Top 10 art exhibitions in London

Stripped of the fashions of his day, sat bleakly against a plain blue wall, Johannes Froben doesn’t look like a sixteenth-century printer. In Hans Holbein’s portrait, he could be anyone, at any time. He looks to his left, his hair thinning, his cheeks sagging, his skin sallow, his arms tucket miserably into his black coat. It’s so stark, so quiet, so rueful and heavy with years of worry and effort. Holbein was special. 

Get ready to see Philip Guston implode. Because over the course of this big retrospective of the American artist’s (1913-1980) work, you watch one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century fall to pieces, collapse in on himself, and then be born anew. It’s amazing.

We might just be designing our own doom. With the pursuit of AI, the creation of ultra-powerful machine intelligences, we’re engaging in the kind of uniquely human and hubristic act that just might spell the demise of the species. And American artist Zach Blas knows that when the world starts ending, we pray. 

In tiny ceramic compositions, Ron Nagle conjures infinite imaginary worlds. The American sculptor, who has been ploughing the same dreamy, psychedelic, hyper-colour furrow since the 1960s, creates small things (none bigger than 16cm) to make you think big.

The whole gallery screams and screeches with fragments of clashing sound. A room is filled with sand and blankTV screens, robotic fingers play dissonant chords on an electric organ, traffic roars as glass shimmers with images of the Empire State building. Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits.

Sometimes, big, clever art is there to make you feel small and stupid. Or at least insignificant. That’s what the best work of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto does. His retrospective at the Hayward finds him toying with light and dark, reality and fiction, life and death, all to make you go slack jawed in awe at your pitiful place in the universe. 

A faceless, grey corporate office; patterned carpet tiles, neon strip lights, shredded paper; suffocating, windowless, airless. This is early 2000s corporate America as seen by Avery Singer. But this isn’t just any date in the early 2000s, this is 9/11.

If you get caught smoking as a kid, the best punishment is to be locked in a closet and forced to smoke a whole pack. It’ll put you off for life. Swedish artist Anna Uddenberg is taking that same approach, not for ciggies, but for rampant over-sexualisation and intense female objectification. She’s shoving it so brutally in your face that you might never find anything sexy ever again. 

This exhibition starts with a lie. ‘I don’t know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all. I actually do not really care. I just extract and record things around me, without pretence,’ says influential Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama (1938-). And he doesn’t mean a word of it. 

Sarah Lucas’s art isn’t big, and it isn’t clever. But who says art needs to be either of those things? Maybe, instead, art can be vulgar, puerile, obscene, grotesque and childish.