Crush-worthy photography, camp sci-fi and a centenarian’s florals: five free exhibitions to see

A little exhibition of Daidō Moriyama at his artiest and strangest, like Warhol with added filth, is among the best on show in London’s free-entry commercial galleries this week

Daidō Moriyama: Ink
★★★★☆

If it’s a crime to have a crush on an elderly avant garde Japanese street photographer then lock me up and throw away the key, because I have some seriously strong feelings for Daidō Moriyama. His ultra-confrontational, high contrast, aggressive take on photography just gets me blushing, what can I say.

This little exhibition is Moriyama at his artiest and strangest. In the 1960s he discovered Warhol and became obsessed. The works here find him playing with repetition and silk screening, printing up ghostly, painterly, effervescent monochrome images of stacks of soft drinks, neon lit crosswalks and peep show adverts. This is the grim, gritty side of Japanese urbanity, but you can see American capitalism creeping in and taking hold, slowly suffocating the streets.

He repeats an image of lips like Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe, duplicates a photo of people walking down a street, their bodies becoming indistinguishable from the adverts hanging from the high rises around them. Then he snaps a woman lifting her skirt, another stomping down the road in thigh-high boots. It’s like Warhol without the pretence, and with added filth.
• Hamiltons Gallery, London, until 30 October

Jenkin van Zyl: Enclosure
★★★★☆

Jenkin van Zyl is hellbent on cementing their place as English art’s ultimate hyper-camp weirdo, and their new show at Somerset House Studios is a pretty persuasive argument.

The exhibition is centred on a speculative sci-fi movie about some bleak company where tourists can inhabit other people’s bodies. But when the central character, a starlet called Mercy, comes to end the lease on her body, the line between reality and fiction starts getting anxiously blurry. Who is the real Mercy, and who is the clone? Who controls your identity? Who has access to what makes you you?

Its grubby atmosphere is reinforced by an immersive installation that replicates the film set as you walk in, with broken automatons, flickering lights and piles of rubbish, all bathed in a pink glow. It’s an unsettling, uncomfortable, dirty, dystopian bit of art cinema – like an overblown, fetishistic take on Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Van Zyl has a singular aesthetic, and this is pretty much as watchable as this kind of art film gets. It stays with you long after you’ve escaped its unnerving clutches.

The gallery handout wants to make out like this is about technological advancement and ideas of authorship. But like all good sci-fi, this feels more obviously allegorical than that. It’s about identity, the versions of ourselves that we present and preserve online, or in public, and how easy it is to lose your grip on the true you. Like a lot of artists these days who grew up with the internet and reality TV turning their brain into gloop, Van Zyl is trying to make sense of a post-reality world, a place where identity can be constructed, but never fully controlled.
• Somerset House, London, until 29 November

George Shaw: Albion Groans Part Two
★★★★☆

There’s nothing all that pleasant, or even particularly green, about the England of George Shaw’s paintings. There are no rolling hills or quiet pub afternoons here in this excellent show of small works by the 60-year-old artist. Instead, there are endless potholes, crumbling masonry, darkened alleys and damp, muddy, miserable, mid-winter landscapes. This is the England of council estates left to rot.

His landscapes – always based on his native Coventry – are devoid of life. There are no humans here, only the places they’re desperate to escape. Every sky is overcast, every tree barren, every path sodden with puddles. A union jack has been left crumpled on the pavement near an empty bottle of booze in one, endless knobs have been crudely graffitied on garage doors in another. There’s a painting of a single cloud blighting a blue sky, another of a robin lying dead on its side. Suburbia has leached into the countryside like a toxic spill.

They are gorgeously painted, especially the smaller works: sticky with enamel, glossy and horrifyingly alluring, like staring at a car crash.

But the car crash here is England itself. Sure, Shaw has been painting the same views of the same bit of Coventry for 30 years, but in that time the country has continued to erode. His whole career is a living portrait of England’s slow collapse. This time it doesn’t just feel like perpetual decline – it’s terminal.
• Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London, until 7 November

Tanoa Sasraku: Tropical Ken
★★★☆☆

The thing that’s so good about the main work in Tanoa Sasraku’s Turner prize installation – open now at Mima in Middlesbrough – is how perfectly it marries image with idea. Sasraku’s collection of corporate paperweights from oil companies acts as a horrifying symbol of the greed of that vile industry. Perfect.

Here at Vardaxoglou, Sasraku is showing works from another series, some of which are also on show at Mima, that don’t quite hit the same dopamine receptors. They’re all paper cut into the form of torsos, held together with clips. She places acetates of military camouflage on top of them and then pops them in a tanning bed, leaving behind the faintest impressions of the patterns.

They’re meant to evoke warfare, weapons crates and fruit boxes, all while alluding to Ken dolls, but they just look a bit like tea-stained gilets. The gap between image and idea, between the concept and its ability to communicate itself visually, is just a bit too wide.
• Vardaxoglou, London, until 31 October

Ce Roser: Running With the Sun, works 1961-2014
★★★★☆

You’ve got to hope you turn out like Ce Roser. The 101-year-old American artist has only got better with age. They call her an abstract painter, but all the flower paintings here feel pretty figurative. The earlier, flowerier works from the 1960s are nice, fuzzy, dreamy things. But the stuff from the 1970s, and then the watercolours from the 2010s … that’s where it gets good. Her work gets sparser and more minimal, but no less pretty. Landscapes and flora burst apart and writhe across expanses of white – they have all the aesthetic warmth and floral calm of the earlier stuff, but pared back and made lighter. I’m definitely worse at everything now than I was in my 20s. Let’s hope things pick up when I hit 90.
• VeneKlasen, London, until 3 December