With her sculptural finesse and gutsy, tragicomic take on things all too human, this Sarah Lucassurvey promises to be an art-season highlight. It’s the crude one-liners that hit you first, though: from the bucket and melons coupled with a cucumber propped up by two fruity orange balls, sharing an old mattress in one of her best-known early sculptures, Au Naturel, to the tens of stuffed nude tights that make a kind of mammary bouquet in her recent Nice Tits. Lucas’s art delves well beyond the bluff of a ladette joke however. Her way with everyday materials is extraordinary, especially what she’s lately been doing with tights. Dubbed Nuds, after being “in the nuddy”, she’s created hundreds of them in recent years. Coiled together like embracing penises, breasts or exposed innards.
Whitechapel Gallery, E1, Wed 2 Oct to 15 Dec
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Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s “maintenance art” focuses on the workers who keep the system ticking, most famously the garbage men of New York’s sanitation department, where she’s been artist in residence for decades. This survey documenting her socially clued-in projects includes Touch Sanitation where she spent a year shaking hands each day with the Big Apple’s 8,500 sanitation workers. In British artist and writer Michael Dean’s work, it’s the featured material that fades into the background: concrete. Exploring the relationship between sign and physical presence, a great grey rune dominates his show.
Arnolfini, Sat 28 Sep to 17 Nov
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The collaborative group Common Culture stage their most recent challenge to art conventions. Here they explore the multicultural celebration of carnival using a video installation which imagines a “new carnival of the future”, which is unlike the city’s mela or world famous Goose Fair. The Rwandan-born Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa takes us on the journey as a futuristic narrator. It’s deliberately mixed-up and wide-ranging as it attempts to shed light on our modern means of collectively getting on together.
New Art Exchange, to 12 Jan
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Lindsay Seers conjures highly distinctive and always unforgettable psychological intrigues. Here, visitors are invited to enter the intimate confines of a specially constructed tin hut and be gradually spellbound by the multimedia story of an unnamed protagonist who has a rare condition called genetic mosaicism. Apparently caused by the fusion of two fertilised eggs in the womb, the condition leads to heterochromia: having eyes of two different colours where one eye is effectively absorbed from the “twin”. The narrative is a characteristic Seers ploy, seducing us into her beguiling world of medical mysteries, haunted technologies and lost longing.
Derby QUAD, to 1 Dec
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You need to be historically well-informed as well as technically skilled to take on the weighty traditions of painting. This show stresses just how deeply contemporary painters study the traditions from which their work has grown. Some of today’s more adventurous artists have been invited to respond to paintings by the likes of Winifred Nicholson and Frank Auerbach. The show demonstrates how seemingly outmoded mannerisms are often rediscovered as retro curiosities and adapted to refreshingly disrupt the painterly conventions of today’s artists such as Paul Housley who has taken work by Louis James and turned it into a deliberately monstrous Picasso-esque pastiche.
Laing Art Gallery, Sat 28 Sep to 9 Feb
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Working on the idea that 3am is the “dread hour”, where nightmares and loneliness lie, independent curator Angela Kingston has gathered a body of work that manages to fascinate, amuse and disturb. Francis Alÿs’s CCTV cameras follow a fox prowling the National Portrait Gallery. Pissing Women by Sophy Rickett is a series of immaculately composed photographs capturing smartly dressed ladies doing exactly what the title says, while Sandra Cinto has been commissioned to infiltrate the gallery with her galaxies of white ink and chalk improvisations. Quite wonderful.
The Bluecoat, Sat 28 Sep to 24 Nov
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The shots that made Philip-Lorca diCorcia an artist of note worked a canny reversal on street photography. In place of documentary snaps capturing casual, daily life, he used a strobe to highlight faces in the crowd. Random passers-by, lost in thought, resembled spotlit stage stars, or enraptured figures in baroque paintings of religious scenes. His East Of Eden series (which he started in 2008) pushes everyday settings yet further into the realm of fiction, with his earlier works’ mystery replaced with a direct symbolism. This includes a porn star Adam and Eve whose onscreen act is overlooked by pedigree pooches in a sterile modernist pad, from which flesh-and-blood humans are absent.
David Zwirner, W1, to 16 Nov
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Though at odds with the real sex life of a hierarchical, morally strict confucian Japan, the erotic Shunga prints that flourished from 1600 onwards depict an egalitarian X-rated wonderland with pleasure for men, women and (occasionally) animals. Set against ornately painted screens, amid a swirl of patterned robes, many of the encounters are approached with an eye for decorative luxury. The appeal to decadent fin de siècle artists such as Aubrey Beardsley as well as early western collectors is obvious. Others have an earthy cartoonish humour, like the cat that raises a playful paw towards his master’s crown jewels, mid-coitus. While made primarily for men, there was also a tradition of including them in brides’ trousseaus.
British Museum, Thu 3 Sep to 5 Jan
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