Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, London
The four contenders for this year's £30,000 prize bring biology, gender, race and politics to the table. Jochen Lempert's black-and-white images make nature's familiar phenomena strange; Lorna Simpson's staged photos and videos reimagine cultural stereotypes; Richard Mosse's portraits of soldiers in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo turn war purple; and Alberto García-Alix's self-portraits document post-Franco Spain.
The Photographers' Gallery, W1, Fri to 22 Jun
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Glasgow International
This biennial spectacle, returning for its sixth year, continues to reinforce the city's worldwide visual arts reputation. While other such extravaganzas tend to be constrained within the conceptual bounds of an often spuriously conceived theme, here its new director Sarah McCrory goes for the best work available anywhere, most of it previously unseen, with some 50 exhibitions of art from 24 countries, spread across 40 spaces, including an underground car park, a coffee factory and a public bath house. Highlights should include Anne Collier at the Modern Institute presenting her mystifying photo-constructions and Bedwyr Williams getting up to his customary subversions with a dystopian diorama of consumerist excess.
Various venues, to 21 Apr
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Ella Kruglyanskaya, London
Young New York-based Ella Kruglyanskaya's paintings of feisty dames have real punch. Her women burst with aggressive vitality. The sharp silhouettes they throw are part cartoon character, part Egyptian hieroglyph. Their clothes are a zingy concoction inspired by vintage prints and they all sport pert bums and boobs, cherry lips and well-formed calves. Kruglyanskya's paintings recall a host of pop culture stereotypes from yesteryear: TV cartoons of primped housewives like the prehistoric babe Betty Rubble, the muscular women of war-effort posters, and curvaceous bathing beauties. Men might not be directly depicted but a male gaze is implicit everywhere.
Studio Voltaire, SW4, Fri to 8 Jun
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Ursula von Rydingsvard, Wakefield
Ursula von Rydingsvard's sculptures are darkly grounded yet almost transcendent in spirit. She uses chunks of cedar wood, which she gouges into with a circular saw, smears with graphite and piles up into looming towers, rippling tubes and mammoth organic growths. Several pieces hollowed out like caves have some of the melancholy resonance of Mark Rothko's mood paintings. Others, beautifully twisted, mottled with orange and crimson and smelling swooningly of cedar scent, seem more like celebratory totems. Such evocations are characteristic of the best abstract art. While they remains rigorously non-figurative, they might still seduce the viewer into deep reveries.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Sat to 4 Jan
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Joseph Beuys & Jörg Immendorff, Oxford
Joseph Beuys was the last self-styled artist-visionary who saw art as a catalyst for real change. He pioneered a spiritual approach that looked back to modernism and the ideas of Rudolph Steiner; he founded Germany's Green movement. Yet of all his feats, he said being a teacher was his greatest work of art. This show pairs his work with that of one of his world-renowned students, Jörg Immendorff (Gerhard Richter was another). It features some of Beuys's seminal pieces, including the felt suit and fat-laden sled that referred to his creation myth as an artist (being rescued by Tartars when his plane was shot down during the Second World War). Life-sustaining, they stand for spiritual nurture and growth. These earthy attributes couldn't look more different from Immendorff's hectic, expressionist paintings, yet both reimagine German identity in the aftershock of the war.
Ashmolean Museum, Thu to 31 Aug
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Wu Chi-Tsung, Sheffield
Taiwanese artist Wu Chi-Tsung's exhibition is called Dust with good reason. As the viewer moves around the space, disturbing the airflow, the artist's highly sophisticated equipment projects the movement of the otherwise invisibly displaced dust particles across the gallery walls in a mesmerising and endlessly changing light show. In an accompanying piece, the artist turns his focus on the enchantments of a nocturnal city. Lit solely by a single, slowly shifting light source, a series of commonplace transparent plastic boxes are silhouetted around the room to evoke a ghostlike cityscape.
Site Gallery, to 31 May
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The Fashion World Of Jean Paul Gaultier, London
Jean Paul Gaultier's travelling retrospective has proved a big hit with audiences: more than one million people have seen it since the tour commenced at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The show traces Gaultier's evolution from punky upstart to household name, with collections inspired by everything from rabbi chic to black power. As you'd expect from the designer responsible for some of the most memorable costumes in pop and film history, he doesn't disappoint when it comes to head-turning spectacle.
Barbican Art Gallery, EC2, Wed to 17 Aug
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Simon Bill, Gateshead
Simon Bill's paintings appear to be an absurdist take on the history of abstract painting. All are oval-shaped to suggest an iconic or emblematic import, yet their format is the only thing they have in common. One suggests a cartoon rabbit head, another an anatomical detail. Sources range from the scientific intricacies of neuroscience to the macho posturings of heavy metal music. Bill also brandishes a bizarre variety of materials, including dental floss, dried cat food and spaghetti. While he obviously finds it hard to play it straight when reflecting on the po-faced history of picture-making, his humour always seems generously spirited.
BALTIC, to 1 Jun
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