Free things to do in London this weekend

It’s hard to come away from a Picasso exhibition without thinking that he was a total bastard: a selfish, arrogant, mercurial, lascivious, lecherous, horny, misogynistic bastard. But there’s a brutish and near overwhelming animal magnetism to him and his work that draws you in and makes you fall madly in love, even though you know you shouldn’t. He makes foolish jilted lovers of all of us. That primal animality is front and centre in this beautifully put together and lovingly researched show focussing on his lifelong obsession with bulls, matadors and minotaurs. The half-man/half-beast creature is a symbol of Pablo himself. It represents raw, physical violence and sexuality, it’s a cypher for the artist as demi-god. The walls in the first gallery are draped with green curtains, the lights are low, it’s half way between a funeral home and your granny’s house. There are artworks everywhere. The drawings and prints are a treat. There are minotaurs with perfectly sculpted muscles, their genitals flapping in the wind as they save women from perilous situations. One series finds hairy beasts groping at sleeping women, or passionately humping away at them. There are simple, stark line drawings and complex crosshatched sketches. In all of these, Pablo is a powerful sexual animal, a saviour of women, a god amongst men. It’s brilliant, but absolutely and totally gross at the same time. There are gorgeous paintings here too – many of them great. There’s a stunning image of a sleep

Ashley Bickerton is like a friend who’s just come back from travelling around Asia for six months and literally won’t stop talking about it and showing you pictures down the pub. Except the pictures aren’t irritating iPhone photos of a beach he dropped some wicked acid on, it’s a whole goddamn body of fine art. But that’s a little unfair: it’s actually only half that bad. Because before he moved to Bali to become an eco-art hippy intent on creating art that makes me wish I didn’t have eyes, Bickerton was actually pretty brilliant. Busting out of ’80s New York alongside his buddy Jeff Koons (part of what got called the Neo Geo movement), his early work was full of simple ideas about consumerism, identity and pop culture, all executed with humour, precision and a super neat aesthetic. The ‘paintings’ from that era here jut boxily out of the walls. They’re assemblages covered in handles and sheeting, screwed in place with industrial fittings. They’re like emergency equipment from cruise ships, or massive black box recorders. One has a digital counter displaying the work’s current estimated value, another features silhouettes of toilets and the word ‘ab-strakt’, there’s even a modern update of one of his early ‘self-portraits’ through brand logos. It’s all crisp, clean and clear, covered in logos and the stench of capitalism. Other works here are massive hulking impenetrable lifeboats, a framed cowboy outfit or Armani suit at their centre. There are bomb-proof boxes of seeds

There’s something special about a tapestry, something traditional, a tangible aura of history. It’s as if the act of creating an image by slowly and meticulously weaving countless threads together is somehow more permanent, more holy, than just slapping a bunch of paint on a canvas. And that’s kind of true: tapestries have been used for centuries as ‘nomadic murals’ for royalty, movable canvases filled with symbolism and iconography. Now, Turner Prize-winning artist Chris Ofili has gone the woven way, and is unveiling ‘The Caged Bird’s Song’ this week at the National Gallery – a huge, complex work, filled with nods to classical mythology. It Ofili first painted a watercolour image then worked closely with the Dovecot Tapestry Studio to create this vibrant, multi-layered wall rug (official art historical term for a tapestry, there), which will go on permanent display in Clothworkers’ Hall in the City once the National’s done with it. Apparently, it’s very tricky to turn a watercolour into a tapestry, but that’s not your problem, because it’s clearly much easier to look at than it was to make.

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ said a wise uncle to his superhero nephew once. It’s a sentiment that hovers around Grayson Perry’s exhibition. Granted, Perry’s own alter ego wears lipstick and gingham rather than a mask and spandex, but the artist/transvestite/unlikely national treasure feels just as much the reluctant hero. This show is intended as a meditation on the role of popularity in art, but if it does anything, it highlights there’s little difference between one ‘P’ word and the other. It was Perry’s ceramic pots that threw him into the mainstream's limelight, but here you’ll also find tapestries, woodcuts, assemblages and custom-made motorbikes and skateboards. Those who deride him for glibly milking the zeitgeist (middle-aged broadsheet critics for the most part) won’t be converted here. Nationalist politics, art-world bickering, the class divide, austerity Britain – Perry casts his net far and wide, with a wry frown and his tongue in cheek. Curiously, it’s the bleaker moments that resonate most. Those who’ve read his book ‘The Descent of Man’ will know he views traditional masculinity as a ticking time bomb of rising suicide rates, domestic abuse and online misogyny; in one woodcut, it’s depicted as a snarling beast with humongous bollocks whose innards are labelled with words like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ and ‘important.’ Another piece, a savage takedown of the institution of marriage, features two miserable-looking wooden spouses encased in an ai

A three-decade survey of works by the celebrated Japanese artist, whose lyrical paintings marry the nihon-ga tradition with an experimental, avant-garde ethos.

Kiwi artist Thompson turns his attention to US race relations in this new exhibition. He's worked with Diamond Reynolds, an African-American woman who recorded the fatal shooting of her partner by the police on Facebook Live last year. Their collaborative film is intended as an alternate 'sister-image' to that widely circulated and overtly politicised footage.

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.