Everybody thinks they know Edvard Munch – if only as the painter of The Scream. This riveting show gives the bigger picture, looking beyond the best-known depictions of vampire lovers and ghoulish girls fraught with the sexual angst of fin de siècle symbolism. Focusing on works from 1900 on, it casts Munch not just as the troubled Scandinavian outsider, but an artist engaged with the developments of his day: the picture house, radio, postcards and magazines. His repeated motifs of huddling parasitical lovers or bedside bereavement are looked at cinematically. The show also includes lesser-known film works and his photographic self-portraits.
Tate Modern, SE1, to 14 Oct
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Pictured: The Sun, 1910-13, by Edvard Munch Photograph: PR
Spanning more than 150 years, Turner Monet Twombly demonstrates that a painterly obsession for nature endures, focusing on the artists’ later year when they made their most radical works. Turner’s gift for topographical illustration gave way to hallucinatory insights into human desire; Monet’s polite impressionism became semi-abstraction as his eyesight faded and his ambition increased; and both are linked by Twombly’s maverick struggles in the early- 21st century. It’s a wonderfully sensual visual treat.
Tate Liverpool, to 28 Oct
RC
Pictured: Camino Real, by Cy Twombly Photograph: PR
Nova, a new incarnation from two Big Chill old hands, in the South Downs in West Sussex, has Damien Hirst and fashion photographer Rankin topping its art bill. Their film, Myths, Monsters And Legends is full of lion-faced man-beasts and stickle-backed mermen. The highlight though will surely be artist-as-comedian Doug Fishbone’s inspired Adventureland Golf, a crazy golf course with each hole designed by a different artist. Jake Chapman, David Shrigley, Ian Monroe and Brian Griffiths are among those testing your strokes. Jem Finer’s film Still is anything but, made up of 18,000 photos that capture the day-to-day life of a tree; Victoria Lucas and Richard Wheater have frozen song lyrics in neon, while the London Drawing collective will create experimental sketches with dancers, light and sound.
Bignor Park, Thu to 8 Jul
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Pictured: Neon, by Victoria Lucas and Richard Wheater Photograph: PR
Following on from Sheffield’s acclaimed Doc/Fest is this survey of the increasing focus of video art on documentary truth. Fine art, with its dreamed-up works and deliberate-tale telling, has always treaded a fine line between fact and fiction, and the easy availability of editing software has encouraged artists to mess with the ambiguities of what exhibitor Hito Steyerl elegantly describes as “the perpetual disbelief”. Steyerl’s In Free Fall links stages of a Boeing aeroplane crash and the crisis in global capitalism, while Jeremy Deller’s works here include his playfully subversive Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode.
S1 Artspace, to 21 Jul
RC
Pictured: Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode, 2006, by Jeremy Deller Photograph: PR
This eclectic drawing show is a chance to see an alternative side to some of the biggest names in contemporary art. There’s work by the maestro of cartoonish existential angst, George Condo; Michael Raedecker, renowned for his embroidered views of quietly sinister suburban hinterlands; Anthony McCall, who normally sculpts great columns of light; and Chris Ofili (work pictured), here seducing with a loose line drawing of Aubrey Beardsley-esque curvy nudes. Those for whom pencil and paper is the go-to medium include Marcel van Eeden, whose wildly twisty-turny stories mix drawings of retro photos, postcards and magazine illustrations that predate his birth in 1965.
Poppy Sebire, SE1, to 4 Aug
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Pictured: Untitled, 2009, by Chris Ofili Photograph: PR
Denise Weston’s oil-painted portraits of “girls”, many apparently now much older, reveal all the psychological disorientations of memory filtered through the family photo album. This is surely not how her subjects remember themselves, nor how they truly felt at the time, and that’s the point; there’s an overriding sense of awkwardness. Their doll eyes are staring and scary, their grins forced, the skin tones shaded towards pallid blues. These are not facades faked for the camera. Rather, they touch a nerve that all family albums are surely meant to gloss over.
Tarpey Gallery, Castle Donington, nr Derby, to 4 Aug; Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, to 19 Aug
RC
Pictured: Girl No 15, by Denis Weston Photograph: PR
The prowess, focus and drive of burgeoning sports stars is explored in four new film works for this Olympics-themed show. Subtitled The Art Of Getting In The Zone, it explores that special state where mind and body work as one. Dryden Goodwin’s drawings, films and photography have mined psychological seclusion with portraits of tube workers and the West End’s human traffic. Here his projection Poise captures young divers at Crystal Palace pool. Susan Pui San Lok’s Lightness also looks at high fliers, as her youngsters from Lee Valley transcend the earthly bounds with pole vaulting, while Roderick Buchanan’s hockey and basketball players are a vision of team spirit. Conversely, Matthew Cornford and David Cross look at ideas of mind over matter in a film about positive visualisation.
De La Warr Pavilion, to 16 Sep
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Pictured: Poise film still by Dryden Goodwin Photograph: PR
The involvement of Juneau Projects, AKA artists Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler, in this central attraction of Sheffield’s Children’s Festival, was guaranteed to push it beyond more-of-the-usual community art indulgence. The main focus of this installation is a post-apocalyptic catastrophe. The Colour Bright, a four-minute looped animation created with the help of 1,000 local schoolchildren, represents the cave art of Derbyshire’s Creswell Crags as a cartoon struggle for survival in a wasteland devoid of technology. Right up most kids’ streets. You’d think that contemporary art – in all its playful mischief, cultural irreverence and contrariness – would mix with a childhood sense of fun, but it rarely does so as well as this, free from any high-minded social aims.
Site Gallery, to 28 Jul
RC
Pictured: The Colour Bright by Juneau Projects Photograph: PR
