The Chapman brothers have been turning gratuitous bad taste into an art form for over two decades now, but they’re a long way from outgrowing their rep as Brit Art’s enfants terribles. The highpoint in this show, which sets new works alongside the shockers that made their name, is Hell, their mutant zombie Nazi grand guignol created with 30,000 hand-painted two-inch model figures in 1999. Other greatest hits include the sculpture they first drew attention with, 1993’s Disasters Of War, which realises Goya’s campaigning etchings as miniature 3D grotesques. In more recent works, miniature models, dinosaurs (pictured) and Ronald McDonald enter the fray.
The Serpentine Sackler Gallery, W2, to 9 Feb
SS Photograph: Todd White
Matt Johnson has a wicked time cutting grand epic themes down to size with pop culture flotsam – and vice versa. Take the centrepiece of the Los Angeles sculptor’s second UK show, a 10-foot tall dinosaur (pictured), carved from salvaged ancient Californian redwood, a tree type that flourished alongside our giant reptilian forebears. Johnson’s dino, however, is of the museum gift shop variety: an outsize version of kids’ flatpack puzzles. Further absurdist inversions of time and materials include 18th-century sculptures of a lion attacking a horse, a snake wrestling a bull recreated in Styrofoam and cast in the historically venerable material: bronze.
Alison Jacques, WC1, to 21 Dec
SS Photograph: Robert Wedemeyer
Born in apartheid-era Johannesburg to an Indian Hindu father and a mother classified by the government as “Cape Coloured”, the late artist Albert Adams spent over 40 years in London, while exiled. Working away on paintings and prints that reflected the tensions of his homeland, Adams wielded the bold gestures and hints of German expressionism to deal with South Africa’s racial troubles. But at its core, Adam’s work is less existential angst than anger and frustration at the waste of human potential.
Oldham Art Gallery, Sat 30 Nov to 19 Apr
RC Photograph: PR
Pauline Boty is a mythical figure from London’s 1960s pop art scene. The “Wimbledon Bardot”, as she was known, twists on the dancefloor alongside other RCA alumni, David Hockney and Peter Blake in Ken Russell’s documentary, Pop Goes The Easel. An aspiring actress and party girl as well as a painter, she also danced on Ready, Steady, Go!. However, since her tragic death from cancer aged 28, her work has seldom been shown and her take on male-dominated pop art largely faded from cultural memory. Stand-out moments here include works exploring the fascination of another magnetic blonde, Marilyn Monroe, a perfectly formed bum presented as if it were a music hall act (pictured), and her anti-war canvas, It’s A Man’s World 1.
Pallant House Gallery, Sat 30 Nov to 9 Feb
SS Photograph: PR
This show, which focuses on artists attempting to recreate the clarity of photography, kicks off with Birmingham-born John Salt’s airbrushed White Chevy – Red Trailer (pictured). His work helped to set the beatnik on-the-road scene of much early photorealism. But it’s fast cars, motorbikes and modernist architecture that are the show’s dominant themes. Peter Maier’s highly polished car bodies achieve the more-real-than-real look through a process of spraying industrial paint on to aluminium. Raphaella Spence sticks to oil on canvas but she perversely uses it to copy cityscape photographs pixel by painstaking pixel.
Birmingham Museum And Art Gallery, Sat 30 Nov to 30 Mar
RC Photograph: PR
What links Stan Douglas’s photos of dancers clad in pale suits and satin dresses in the Versailles-like splendour of an underground club in early 1970s New York, with images of newly liberated Angola following the African country’s civil war? The answer: disco. Douglas’s shots capture youthful soldiers breakdancing and a young woman in candy-coloured party clothes, alongside images of civil war. In fact, the photos are all exactingly researched, elaborately staged fakes, taken by Douglas assuming the fictional guise of a 1970s documentary photographer, retreating from the harsh reality of that decade’s financial crash into after-hours hedonism. They point, not just to untold histories, but the malleability of so-called documentary news photography itself.
Victoria Miro Mayfair, W1, to 11 Jan
SS Photograph: PR
German artist Thomas Bayrle started his working life in 1956 as an apprentice weaver in a textile factory, and it shows. When he turned to art, he didn’t lose his concern for intricate repetitive patterning (work pictured). Whatever his subject – and Bayrle has tackled issues such as global capitalism, sexual liberation and religious indoctrination – he always imbues his images with hallucinatory vibrancy. The dehumanised maze of a computer game obscures a furtive glimpse of the organic outlines of erotic intimacy. Bayrle’s work seems to imply a universal geometry of aesthetic brainwashing, a network of image-traps that effectively keeps us all in line.
BALTIC, to 23 Feb
RC Photograph: PR
Debbie Lawson’s magic Persian carpet might be a cheapish factory remake but it fits the enchanting role almost perfectly. These are sculptures in a dream state of metamorphosis in which the tame and domestic comes to life. The 2D rug surface, hung vertically on the gallery wall like a treasure, is inhabited by a half-obscured sculptural menagerie of almost mythical wildlife: a looming hunter’s trophy of a bear, a fox getting up to urban mischief, a flock of seagulls caught in flight like ornamental ducks. The heady incense air of Arabian Nights seeps in as one feels seduced into playful reverie. Anything that infiltrates the safe realms of the family home with hints of unpredictable and uncontrollable spirit is bound to transport us directly back to childhood daydreams.
Fergusson Gallery, to 15 Mar
RC Photograph: James Royall
