Free art in London

Standing in front of ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ is like slipping down a water slide. The most important painting by sixteenth century Italian maestro Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, aka Parmigianino, is an exercise in sinuous, surreal psychedelia, and it’s stunning.

Going to a Jeff Wall exhibition is like watching 100 films at once. The pioneering Canadian photographer has spent decades creating highly stylised, minutely posed, ultra composed, totally fictional photographic scenes, all filled with enough details to send you spiralling down countless narrative rabbit holes.

On Kawara did one thing, every single day, for most of his life. Over and over again, he painted that day’s date, always in white, usually on black, sometimes on other colours, but with no other variation.

Your parents told you that if you got too close to the TV your eyes would go square, but no one warns you about what happens when you get too close to a painting. What happens is Mary Ramsden’s show, where everything is blown out, fuzzy and hazy.

It’s grim up north they say, but George Shaw’s paintings prove that it’s not much better anywhere else in this country. This group of six small enamel paintings – and a handful of watercolours of flowers – see Shaw returning to his childhood estate in Coventry to continue documenting its long, slow decline into dereliction.

Back in the mid-1960s, pure abstraction still just about meant something. We’d already had Malevitch and Kandinsky and all the abstract expressionists, but art hadn’t yet been totally blown to pieces by conceptualism. And at the precipice of all that came Patrick Heron and Victor Pasmore, showing up to represent the UK at the 1965 São Paulo Biennial with a load of experimental paintings that were still – just – fresh enough to feel experimental. The show is semi-recreated here, with a few works from the Biennial mixed with others from the same period. 

Everyone in 1970s Lagos was cooler than you. At least they were on the evidence of this show, which collects together the best work of Abi Morocco Photos, a husband and wife duo who documented life in Nigeria as prosperity blossomed and the economy boomed.

The camera is meant to be a tool of truth, an instrument that captures reality. But it captures something else in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work: fantasy. The Nigerian-born artist lived in Brixton until his early death in his 30s in 1989. In the privacy of his studio, he was able to use the camera to explore ideas of difference, identity and a whole lot of desire.

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space.

If you like GDPR training, you’re in for a treat at the Serpentine. Tech experimenters Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s series of mediaeval church altars and choral compositions is actually a deep dive into the intricacies and legal frameworks of AI modelling. The quasi-historical approach helps to make you feel safe in the uncomfortable, scary waters of new technology.