As Chloë Brown, the artist and co-curator of this animal-centric show, states, the works “explore the way humans look at animals and how animals return that look”. The artists counter the pathetic fallacy of anthropomorphism by addressing it from perspectives of respectful uncertainty. The confrontations pictured often have an unnerving atmosphere about them as the artists avoid the sentimental tradition of popular animal art. Olivier Richon and Greta Alfaro show a monkey leafing through a pile of heavy academic tomes. An Animal Space (Jessop West Building, to 30 Aug) is a related show, featuring Brown and Robert McKay, which uses sculpture, drawing and text to look at animals used in early space flights and their literary equivalents.
Sheffield Institute Of Art, Hallam University, to 2 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
Brian Griffiths responds to the industrial ambience of the Tramway’s main gallery space with an architectural pile-up of mysterious sculptural forms fashioned from – and shrouded by – stitched, painted and patched tarpaulins. Griffiths could go anywhere in his most spacious exhibition to date; the worn, weathered and battered raw materials and the way the artist drapes them to sag under their own obsolete weight are bound to evoke an air of melancholy. Then again, paradoxically, there’s the absurdist humour with which he carries off the pathos. In shantytown scenarios, Griffiths creates glimmers of spirited life out of the brute deadness of material objects.
Tramway 2, Sat 3 Aug to 22 Sep
RC Photograph: PR
From the creaking, revolving wooden steampunk-ish contraptions that first made his name, to more recent experiments with industrial robots, a show by Conrad Shawcross means machines. His weird engines have no practical purpose, of course; rather, they translate ideas – from early computer science to philosophical principles – into marvellous mechanical spectacles. For his latest installation at Camden’s Roundhouse he’s addressing one of the most ancient and epic human concepts: time. There are no giant cogs groaning here, however; he’s stripping things back to essentials by turning the building’s entire interior, with its 24 columns, into a walk-in clock. It’s a novel and industrial way to make us look again at something we take for granted.
Roundhouse, NW1 to 25 Aug
SS Photograph: Stuart Leech
What makes an object a sculpture? Is it simply the act of being presented as such in a reputable gallery such as this one? To pose the question, radically modern sculptural works are set against ancient objects on loan from archaeological collections. So Félix González-Torres’s sculptural mound of cellophane-wrapped sweets, Andy Warhol’s helium balloons and a Perspex box containing sprouting grass by Hans Haacke are paired variously with neolithic jade discs, unidentified minerals and a pair of Roman marble legs made by unidentified artists.
Henry Moore Institute, to 20 Oct
RC Photograph: PR
Marguerite Horner’s paintings, with their greying twilight shades, depict those non-places where towns and cities fade into suburbia and countryside, as if glimpsed through train or car windows. It always seems to be an in-between time, very early morning, before rush hour kicks in, or dusk, when the ordinary world becomes oddly radiant and eerie. In her current show she gives us the backs of houses, a cat’s cradle of telegraph pole wires and unexpected eye contact with a woman. Yet these everyday sights are transformed into charged, luminous moments. A little fuzzy at the edges, their source material might be snapshots, but they suggest the subtle distortions and amplifications of memory.
St Marylebone Parish Church, NW1, to 30 Aug
SS Photograph: PR
This 10-year retrospective honours a painter who is as generally popular as he is justifiably admired by the contemporary art world’s arbiters of taste. Doig manages to be convincingly poignant and decorative at the same time, and it’s hard to think of another contemporary artist who dares to take on the life-affirming aesthetic legacy of such 20th-century painterly charmers as Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. Doig’s subjects tend towards the romantic: a lone canoe drifting across a nocturnal lake, enchanted forests, the shock and sparkle of a sudden snowfall. His resonant colours coalesce into dreams that are as deep and, at times, disturbingly hallucinatory as they are downright lovely.
National Gallery Of Scotland, Sat 3 Aug to 3 Nov
RC Photograph: PR
Public sculpture is in Yorgos Sapountzis’s cultural DNA. He grew up in Athens, its millennia-old stone edifices indelibly ingrained in western art history. His take on the monuments, however, is makeshift and fleeting, attuned both to tradition and the unruly energy of the street. Coloured fabric, newspaper and silver foil hung on skeletal configurations of tubing or bashed-up bike frames are his favoured materials. Here, he’s responded to Bristol’s local landmarks, taking moulds of feet from statues commemorating various peripatetic adventurers, from 15th-century Venetian explorer John Cabot in a 1980s bronze to Hollywood icon Cary Grant’s slip-ons.
Arnolfini, to 15 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
For Sean Edwards making art is a constant process of reference and transformation, his latest show unfolds like a detective story. His materials are typically raw-looking and provisional, closer to maquettes than finished sculpture. In fact, the simpler they get the more complex his networks of allusion seem. The shelving dividing Chapter’s long, corridor-like space, for instance, is made from stacked, plain MDF boxes. Visual clues on a handout reveal that Martin Amis’s wine-crate library was the touchstone. The metamorphoses continue with a chiselled block of wood, giganticised as a metre-high photo. Meanwhile, instructions for using a four-track tape recorder – the kind Bruce Springsteen recorded his famed Nebraska on – line the walls. Working solo isn’t easy, though, as a film of anxious hands hints.
Chapter Gallery, to 22 Sep
SS Photograph: PR
