born artist Nina Beier’s art has a tendency to escape from the picture frame. Past work has seen the artist employing an actor to remake a work that has been purposefully destroyed, relying only on a verbal description. Photographs are left to fade and what appear to be elaborately painted canvases are in fact coloured-in carpets. Yet, given Beier’s sensitive compositional skills, all this adds up to more than clever-as-they-come ponderings, as if these material things stand to remind us they will all outlive us.
MOSTYN, to 5 Jan
RC Photograph: PR
Five artists take painting down forking and occasionally interlacing paths in this energetic show. Art history flirts with the personal in Turner prize-winner Tomma Abts’s small, tightly wrought abstractions. Catherine Story’s muted, stripped-back paintings of anthropomorphic shapes initially seem austere, though they have a charmingly odd, cartoonish quality. Her Lovelock (pictured), for example, collapses film, animation and art, the Cubist stack of shapes could be an old movie camera or Mickey Mouse ears.
Tate Britain, SW1, Tue 12 Nov to 9 Feb
SS Photograph: Andy Keate/Tate
One of Ireland’s most distinctive 20th-century painters, Farrell worked through the 1960s in the relatively new medium of acrylics, combining geometric abstraction with the filigree fascinations of Celtic illuminated manuscripts. The unrest of the 70s ended such transcendental aspiration, Farrell declaring he would no longer exhibit in northern Ireland until “a decent society” was established, with his subsequent work often dwelling on national identity. He reworked a 1752 portrait of Louis XV’s mistress Marie-Louise O’Murphy and played with depictions of Ireland as the courtesan of European politics. The show also tours to Dublin and Paris.
Crawford Art Gallery, 9 Nov to 4 Jan
RC Photograph: Roy Hewson
