Reinventing the Landscape: Research from Alexandra Leykauf’s Creative Libraries ARC Fellowship

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South London Gallery, 65-67 Peckham Rd, London SE5 8UH

Michael Armitage: The Chapel

Following on from his excellent show in summer 2017 at Turner Contemporary with this exhibition of eight new paintings, Michael Armitage stakes a strong claim to being the leading figurative painter of the group that has emerged from London art schools in the last decade. Review by Piers Masterson

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Book, Schilt Publishing

Cig Harvey: You An Orchestra You A Bomb

As in ‘You Look at Me Like an Emergency’ and ‘Gardening at Night’, Cig Harvey's personal life remains a foundation for her practice. What differs about ‘You an Orchestra, You a Bomb’ is its comparison between the interior and exterior worlds, and its heightened awareness of life's fragility. Selina Oakes reviews Harvey's third monograph.

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National Galleries of Scotland, 73 Belford Road, Edinburgh, EH4 3DS

NOW | Susan Philipsz, Michael Armitage, Yto Barrada, Kate Davis, Hiwa K, Sarah Rose

NOW is the second in a six-part series of exhibitions presented by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exploring the work of international contemporary artists. It is dominated by a 5 room display of works by the artist Susan Philipsz alongside works by renowned artists Kate Davis, Sarah Rose, Hiwa K, Michael Armitage and Yto Barrada. Review by Rosie Priest

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Jerwood Visual Arts, Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street, Bankside, London, SE1 0LN

Jerwood/Photoworks Awards

Over the last year, the artists have been creating a new body of work with the award’s support. The results are diverse, touching on femininity, belonging, nature and death. Yet, despite their differences, an underlying premise surfaces - each work is charged with a desire to escape contemporary life, either by creating fictions or by returning to our pasts. Review by Sophie Ruigrok

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Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA

Laura Owens

The Whitney Museum of American Art has historically positioned itself in the public imagination as an incontrovertible arbiter of taste, the sort of claim that makes its stale, self-consciously presentist choices all the more discouraging. As such, the Laura Owens retrospective currently on view feels less like the mid-career survey of a serious painter and more like an overblown Instagram backdrop, a pandering move that undercuts Owens’ contributions and reasserts the Whitney’s distance from artistic innovation. Review by Torey Akers

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Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University, London Kingston School of Art, Grange Road, Kingston upon Thames KT1 2QJ

P!CKER, PART II Céline Condorelli: Prologue

Condorelli’s prologue is merely the latest episode in a continuous process of exchange and renewal, where the legacy of a project – in this case both Lustig Cohen’s show, and Condorelli’s own show at P! last year – is archived, mined and reworked, forming new projects, new exhibitions, and new ways of understanding the contexts within which we work. Review by Phoebe Cripps

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The Geffen Contemporary At MOCA, 152 N Central Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA

Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance

MOCA presents Adrián Villar Rojas: The Theater of Disappearance, a site-specific installation inside The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA’s warehouse space. Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) has built a singular practice by creating environments and objects that seem to be in search of their place in time. Villar Rojas’s interventions beckon viewers to consider fragments that exist in a slippery space between the future, the past, and an alternate reality in the present. With his post-human artworks, Villar Rojas posits the question: What happens after the end of art?

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Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ

Lee Bul: After Bruno Taut

Through complex and elaborate works, Lee Bul portrays failed models that echo the qualities of utopian systems of early twentieth century architecture as well as the politics of totalitarian regimes. The works displayed in ‘After Bruno Taut’ at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac strongly emphasise the excess and fragility of our world, and our failure to control it. Review by Fiorella Lanni

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Museumpark 18-20, 3015 CX Rotterdam, Netherlands

Academy of Tal R

As seen in Tal R's mid-career retrospective, Academy of Tal R, currently at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, he tends to work in series and employs intermittently recurring motifs yet his subject matter, compositional arrangements and application of materials evidences an approach that is anything but doctrinaire. Review by John Gayer

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Plymouth Arts Centre, 38 Looe Street, Plymouth, PL4 0EB

Clare Thornton: Materials of Resistance installation view

In Clare Thornton’s current solo exhibition, Materials of Resistance, showing work from the last seven years, delicate materials – including the body itself and those that stand in for it – are put at risk and tested to breaking point. Review by Ellen Wilkinson

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Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, London W2 2AR

Rose Wylie: Quack Quack

Rose Wylie’s paintings have previously been dismissed as ‘childish’. Her forms are decisive, irreverent, lucid; facial expressions are often reduced to a mere few brushstrokes. In this way, her paintings are, in fact, childhood remembered and rendered exactly as it exists for us as adults – as hazy fragments, as depictions not just of events or places, but of how it felt to be there. Review by Phoebe Cripps

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Thomas Dane Gallery, 3 & 11 Duke Street St James's, London SW1Y 6BN

Phillip King: Colour on Fire & Ceramics 1995-2017

The ceramics mark a key departure in King’s work; where previously he had produced mainly large coloured sculptures in steel and plastic, the unglazed vessels speak a quieter aesthetic language. Review by Samuel Glanville

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Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield WF4 4JX

Alfredo Jaar: The Garden of Good and Evil

Alfredo Jaar’s newest work, ‘The Garden of Good and Evil’ (2017), is the titular piece of Jaar’s current solo show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The garden is a grid of 101 potted ever-green trees: Black Pine, Scots Pine, Green Yew, Variegated Holly, Green Holly, White Pine and Western Red Cedar, all species already present in the landscape of the sculpture park. Review by Hannah Newell

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