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The winner of the June Saatchi Online Studio competition is Patricia J, from Oaklyn, New Jersey. Saatchi Online contributor, Bill Roberts, comments: "Patricia J.'s neatly-composed abstract images possess a
very satisfying formal economy, and in their oscillation between the geometric and biomorphic, they manage to convey a range of associations, from the claustrophobic spaces of 3D video game worlds,
to ominous microscopic medical diagrams." The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's ... read more...

The winner of the May Saatchi Online Studio competition is Bob R Wilson. Saatchi Online correspondent, Alix Rule, comments: "Elegant as they are, Bob L. Wilson's fuzzy neon colour fields don't seem really serious - they might just be an effect on the eyes (after too much time at the computer?). Meanwhile eyeballs themselves appear to have entered the field, and are bouncing around on their own terms." The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of the winn... read more...

The winner of the November Saatchi Online Studio competition is Laurence Groux from New York. Bill Roberts, Saatchi Online contributor, comments: 'Laurence Groux's untitled sketch of bird forms emerging from a tangle of black lines has a decorative, improvisatory charm, as if Picasso or Miró had somehow got hold of a PC one afternoon.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of his choice. Artists can now create works for the December Saatchi Online S... read more...

The winner of the October Saatchi Online Studio competition is Pixo Hammer from Toronto in Canada. Rebecca Geldard, Saatchi Online London correspondent, comments: 'I like the deft linear quality of Pixo Hammer's mutant Jellybaby society, which brings to mind the hiphop graphics of Keith Haring and the dystopic cartoon narratives of Mrzyk & Moriceau.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a children's hospital of his choice. ... read more...

Since 1995, Norwegian sculptor Bjørn Bjarre's practice has consisted largely of an unfolding series of Plasticine works, collectively titled 'Abstract Feeling'. In this series, Bjarre subjects fragments of stylized, cartoon-like, mostly male body parts to a process of violent recomposition in a manner that seems to comment on the artist's role as a latter day Dr Frankenstein. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

Timothy Hutchings' sculptural practice presents a novel intersection of pastiche Minimalist geometry with an interest in social and formal aspects of play and gaming, but warfare provides a sustained undercurrent to each of these concerns. To see more of Timothy Hutchings work registered on Saatchi Online click here. ... read more...

Cerith Wyn Evans's current show at White Cube Hoxton Square takes as its starting point the parallel conceptual pairings of visibility-invisibility and sight-blindness, extending these to deal, like much of his work, with alternative forms of communication from Braille to Morse Code, and the nature of memory.

The work of the Birmingham-based duo Simon and Tom Bloor deploys disembodied slogans from numerous 'eccentric' sources in public and gallery installations, eliciting a range of responses from the knowing and derisive to the quizzical, but without adopting anything resembling an overt political stance.

The young New York-based artist Tom McGrath, whose show at Zach Feuer opens tonight, picks up the baton of the American realist tradition, but his abiding theme is transport itself, connecting McGrath to a quintessentially American mythology of the open road.

In his second show at Vilma Gold William Daniels continues his reconstructions of historical paintings but this time the artist's renderings of well-known masterpieces are made out of foil rather than card or paper.

Having opened a sister gallery above The Reliance pub on Old Street just the other year, and having been a presence in London's East End for ten years, Jake Miller and Emma Robertson's The Approach Gallery opened a West End space this week with a display of new work by John Stezaker (below left) that continues the artist's celebrated series of deceptively simple found-image collages. ... read more...

Ross Knight creates medium- and large-scale assemblages from quotidian, light-industrial materials: aluminium tubing, Velcro, tape, wire, foam, rubber and vinyl sheets, the latter often painted in bright, even tones. In contrast to the durable, heavy-industrial character of works by artists like Donald Judd and Richard Serra, the materials employed in Knight's delicate structures give to them a certain physical precariousness, so that in the presence of his works the viewer is made to feel that ... read more...

In his figurative drawings and mixed media tableaux Simon English, for his first solo show in Paris, adds to his already eclectic range of references an odd mix of famous French names - Marie-Antoinette, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Jean Genet and Zinedine Zidane. English may be the new kid on the Parisian block, but, as he said in a recent interview, 'the visual diary is expanding to incorporate a curious set of cross references. It's all getting mixed up, and it's as if the twin-towning c... read more...

Los Angeles is cracking up. On the large canvases of painter Dan Bayles, whose first solo show in the city opens this December, the famously decentred metropolis is dismembered, and its building blocks - anything from the concrete lanes of freeways, to the paving slabs, porch lamps and swimming pools of the city's condos - variously cascade down the works' surfaces in lyrical swirls and tumbling maelstroms of heavy matter. ... read more...

Amongst her other subjects, Anne Collier takes photos of photos. Unlike Sherrie Levine's re-photographed images, however, Collier's source material tends to sit in an indeterminate space in the centre of her compositions, and as a result the physicality - that is to say, the objecthood - of the original print mostly registers in the new image.

New York- and Berlin-based Sue de Beer is known for her photographs, videos and sculptural installations that draw on horror and Goth culture, presenting apocalyptic-sardonic narratives of doomed and disaffected adolescents. One theme of de Beer's work is the boundary between fantasy and reality, the point at which the escapism born of alienation spills over into violence, whether the nihilism of US high-school shootings or the angry idealism of revolutionary struggle. ... read more...

The debut show in London for New York-based artist Zak Smith presents a number of works from his ongoing series, 'Drawings Made Around The Time I Became a Porn Star'. The drawings are all only 5 x 4 inches, and have an almost diaristic feel to them, with a wealth of imagery frenetically crammed into each one - sprawling documents of a life spent engrossed in music and comic culture, and some apparently less wholesome pursuits. ... read more...

Having lived in New York since 1998, Zhang Huan has recently moved back to China, establishing a studio complex in Shanghai with around 100 assistants (below). Perhaps as a result of this arrangement, his recent focus has been on the production of objects, marking a shift from the choreographed performances for which he has become known. The artist's show at Haunch of Venison includes a sample of recent paintings, sculptural busts and works on paper that employ the ash accumulated from incense b... read more...

Damien Hirst's skull is only the best-known example of the skeleton motif in contemporary art, and it should of course come as no surprise that this image continues to provide such rich pickings for artists in the present day, as it has done in the centuries gone by. Like the very themes it is most often taken to signify, the skeleton in art is inescapable. Cheim & Read's new show, 'I Am As You Will Be', surveys the work of more than thirty modern and contemporary artists who have used the skele... read more...

Berlin-based Raphael Danke creates enigmatic sculptures and collages that wittily reinterpret Surrealist strategies for today's consumer culture. Following appearances in group shows at London's ICA in 2001 and at the Vilma Gold Gallery in London earlier this year, his first UK solo show is at Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, until 10 November.

Stockholm-based Johanna Billing (born 1973) shares a particular interest in the communality and shared emotional resonance of pop music with artists such as Phil Collins and Jeremy Deller, and is perhaps closest to the latter both for her interest in the merits of amateurism as well as in her efforts to coordinate large numbers of people in order to create her participatory projects. Billing's new show at Dundee Contemporary Arts is presented concurrently with a show at Basel's Museum für Gegen... read more...

It's been a while since British artist Cornelia Parker last made a splash, or more properly a bang, on home turf. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997, she remains best known for installations that extend the artistic exploration of the sublime into the present day, dealing in awe-inspiring fashion with the mysteries of mortality and the cosmos. Marking a new phase in Parker's career, the artist presents in this exhibition two new video works including 'Chomskian Abstract', in which Parker q... read more...

As befits its presentation in the hallowed Art Deco halls of RIBA, Fiona Tan's new film work, 'A Lapse of Memory', centres in many ways on the underlying ideologies of architecture, especially the peculiar ambiguities of the colonial imagination as registered by John Nash's Regency-era Brighton Pavilion. The 25-minute colour film loop follows an old man, the lone inhabitant of a palatial building, as he goes about his daily routines, some more or less purposeful - tea-drinking, Tai Chi - and oth... read more...

The 1977 book entitled The Third Mind was, in fact, a meeting between two minds. William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin deployed their programmatic literary device, the cut-up - the more or less random cutting-and-pasting of disparate text fragments - to concoct a volume full of surreal half-narratives, the result seeming so other-worldly, even to its creators, that the book appeared to come from a foreign source, literally a third mind. For his curated show at the Palais de Tokyo, the Swiss artist... read more...

The final generation to have been partially brought up under Eastern European 'really existing socialism' has now reached adulthood, and young painters from the former Soviet bloc and non-aligned communist states alike have begun to reflect on their formative experiences in an attempt to excavate that which has vanished irretrievably. Although Nicolae Ceausescu's vile US-backed regime always was unlikely to inspire anything like the much-noted wave of nostalgia - or 'Ostalgie' - that followed th... read more...

Polish painter Adam Adach's paintings seamlessly combine elements drawn from popular culture and personal and collective memory, often using photographic sources such as newspaper and magazine illustrations, together with photographs taken by the artist and some from found, anonymous sources.

Paris-based Fikret Atay will be familiar to anyone who saw Tate Modern's 2004 'Time Zones', a survey of film and video art from around the world, where he showed his eleven-minute video Rebels of the Dance, featuring 90 dancers. Like the artist's other works, Rebels of the Dance was filmed with a handheld camera in Atay's hometown of Batman, a Kurdish city close to the Iraqi border. Atay's show in Sheffield is his first solo exhibition in the UK, and includes a selection of recent work plus a n... read more...

In a large empty building nestled close to the new Wembley Stadium, Paul Pfeiffer's new sound and video installation, 'The Saints', sees the New York-based artist tackling - if you'll excuse the pun - the national British obsession: football. Viewers enter the exhibition to the sound of crowds chanting numerous anthems, from Rule Britannia and When the Saints Go Marching In, to Deutschland über Alles. The exhibition, developed with the help of Artangel, opens today and runs until the end of Oc... read more...

American Fine Arts Co., managed by the late Colin de Land in New York's SoHo, was a key venue for a generation of post-conceptual artists between 1984 and 2004, forging links between American and European (predominantly German and British) artists. Nils Norman and Stephan Dillemuth were closely involved with the gallery, and have collaborated on exhibitions and research projects since the early 1990s, exploring themes of gentrification, bohemianism and the financialisation of the art world. At V... read more...

Lee Broughall is a young painter based in Surrey, and a 2006 graduate of the University of East London. His most recently completed series of four large-scale works employ the repeated motif of a misshapen disc floating on either a red or black backdrop. The discs contain blotches and other impurities that are reminiscent of the swirls and patterns of a planet's surface, like the famous Great Red Spot on Jupiter. ... read more...

Fresh from participating in the four-person show, 'The Atrocity Exhibition', at Thierry Goldberg Projects this summer, Ahmed Alsoudani's first solo outing at the Lower East Side gallery opened this week. Alsoudani fled his native Baghdad for the US after the 1990-91 Gulf War, and his large-scale semi-figurative drawings and paintings are consequently informed by both personal familiarity with and media accounts of that war-torn city. ... read more...

British artist Samuel Herbert has shown extensively since graduating from Goldsmiths College in 2004, and while he has stuck fast to the style and theme of the paintings that initially brought him such attention, he is clearly a young painter to watch. For his second solo show at ZINGERpresents, Herbert picks up where his previous show at the gallery, 'Natives and Colonials', left off, presenting further precisely rendered monochrome paintings of aristocrats and their servants in unnamed British... read more...

Birmingham-based duo Karin Kihlberg and Reuben Henry have been working collaboratively together since 2004, in which time they have complemented their performance and video practice with directing the Springhill Institute, which hosts international artists' residencies in the city. Their solo show at the Castlefield Gallery is their first in the UK, and presents a selection of video works from the past three years as well as a new work to be performed and documented in the gallery on 18 Septembe... read more...

Coinciding with this year's Biennale and marking the opening of the home of Mariano Fortuny, the Spanish fashion designer, to the public for the first time in over 20 years, 'Artempo' is a show of over 300 works by more than 80 artists. From the ancient to the contemporary, the works are drawn predominantly from the collection of the Belgian antiques dealer and interior designer Axel Vervoordt, but also from museum collections in Venice and further afield, all of which are set amongst the extrao... read more...

Stan Douglas's standing as one of the most influential film and video artists of the last two decades is to be confirmed in a large retrospective curated by Hans D Christ and Iris Dressler in close collaboration with the artist and spread across two venues in Stuttgart this autumn and winter. Together, the venues will house fourteen of the Canadian-born artist's film and video installations, together with many photographic works. ... read more...

Among the more memorable works at this year's event are Mike Kelley's 'Petting Zoo' (below), Hans-Peter Feldmann's luxury public toilets and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's installation 'Roman de Münster (A Münster Novel)', a series of small-scale replicas of sculptures from the last three editions of Skulptur Projekte Münster, reminding us that, as well as being the ideal summer art-tourism destination and city marketer's dream, the festival is a living archive of, pilgrimage site and playgrou... read more...

Tania Kovats is a British artist who works on long-term projects that examine the ways in which diverse kinds of landscapes are culturally mediated. Following a recent fellowship at the University Museum of Natural History in Oxford, a commission from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford University has resulted in a project that marries her interests in landscape and drawing perhaps more succinctly than ever before. The 'Museum of the White Horse' examines the history, meaning and... read more...

In his new book, 'The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp', the London-based art historian TJ Demos finds that what Duchamp referred to as a 'spirit of expatriation' infuses his entire artistic practice.

Curator Sylvia Chivaratanond brings together three upcoming artists linked by a dark and occasionally gothic sensibility for this group show at Lehmann Maupin, perplexingly titled 'Duet' - Michael Bauer, influenced by the Futurism of Balla and the eternally curious 16th-century paintings of Arcimboldo; painter Victor Man whose work reflects on the history and mythology of Transylvania; and the London-based Australian artist David Noonan whose grainy and foreboding 8mm films and silkscreened phot... read more...

The modesty of Varda Caivano's paintings, both in size and conception, can seem a little at odds with the triumphant solo show format, a strangeness that is registered by the works' presentation in the single large space of the Chisenhale Gallery, just as it was at Victoria Miro in the artist's first London solo show two years ago. These are homely paintings, rarely more than tabloid-sized, whose tones, shapes and patterns evince a warmness and tropicality redolent in words like 'copper' and 'em... read more...

Punk and art has always been a tricky pairing. Some don't like to hear the two words together, clinging fast to punk's oppositionality to official culture, while others point, in many instances correctly, to punk's varied anti-art, avant-garde and art school genealogy. To all of which the only safe response is to shrug and suggest that punk has always been cerebral, visceral and tribal to shifting degrees. Find out more at the Barbican's exhibition which opens today. ... read more...

Jim Shaw has been lumped in with a host of 'movements' over the years, but has always managed to wrestle himself out of the clutches of any particular labeling. His deliberately eclectic approach has demanded such a resistance and is also the natural corollary of the disparate obsessions with countercultural Americana and kitsch that are the artist's sustenance. At BFAS Geneva, an art consultancy established by ex-Sotheby's France boss Marc Blondeau, Shaw's 'Distorted Faces' series will be on vi... read more...

Alice Neel was a prolific painter, whose subjects ran the gamut from small children and mother-and-baby portraits, through to the hospitalised and elderly, via intimate portraits of artists, curators, critics and art historians at the height of their creative and intellectual powers. This exhibition, which opens on 23 May, will showcase her painterly account of New York's artistic life in the postwar period. We also preview below in our red VIDEO box a new documentary film about the artist made ... read more...

Coinciding with a major show of Hannah Collins' photographic and film work, debuting at the Fundacion La Caixa in Madrid and Barcelona before touring Europe, 'Finding, Transmitting, Receiving' presents photographs, found family portraits and childhood drawings by Collins from the last 15 years. Together with complete transcriptions of the artist's film scripts, her diverse body of work explores themes of homelessness, migration and other effects of globalization on the lives of individuals. ... read more...

The bread and butter of Jonathan Gitelson's art is that most elusive of subjects, everyday life. Since moving from New York to Chicago, Gitelson has turned the overlooked stuff of the city into the focus of his large-scale photographic works, capturing such things as discarded club fliers and pairs of shoes hanging from telephone wires. ... read more...

Martin Creed's new show at Hauser & Wirth is the last of three large-scale shows at the gallery's Coppermill space and, with his absurdly reductive approach, could hardly be in more marked contrast to Christoph Buchel's attempt at cramming the cavernous ex-factory with a vast accumulation of unreformed stuff.

Brooklyn-based Rob Fischer works in both photography and sculpture, taking snaps along the highways and byways of the US Midwest, works that hold their own as 'photo-essays' as well as functioning as source material for his large-scale constructions. 'There is certainly something reassuring about a slice of Rust Belt Americana in the midst of the bustle of Mayfair,' find Bill Roberts. ... read more...

'Slow Life' gathers works by seven artists who share a common interest in the centrality of technology in contemporary life, from digital and online culture to consumer durables, mass production and even the spectacle of space exploration. Linking the very different practices on display is a concern with the phenomenology of technology, its effects on our cognitive and perceptual faculties, and - as the show's title would suggest - on our perception of time. Bill Roberts reports. ... read more...

If high art today really can be identified as, for the most part, a rarefied field of the entertainment industry, then White Cube's current pairing of fanciful new works by Katharina Fritsch and Neal Tait can appear to follow the same logic of escapism as TV's period dramas that perennially take pride of place in the autumn schedules. Bill Roberts reports. ... read more...

Carlos Andrade and Todd Ayoung create videos and installations that, though often cryptic or abstracted, invariably refer to catastrophic events of contemporary history.