With the Serpentine, Whitechapel and the ICA all waiting until next week for their big shows to open, there's plenty of time for the artworld to nip to Switzerland for the influential Art Basel.
Meanwhile in the UK this weekend, the Courtauld have just opened a showcase of masterpieces of drawing chosen from their impressive collection, the New Art Gallery, Walsall showcase work by Isabel Rawsthorne tracing the influence of dance and movement, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park have an authoritative collection of sculpture by Anish Kapoor in the first major UK survey of his work outside London.
Baltic opens a show by Janet Cardiff in which she immerses her audience in Renaissance music by broadcasting 40 voices singing Thomas Tallis' uplifting motet Spem in Alium from 40 speakers. Soundworks, which opens at the ICA next week, is an ambitious project which features 100 new works of sound art selected by curators from art institutions across the world - from Brazil to Beirut, from San Francisco to Oxford. Bruce Nauman's Days, in which seven voices recite the days of the week in random order, is also installed in the lower gallery in what is a UK premiere of this seminal work.
Next week you can look forward to Yoko Ono at the Serpentine, where the new summer pavilion by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron is garnering impressive reviews, and here's the heads up to what promises to be a fantastic show of new paintings by Jenny Saville at Modern Art Oxford next weekend, with additional work at the Ashmolean.
The full recommended list is here, and includes Angelo Plessas' websites at Cell Project Space, retro record covers at Pallant House and some stunning photography by Leigh Tarantino at Adam Gallery on Cork Street.
There's also an exhibition of stone sculpture in Oxford for the On Form biennial, and the hotbed of designer-maker talent that is Cockpit Arts has an open studios event this weekend in Deptford. Or maybe you fancy the Contemporary Craft Fair in Bovey Tracey? Bring your wellies!
There's always news on our blog updated by our tweets @isendyouthis / Kate Jago
artexhibition: highlights
 | ART | 43 | Basel Switzerland 14/06/2012 to 17/06/2012 The world's premier international art show for Modern and contemporary works, Art Basel features nearly 300 leading galleries from North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa. The exhibition includes the highest-quality paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, video and editioned works. |
 | Eva Rothschild - Boys and Sculpture Whitechapel Art Gallery
London E1 7QX 19/06/2012 to 09/09/2012 The London-based Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild has made a film which shows what happens when young boys are let loose in a gallery. Rothschild’s remarkable sculptures use shape, colour, crafts techniques and scale to fuse form with, in her words, ‘ideas of faith, death, magic, things that are all very messy…’ |
 | Fiona Crisp - Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle Matt's Gallery
London E3 4RR 20/06/2012 to 29/07/2012
Open Weds-Sun 12-6pm Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle continues her exploration of what, in phenomenological terms, a photograph is - what is it capable of? Here the equivocal identity of Crisp’s work persists as glazed and framed photographs are removed from the plane of the gallery wall to be sited on single scaffolding poles creating a new, provisional architecture of the gallery interior. Generated at the National Trust site of Stourhead in 2006, the 8 large-scale photographic works eschew any desire to document a specific location; instead, the historic house at Stourhead, along with it’s world-famous 18th century landscape gardens, are employed by Crisp as a formal device to reflect upon the colliding imperatives of heritage, leisure and history at a site of national cultural significance. |
 | Mantegna to Matisse - Master Drawings Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery
London WC2R 0RN 14/06/2012 to 09/09/2012 Spanning over 500 years, this exhibition includes rarely seen drawings by Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo as well as masterpieces by Rembrandt, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Matisse, to celebrate the art of drawing. In the Renaissance the medium of drawing increasingly gained importance as an expression of artistic creativity. Drawings not only functioned as workshop material, but also served as a means to explore ideas for paintings and sculptures. For the first time they were also created as finished works of art to be collected. Including works from the most famous Italian artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, but also from Northern artists like Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder the Courtauld’s outstanding collection of Renaissance drawings is one of the finest in Britain. |
 | Philip Haas - The Four Seasons Dulwich Picture Gallery
London SE21 7AD 20/06/2012 to 16/09/2012
Open 10am - 5pm A set of four monumental fibreglass sculptures by American artist and film-maker Philip Haas. In a spectacular transformation that is typical of his work, Haas has created a group of large-scale sculptures, each 15-foot-high, inspired by Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Renaissance paintings of the four seasons, comprising Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter.
* Free entry to Gallery grounds |
 | Soundworks Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
London SW1Y 5AH 19/06/2012 to 16/09/2012
Open Mon-Tues: 12noon–11pm; Thurs- Sat: 12noon–1am SOUNDWORKS embraces the ephemeral nature of sound, and presents an online platform that doubles as a virtual exhibition space. This site aims to make the works internationally accessible, a place to explore the genre as a medium which is simultaneously inclusive, interactive, and subversive. It includes a wide range of audible approaches by artists who have been working with the medium for many years, as well as artists taking their first venture into the sonic arts. |
 | Yoko Ono - TO THE LIGHT Serpentine Gallery
London W2 3XA 19/06/2012 to 09/09/2012 A major exhibition of Ono's work, her first show in a London public institution for more than a decade. Consisting of new and existing works, including some that have rarely been shown in the UK, Ono will present a selection of installations and films. An important aspect of the exhibition will be SMILE, a large-scale participatory project that records people's smiles to create a global anthology of portraits. This timely exhibition will reflect upon the enormous impact Ono has made on contemporary art, exploring her influential role in art, film and performance. |
 | Isabel Rawsthorne - Moving Bodies New Art Gallery Walsall 15/06/2012 to 08/09/2012 Open Tuesday- Saturday 10-5pm For nearly twenty years Rawsthorne drew and painted her friends the prima ballerinas Margot Fonteyn, Antoinette Sibley, Svetlana Beriosova and Rudolph Nureyev in the rehearsal rooms at Covent Garden. Her works are as much portraits as they are an exploration of a way to depict movement. For artists of her generation, the inheritors of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, dance was the cutting edge of the avant-garde, a potent synthesis of new music, art and physical expression. |
 | Anish Kapoor - Flashback Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Wakefield WF4 4LG 16/06/2012 to 04/11/2012 Following on from the critical acclaim of his show at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2009, this Flashback exhibition gives an opportunity to explore Kapoor’s earlier works from the Arts Council Collection alongside major sculptures on loan from the artist and from other UK collections. |
 | Janet Cardiff - The Forty Part Motet BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art
Gatehead NE8 3BA 16/06/2012 to 14/10/2012 A reworking of the renaissance choral work for forty voices 'Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui' (1573) by Thomas Tallis, The Forty Part Motet consists of 40 separately recorded voices played back through 40 individual speakers grouped in eight choirs of five singers. The work allows the audience to experience the music as the voices weave in and out of each other. |
Click here to see the full list
