Rachel Whiteread is the great eulogiser of overlooked space, such as the empty air of the condemned house she famously filled with concrete in east London in 1993. Her latest creations strike a lighter note than her best-known works, which memorialised the untold dramas played out in the home. Here, she’s turned her attention to that most humble of buildings: the garden shed. Cast in concrete so their empty insides are rendered solid, these traditional places of escape for hobbyists and green-fingered potterers become monuments to suburban life. Complementing these are resin casts of doors and windows, in pretty pale pink and blue.
Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, WC1, Thu 11 Apr to 25 May
SS Photograph: Mike Bruce
This exceptional public collection of over 40 paintings of classical Italian art reveals remarkable cultural developments as the late Middle Ages led through the Renaissance to the beginnings of the modern world. Here, on-loan works are temporarily added to Compton Verney’s more modest Neapolitan Golden Age collection to create a rare treasure of a show. One picture alone is worth the trip: Sandro Botticelli’s 15th-century The Annunciation is a stunner. A gold-leaf shaft of divine force obliquely pierces the terrestrial space as Gabriel glides in from stage left and the Virgin Mary bows her head to gracefully receive the good news. It looks fresh enough to have been painted yesterday.
Compton Verney, to 23 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
Initially, Marcel Dzama’s delicate ink and watercolour creations seem to tap into a similar amber-hued nostalgia as Wes Anderson’s films: his characters, depicted in antique browns and dried blood reds, might have escaped from 1950s children’s book illustrations. His latest drawings, Puppets, Pawns And Prophets, include elegant lines of debutantes, gangsters, women – nude but for their black stockings and masks – and goat-headed priests. They all seem to move in step, following the dictats of some inscrutable rite to an apparently violent end. Equally ominous are his beguiling boxed dioramas of paper figures and a new film with dancers in head-to-toe body stockings.
David Zwirner, W1, Sat 6 Apr to 11 May
SS Photograph: PR
Last year’s John Moores Painting Prize-winner Sarah Pickstone plays on different kinds of fertility in her paintings: the flowers and trees cultivated in Regent’s Park and the creative lives of writers who have spent time there. Against silver-grey grounds, faces, figures and plants are conjured into view, like fleeting ideas or history’s ghosts. In one work, Sylvia Plath sits at her typewriter on a park bench beneath a neo-classical statue. Another presents flora, insect and human life melding, with Katherine Mansfield’s eyes staring from a moth’s wings. It’s a women-only canon too, with George Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Stevie Smith swelling the ranks.
New Art Centre, Sat 6 Apr to 12 May
SS Photograph: Laura Braun
In the complementary setting of the Museum Of Science And Industry, Stephen Hurrel utilises scientific data to create his latest multimedia installation, Beneath And Beyond. The idea is straightforward enough: computer programs tap into and broadcast the low-frequency vibrations of the Earth’s tectonic shifts, monitored and transmitted over the internet by seismic stations all over the world. The vibrations are speeded up and fed through speakers, with their sonic waveforms projected on to screens as a series of intricate abstracts. Inaudible geological movements beneath Alaska, Chile, Japan, Antarctica and downtown Altrincham are transformed into a composition of breathing, groaning and trembling voices.
Museum Of Science And Industry, to 30 Jun
RC Photograph: PR
The exhibition title is taken from photographer Lee Friedlander’s account of his attempt to make a portrait of the uncle in question, only to realise that he had also snapped the dog peeing on a fence in the background. Artists Sarah Bowker-Jones and Mike Ryder have curated a show of photographs, paintings, sculptures and videos by 17 artists all on the lookout for lucky, unlucky or delightfully surprising creative accidents. It’s a promising focus for an exhibition, as the extent to which contemporary art involves a painstaking search for the unpredictable is not often recognised. So here we get photographs taken from speeding cars, chance glimpses of mirrored reflections, films of people doing next to nothing and drawings that follow the suggestive trajectory of graphic incompetencies.
Gallery North, to 3 May
RC Photograph: PR
William E Jones refers to his projections as “sequences of digital files” rather than video films. Certainly, they tend to be continuously unnerving, eschewing any kind of narrative development for a speeding collage of documentary snippets, sound samplings and textual fragments. The prevailing atmosphere is one of uncertainty, both as to the veracity of the subject and the message of the work. It’s reminiscent of the kind of thing used as a backdrop in 60s underground clubs but with the spaced-out psychedelia substituted here by serious notions of political distrust.
The Modern Institute, to 25 May
RC Photograph: Ruth Clark
Peter Halley’s paintings are designed to be gobbled up fast, the visual equivalent of a McDonald’s. They come in DayGlo colours and resemble exercises in pure form, like Frank Stella’s hard-edged abstraction or Mondrian’s spiritually invested grids of red, yellow and blue. Since the 1980s, when he first emerged as the cerebral star of New York’s ‘neo-geo’ school, Halley has been painting the same stripped-back forms: rectangles containing lines like the bars of a prison which he dubs “cells”, with connecting lines called “conduits”. His unwavering recycling of forms says bleak things about painting’s endgame.
Waddington Custot Galleries, W1, Thu 11 Apr to 3 May
SS Photograph: PR
