Richard Bartle’s Deities At The Bottom Of The Garden seems to be, on the bare face of it, a set of 12 common-or-garden sheds. The English garden shed has, of course, come to represent the hideaway of the obsessive (usually male) hobbyist. So one expects to find in these sheds a stowaway clutter of the practically useless nothing-much. Yet Bartle’s sheds turn out on closer interior inspection to be something else: a series of 1:6 scale model shrines to the religions of the world, from paganism to Hinduism, Judaism and even atheism. It’s an intriguing metaphorical set-up, drawing telling connections between allotment gardening, religious ritual and, of course, studio art.
20-21 Visual Arts Centre, Sat 15 Dec to 23 Feb
RC Photograph: Ken Grint
Amalia Pica’s art is a kind of bittersweet relationship comedy, hinging on missed signals and misunderstandings. The backdrop to this show is a wall-sized black-and-white image of a couple in a field, made from a patchwork of photocopies. They make a strange pair, linked by a string of cheery, coloured bunting, but all alone as if they’ve turned up too late for the party. Pica’s work is an intriguing counterpoint to a smaller show documenting the Polish artist André Cadere’s work of the 1970s. Cadere had a similar interest in the inscrutable, painting poles with a coded system of coloured stripes.
Modern Art Oxford, to 10 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
Cyprien Gaillard’s film is an irresistibly seductive study of beautiful ruins, territory that this rising French art star has very much made his own. Shot on hazy 16mm, his films are love letters to architectural decay and the daredevil destruction of youth. Here, American jocks get loaded in Cancún, a Mexican holiday destination where 1960s hotels ape the pyramid forms of the ancient Mayan site nearby. The booze-swilling topless young men, dated white hotels, and age-old temples of a fallen civilisation, make for a heady brew of decadence and decline.
Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, Sat 15 Dec to 13 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
Although the Victorian critic and part-time artist John Ruskin never actually lived in Sheffield, he took a particular interest in a city that he called a “dirty picture in a golden frame”. Sheffield’s rare combination of industrial squalor surrounded by spectacular countryside served Ruskin well as an exemplary subject for his back-to-nature social and cultural theories. So here the city’s Millennium Gallery stages a show of landscape painting by both Ruskin’s contemporaries and present-day artists in order to revisit ideas that appear to be just as relevant in our age of ecological concern.
Millennium Gallery, Sat 15 Dec to 23 Jun
RC Photograph: JMW Turner
Hot on the heels of Italian prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s solo exhibition comes another offering from collector Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s normally private art stash. The work of the 13 artists on show is slippery, full of entrancing tricks and disguises. Its centrepiece is one of Charles Ray’s reliably unnerving twists on familiar objects, his 1986 sculpture Viral Research, where clear glass jugs, jars and bottles are filled with black ink to exactly the same point, while tubes carry the sinister, staining liquid from one vessel to the next.There’s further play with kitchenware from Piotr Uklanski, whose pots and pans seem to balance magically on the wall. Cindy Sherman meanwhile continues the illusionism, posing as B-movie heroines in her Film Stills photos.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Sat 15 Dec to 10 Mar
SS Photograph: PR
The D Daskalopoulos Collection has grown into one of the most impressive collections of contemporary and 20th-century art anywhere. Represented in it are many of the artists who are responsible for how our visual art culture looks today: from Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys through to Marina Abramovic and Sarah Lucas. So this extensive exhibition, which mixes the collection in with samples of the Scottish National Gallery’s own holdings, serves as a useful cross-section introduction to, or reminder of, the most inventive, radical and influential art of our time. Visitors should sample rare individual works, including those of Ernesto Neto, plus Louise Bourgeois and Paul McCarthy’s sculptural effronteries.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, from Sat 15 Dec to 8 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
The acclaimed South African film-maker and theatre and opera producer exhibits more than 100 of his often large-scale prints. They picture forlorn subjects and scenarios: migrant workers, lone wanderers, stray cats, threatened species, moonlit silhouettes and diseased swamplands, while managing to convey some of the visual bravado of German expressionism. Kentridge’s output in this medium might seem to many of us as something of a throwback to times when printmaking served as a means of political protest, but then one realises that many of Kentridge’s dramatic scenarios are derived, of course, from the inescapable disquiet and mounting tensions of the apartheid era.
Bluecoat Gallery, to 3 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
In the 1970s a small group of artists gathered under the banner “expanded cinema” and started using celluloid and camera equipment in ways conventional film-makers would never have dreamed of. Their medium of choice was at the forefront of the entertainment industry and the modern world. Today it’s a rare, precious material, only produced and processed by specialist labs whose doors are closing fast. This makes the work selected by one of the movement’s leading lights, Guy Sherwin, for his first major effort as curator as poignant as it is ballsy, featuring film stitched by a sewing machine.
Camden Arts Centre, NW3, Sat 15 Dec to 24 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
