Terence Conran: The Way We Live Now, Design Museum, London
2011-11-20 00:00:01.0
Conran didn't start the sexual revolution – he just sold us the kit...
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination, British Library, London
Infinitas Gracias: Mexican Miracle Paintings, Wellcome Collection, London
2011-11-20 00:00:01.0
On one side, the cream of medieval publishing; on the opposite, the joyful votive art of ordinary people in Mexico – and each as colourful as the other
Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship, Hauser & Wirth, London
2011-11-18 00:00:01.0
Pigs and a president make for a provocative show, but it's still hard to squeal with delight
The Event, Various venues, Birmingham
2011-11-15 00:00:01.0
The old industrial spaces of Birmingham's Eastside have been blossoming gradually in recent years with an influx of artists' studios, galleries and artist-run spaces, and The Event was a week-long biennial art festival that celebrated this area and attempted to tie these spaces together. Now in its third edition, the festival was something of a mixed bag, but good projects gleamed from this post-industrial landscape where most effort had been made. At Eastside Projects, a gallery with a high-voltage output was Child, a video installation by the American William Pope.L, split around the space on to a series of screens and around fragmentary films sets including a bar, a sick room and a stage covered in soil. Shot around the local area, this surreal narrative was like a cross between Coronation Street and Mulholland Drive. Nearby artist studio space the Lombard Method staged a wildly ambitious show in which they invited similarly overactive organisations from across the country to contribute a slice of their thoughtful programmes. Grand Union's tag-team style project, in which four curators each proposed a work one after the other, produced a complex show of strong works on the theme of shadows and reflections including Simon Faithfull's silhouette of an Istanbul skyline that is purportedly directly opposite the gallery as the crow flies, which changes with the light.
Leonardo da Vinci, Painter at the Court of Milan, National Gallery, London
2011-11-13 00:00:01.0
Revisionists, novelists, conspiracy theorists...all are banished in the National Gallery's clear-sighted assessment of Da Vinci's boundless talent
Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
2011-11-11 00:00:01.0
Money and art are uneasy bedfellows. One seems gross and materialistic; the other otherworldly, lighter than air.
You, Me, Something Else, GoMA, Glasgow
2011-11-09 00:00:01.0
Ten different artists based in Glasgow, all making work that can be classified as "sculpture".
Building the Revolution, Royal Academy, London
2011-11-06 00:00:01.0
Early Soviet art and architecture were synonymous – so why does this show prise them apart?
Edward Burra, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
2011-11-06 00:00:01.0
Rich harvest for the singular artist who ploughed his own furrow
Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings, The Mayor Gallery, London
2011-11-04 00:00:01.0
Plath the tortured poet's pictures are too polite to be a big draw
Alison Wilding: How the Land Lies New Art Centre, Salisbury
2011-10-28 00:00:01.0
The sculptor Alison Wilding is not as well known as she deserves to be. She tends to be disinclined to talk about her work. Journalists are not presented with easily digestible narratives.
Turner Prize 2011, Baltic, Gateshead
2011-10-23 00:00:01.0
It's never easy to predict, not least because the best artist so seldom wins. But this year's Prize is hard to call because the shortlist is so strong
Camulodunum, Firstsite, Colchester
2011-10-21 00:00:01.0
Colchester's Firstsite has a dramatic new building, a golden curving shell designed by Raphael Viñoly that hugs a garden and gently preserves an ancient Roman mosaic under a glass floor at the heart of the gallery. The Berryfield Mosaic was discovered in 1923 with a human skeleton, oyster shells and pottery, and it can be read as a kind of cornerstone for Firstsite's opening exhibition, Camulodunum (the exhibition title taken from the old name for Colchester). The tone is set by Danh Vo's huge sculpture We the People (2011), part of a larger work in which he is making a replica of each part of the Statue of Liberty in copper. Packing crates, tools and rags are strewn around a huge hand, which will never likely never find its way on to an arm.
Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage, Hayward Gallery, London
2011-10-19 00:00:01.0
A feminist fantasist who knows how to light up a room
Wilhelm Sasnal, Whitechapel Gallery, London
2011-10-17 00:00:01.0
Two small paintings of Saturn bookend the Whitechapel's major exhibition of the Polish painter Wilhelm Sasnal.
