Michaël Borremans, Donald Urquhart, Etel Adnan: this week’s new exhibitions

Michaël Borremans, London

Michaël Borremans’s paintings prompt comparisons with David Lynch (they’re weird, dark and cinematic), Samuel Beckett (for their stripped-back sets and absurd humour) and Francisco Goya (Borremans has an old master’s way with paint). Yet the top Belgian artist’s mysterious painterly universe is not easy to classify, as his first London show in years amply demonstrates. On canvases, little groups of hooded figures gather against what appears to be the plain backdrop of a studio. Some bear torches, others dance in a circle with arms outstretched like windmills, or gather around… a badger. Is this creature, posed with a blank sheet of paper, a sacrificial victim, prophet or friendly storyteller? The hooded figures meanwhile conjure demonised and demonic figures from the western cultural consciousness: from women in hijabs to the bloodthirsty inquisitor or Klansman.

David Zwirner, W1, Sat to 14 Aug

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Donald Urquhart, London

Donald Urquhart’s pen-and-ink drawings have been conjuring yesteryear’s divas in a haze of doomed glamour and devilish wit since they first graced the walls of his 1990s club night, The Beautiful Bend. His most recent works mull on disco’s seminal year, 1978, mixing personal memories with broader social commentary. Subjects include a comic-book swirl of 1970s anxieties-cum-hot topics, from the cold war to whether Blondie might split. There are guest appearances from John and Jackie Kennedy and references to Ronnie Biggs. For Urquhart’s characters, beauty is a shield against the world but it has a dark underside, as with his peacock’s tail of long lashed eyes: gorgeous but always watching.

Maureen Paley, E2, to 12 Jul

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Art From Elsewhere, Middlesbrough

This touring exhibition, selected from collections acquired through Art Fund International, focuses on socially committed contemporary art. Accordingly, notwithstanding its bright and lively curation by the acclaimed David Elliott, it might be viewed as a cross-section of a world gone wrong, a global array of misery, tackled variously with irony and a subversive intelligence. Subjects range through the cultural degradations of capitalism and totalitarian dictatorships, to the political complexities of post-colonial struggles and the ongoing rise of fundamentalist belief systems. Nathan Carter’s drawing JFK Tower Missed Approach We’re In The Clouds Over interweaves gay abstractions derived from Joan Miró, while Barbara Kruger aligns the printed slogan You Have Searched And Destroyed with a photo of spiked human hair.

MIMA, Fri to 27 Sep

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Gabriel Orozco, London

Since he shook up the newly multicultural 1990s art scene, Mexican art star Gabriel Orozco’s peripatetic work has channelled beauty and oddness from everyday moments around the world. It’s a principle that’s spawned a stunningly diverse body of work, from photos of street life to attention-grabbing interventions. His first London exhibition since his major 2011 Tate survey pools work made recently in Japan, including totemic sculptures and his self-consciously disappointing, flatly decorative paintings of red, blue and gold leaf circles.

Marian Goodman Gallery, W1, Sat to 7 Aug

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Real Painting, Manchester

If this is Real Painting, it’s not painting as you probably know it. These things are less representational pictures or illusory abstract spaces than assemblages of this, that and the other. This exhibition, with an impressive gathering of international names, pushes the traditional expectations of the medium as far away as possible from a stretched or framed flat surface before it demands to be called something else. Adriano Costa, for instance, creates work that could be wall-based relief, assemblage sculpture, non-functional, non-decorative textile craft or something rather beautiful that has crawled out of someone’s bin. Then there’s 2010 Turner prize nominee Angela de la Cruz, who cheekily refers to her work as “paintings behaving badly”. With stretchers fragmented and reconstructed so they poke out into 3D space, hers are half-broken paintings that have come back to life.

Castlefield Gallery, to 2 Aug

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Etel Adnan, Dublin

Artist, writer, poet and film-maker Etel Adnan first gained international renown with Sitt Marie Rose, her 1978 novel movingly decrying the human cost of civil war across her native Lebanon. Her work since, in whatever medium, has never shied away from facing up to the tragedies of modern history. Knowing this, to look here on her small-scale mock-naive landscape paintings can tempt one to the verge of heartwarming tears. Their sunny colours, condensed from her beloved Californian and Mediterranean climes, resonate with a typical sense of wide-eyed wonderment. It’s almost as if she has found a kind of modest sanctuary in their making. The exhibition also includes one of Adnan’s black-and-white films, as well as recordings of the artist reading from some of her most recent published poems and writings. This is the work of a generous spirit: lamenting, touching, uplifting.

Irish Museum Of Modern Art, to 13 Sep

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Art Car Boot Fair, London

The annual Art Car Boot Fair on Brick Lane has become something of an East End institution. Regulars returning to flog limited editions of their work specially created for the Vauxhall-sponsored event include the sign-painting political provocateur Bob And Roberta Smith; gothic taxidermist Polly Morgan; Pam Hogg, whose cult fashion designs have graced rock icons such as Debbie Harry and Siouxsie Sioux; and Tracey Emin. A further edition of the fair will rock up in the YBA’s home town of Margate in August. Unlike other art fairs, the emphasis here is on affordable fun: prices start at a tenner and there’s a canine theme to many of this year’s works.

Brick Lane Yard, E1, Sun

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