Things to do in London today

Many long years before the phrase ‘food porn’ was invented, Wayne Thiebaud had already made an artistic career out of it. The Californian artist also paints portraits and landscapes – but it’s his still-lives of cakes, pies, candy and deli counters that earned him fame, and in this six-decade survey you’ll see why. Working on the fringes of pop, Thiebaud is perhaps best summed up as an Old World painter of the New; dealing with the optics of modern American life – excess, desire, mass production – but with the mindset of European masters like Matisse and Cézanne. It’s this paradox that makes him arguably the best working colourist today (yes, that includes Hockney), and each painting such a prismatic, confounding experience. How can a gherkin flecked with pink still look like a gherkin? How can every colour in the spectrum successfully figure into a pair of beige nylons? His dense and gooey use of oil paint is as witty as it is gratuitous: he paints the icing on a cake in much the same way as you’d ice an actual cake. Downstairs, we’re treated to some of his West Coast landscapes: vertiginous quilts of car-studded freeways and candy-coloured cornfields. These are nuts. Their morphing perspectives and 45-degree inclines clearly don’t belong to exact reality, and yet they feel in total obeisance to their subject matter. His portraits have a kind of Rockwell-esque reverence to them – but I’d argue he paints cherry pies and high-heeled shoes with just the same humanity. Just lo

A show of photography by the American self-described 'reality artist', whose lurid, hyperreal images force us to ask questions about what's real or not in our permanently switched-on world.

The Turner Prize-nominated Mach will be creating one of his gargantuan newspaper installations, the first of its kind in 15 years. As it will largely be improvised in the gallery itself, we're not too sure what to expect – except that it will weigh a staggering 30 tonnes.

The American artist, now in her eighties, rose to fame in the '70s for paintings and drawings that explores how the power relations between the genders are played out in contemporary culture. 

A presentation of the American artist's groundbreaking 1958 film 'A Movie', a collage of found footage that includes westerns, war movies and soft-core porn.

The American West Coast sculptor has been creating brilliant, bold, small-scale ceramics as part of the California Clay Movement since the 1950s.

Many long years before the phrase ‘food porn’ was invented, Wayne Thiebaud had already made an artistic career out of it. The Californian artist also paints portraits and landscapes – but it’s his still-lives of cakes, pies, candy and deli counters that earned him fame, and in this six-decade survey you’ll see why. Working on the fringes of pop, Thiebaud is perhaps best summed up as an Old World painter of the New; dealing with the optics of modern American life – excess, desire, mass production – but with the mindset of European masters like Matisse and Cézanne. It’s this paradox that makes him arguably the best working colourist today (yes, that includes Hockney), and each painting such a prismatic, confounding experience. How can a gherkin flecked with pink still look like a gherkin? How can every colour in the spectrum successfully figure into a pair of beige nylons? His dense and gooey use of oil paint is as witty as it is gratuitous: he paints the icing on a cake in much the same way as you’d ice an actual cake. Downstairs, we’re treated to some of his West Coast landscapes: vertiginous quilts of car-studded freeways and candy-coloured cornfields. These are nuts. Their morphing perspectives and 45-degree inclines clearly don’t belong to exact reality, and yet they feel in total obeisance to their subject matter. His portraits have a kind of Rockwell-esque reverence to them – but I’d argue he paints cherry pies and high-heeled shoes with just the same humanity. Just lo

A show of photography by the American self-described 'reality artist', whose lurid, hyperreal images force us to ask questions about what's real or not in our permanently switched-on world.

The Turner Prize-nominated Mach will be creating one of his gargantuan newspaper installations, the first of its kind in 15 years. As it will largely be improvised in the gallery itself, we're not too sure what to expect – except that it will weigh a staggering 30 tonnes.

The American artist, now in her eighties, rose to fame in the '70s for paintings and drawings that explores how the power relations between the genders are played out in contemporary culture. 

A presentation of the American artist's groundbreaking 1958 film 'A Movie', a collage of found footage that includes westerns, war movies and soft-core porn.

The American West Coast sculptor has been creating brilliant, bold, small-scale ceramics as part of the California Clay Movement since the 1950s.

The pristine white spaces of the ICA have been ravaged. Stuart Middleton has torn down the ceiling, stripped the walls and ripped up the floor. Where once everything was perfect, now there is only ruins and decrepitude. He’s transformed the hallowed gallery into an abandoned factory, an empty, unused abattoir. Upstairs, a stop motion video shows a sickly dog prowling around a white room, barking and sniffing. You complete Middleton’s installation by walking through it – you’re the metaphorical art livestock, the hungry worker returning to find scraps of cultural nourishment in the old factory. You’re a participant in the grubby, filthy, cultural gallery game. At least, that’s the generous way of approaching it. But if you’d never been to the ICA before, you’d walk in and just see an empty room. A bit of a grotty one, with peeling walls and rotting wooden floors, but still just an empty room. The only way that’s explained is through a short story written by the artist – there’s no other concession made to helping you understand what this is. So you’re just stood there, coming up with narratives for why this empty room is so empty. And an empty room isn’t exactly a new conceptual conceit. The whole installation is unrewarding, and maybe even a bit silly. The thing is, for too long now the ICA has been putting on shows that are woolly, unapproachable and unappealing. They choose interesting young artists, but the results are too often completely underwhelming, too ensconced in

Five Berlin-based artists and filmmakers are collaborating to produce a huge, immersive artwork in the form of a kind of old-school TV channel, which will play out in the gallery as well as online. Apparently it's going to be 'absurdly complicated'. Sounds it.

This show is like a Surrealist’s dinner party; one where Tracey Emin bombards you at the door with a story about an ethyl alcohol comedown that ended with her inserting an Orangina bottle into her vagina. The confession is told through the graceful loops of her handwriting in a framed two-page letter, a kind of self-portrait that acts as a prologue for the show. Down the hall, you find Eva Rothschild’s ominous cast arm bolt upright in the middle of the floor, while feminist photographer Jo Spence stares on from one of her black-and-white images, holding a sign that reads ‘I’ll take (almost) any work’ in front of a bridal store. The strangest thing about this gathering is that it began more than 74 years ago, when art obsessive Peggy Guggenheim held an all-female show called ‘Exhibition by 31 Women’. Breese Little’s version acts as a Guggenheim sequel, but one with abstracted British bones. Under-appreciated London Surrealist Eileen Agar’s collage ‘Fighter Pilot’ from 1940 sits beside the work of contemporary big hitters such as Gillian Wearing, Rose Wylie, Phoebe Unwin and the psychogeography of Cornelia Parker, while emerging artist Aimee Parrott has created a latex painting mimicking her own body especially for the show. It’s all a bit of a historical muddle, but it comes together in the compact Breese Little box. The works stand alone, but at times wink across the room at each other, like the way the mathematical lines of Bridget Riley’s ‘Towards Little Diamond’ speak to