Explosions of colour, cold war paranoia and hyper-erotic intimacy: five free shows to see

In a new series, we review the best art exhibitions currently showing in commercial galleries, where entrance is free

Gabriel Orozco: Chronotopic
★★★☆☆

Walking into Gabriel Orozco’s show is like waking up with a headache and trying to piece together whatever the hell you did last night. Everything in the Mexican conceptualist’s exhibition is splintered, disjointed, a history you can’t make sense of.

There’s a round of applause as you walk in, but the ovation morphs into the sound of rain. There are recognisable things here – cars, a football, cigarettes – but they don’t make sense. They’re suspended mid-air, broken into pieces, flipped upside down. An old Citroën has been split in half and glued back together too small, too narrow. There are kids’ toys and games, ceiling fans twirling with rolls of toilet paper attached to their blades, tree branches that have sprouted cigarette butts.

So many artists deal with the idea of memory and the passing of time, but few manage to capture the slipperiness of it all like Gabriel Orozco. The whole show feels as if it’s about history, but stripped of its big names and important dates, leaving behind a bunch of fragmented memories instead.

It’s all a bit too ephemeral, dense and self-satisfied, as if he can’t stop patting himself on the back for being so clever. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good, it’s just odd, discomfiting art that makes you feel you’re about to forget your pin number.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 8 November

Mary Ramsden: The Feeling of What Happens
★★★★★

I like colour as much as the next guy, unless the next guy is Mary Ramsden, and then I might be beat. What you see first in the Yorkshire-based artist’s huge new abstracts is big washy swathes of colour, one canvas all neon pink and green lost in a haze of deep purple, another all mauve and lilac in a vastness of blue. They’re explosive bursts of hue and tone, totally mesmerising, abstraction at its abstractest.

But look more, look longer, are those flower petals? Shafts of daylight through slats in a window? Everything is being constantly pulled between abstraction and reality, each work vacillating between still life and colourfield experimentation.

Years ago Ramsden was painting love hearts over and over, as if she was abstracting her teenage diaries. Then she did the same thing to interior scenes of living rooms and furniture. Now nature has crept its way in. She says these works are all about the limits of consciousness and perception. Yeah, maybe, but what makes this show so good is its total, obsessive, overwhelming dedication to colour.
• Pilar Corrias, London, until 7 November

Martine Syms: Knot Eye
★★★☆☆

I asked the ether – AKA people who follow me on social media – if anyone could explain what the hell Martine Syms’ show at Sadie Coles HQ is about, and someone replied “it’s about Martine Syms”. Which is as good an answer as any. The LA-based artist’s work is about brand Syms – literally, there’s a concept store of Syms merch, books and candles on the ground floor. But it’s about that idea in a wider societal sense too, about how we’re all brands: personalities constructed for display, amalgams of fiction, memory, capitalism and pop culture.

There are two films upstairs. In the newest piece, three people at an afterparty talk about DMT and interdimensional travel, one starts tripping while the others fall asleep. Reality and fantasy crash together and never really get pulled apart.

The other film follows a teenager who’s obsessed with an early 2000s reality star, an obsession that makes it impossible to distinguish a real person from the character they portray.

None of it is brilliantly acted or scripted, but somehow it still sends you out into the street with a head full of questions. Syms lives in a world where the lines between who we are, who society wants us to be, and who we present to the world, are all being constantly blurred.
• Sadie Coles HQ, London, until 7 November

Colin Self: Unseen
★★★☆☆

If you had a penny for every exhibition that rediscovers some long-lost pop art innovator 60 years after they first nicked imagery from ads or cartoons, you’d have a ton of pennies. But Colin Self is worth adding to the purse.

What sets Self apart from the other pop artists of his generation is an overwhelming atmosphere of paranoia and dread. While the rest of them were tackling ideas of consumerism and fame, Self was dealing with the aftermath of the second world war, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation in the cold war, and shivering with fear.

A grinning face hangs by a thread as a Nazi bomb flies past in one work; a dog bares its teeth in front of a battery of missiles in another; he sculpts a war plane out of nails and fake leopard fur, he creates a portrait of a man made up of saws, knives, springs and tools. It’s atomic terror in a newly mechanised society that’s perpetually on the verge of self-annihilation. These early works are brilliant, pop art with all the fun and colour replaced by abject horror.

Self is still at it, still making work at 85. Newer landscape paintings show his native East Anglia as a bleak old place filled with broken caravans and bomb craters. None of the more recent stuff here is brilliant, but it’s all still marked by that terror and dread.
• Frith Street Gallery, London, until 7 November

Somaya Critchlow: Pastels
★★★★☆

Critchlow’s erotic portraits have always been marked by a palpable sense of threat. The young English painter’s coquettish, 70s soft-focus nudes locked eyes with the viewer aggressively, confrontationally, as if they were on the verge of punching your lights out or throttling you with their negligees. But in this exhibition – her first since showing at Dulwich Picture Gallery last year – you don’t have to fear for your life.

Instead, in these tiny, ultra-intimate pastels, Critchlow is luxuriating in form. These are unabashed celebrations of sensuality, nudity and eroticism. They’re still confident and confrontational figures, but you feel as if Critchlow is enjoying herself a bit more, letting things be sensual for their own sake, without being weighed down by anger and revenge. I miss the implication of violence, but they’re still really good, hyper-erotic, intimate images. They could also just be lulling you into a sense of false security – so watch your back.
• Maximillian William, London, until 14 November