Reviews

What can one write about art that is impossible to define? Laure Prouvost’s ‘Monolog’ at the Contemporary Art Society relies on its mistranslation

Dark but deeply compelling, Wael Shawky’s films at the Serpentine Gallery are a reminder of the power and unreliability of stories

Fausto Melotti, the quiet man of modern Italian sculpture, is given a first UK retrospective at the Waddington Custot Galleries

‘Antoniazzo Romano: Pictor Urbis’ at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome attempts to shed new light on this enigmatic artist’s career

‘We can’t avoid the romance of that era’… Kevin Francis Gray discusses the influence of classical art on his own work at Pace Gallery

‘White Light/White Heat’ at the Wallace Collection and London College of Fashion reflects on glass as a contemporary medium

It’s an interesting premise, but ‘The Russian Avant-garde, Siberia and the East’ at Palazzo Strozzi is ultimately rather disorientating

Edmund de Waal creates an atmosphere of meditation at the Fitzwilliam Museum with the display ‘On White: Porcelain Stories’

Despite a few bland contemporary exhibits, ‘Art and Appetite’ at the Art Institute of Chicago is an excellent survey of a nation’s changing tastes

As the Turner Prize winner is announced in Derry, ‘Bloomberg New Contemporaries’ at London’s ICA seeks out tomorrow’s big names

‘Artist of gems’ Joel A. Rosenthal measures the value of a stone not in carats but in colour. His designs sparkle at the Metropolitan Museum

The Fondation Cartier’s exhibition of Latin American photography features defiantly eloquent works that mix visual experiment and political fury

Samuel Cooper famously painted Oliver Cromwell ‘warts and all’. It’s worth getting up close to his superb miniatures at Philip Mould’s gallery

His work at the Royal Academy strives for poetic significance, but does Bill Woodrow offer anything new?

‘Art Spiegelman’s Co-Mix’ at the Jewish Museum in New York celebrates the extraordinary breadth and variety of the comic artist’s career

‘Uproar!’ From the creation of Eve to the kitchen sink, Ben Uri gallery celebrates the first 50 years of the London Group

The New-York Historical Society’s ‘The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution’ actually reveals a measured side to the legendary show

The exhibits at ‘Beyond El Dorado’ are compelling not only for the myths associated with them, but for their idiosyncratic human appeal

Stanley Spencer’s paintings from the Sandham Memorial Chapel – currently touring the UK – are among the most important artistic responses to the First World War

An exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery attempts to find a home for Whistler on the banks of the Thames

‘The Show is Over’ at Gagosian Gallery, where painting’s elaborate deferrals of its death-scene extend like a multi-volume suicide note