Barry Flanagan: Early Works 1965-1982, Tate Britain

BARRY FLANAGAN, TATE BRITAIN: From sand installations to bronze casts of prancing hares, from prankster to mass producer: a career that goes cold

From sand installations to bronze casts of prancing hares, from prankster to mass producer: a career that goes cold

"The sheer adventure and life of the touch is the only relevancy," wrote Barry Flanagan in his graduation thesis for St Martin’s School of Art in 1966. "I must allow my hand to touch and feel, my eyes to look and see, my tongue to lick and taste, my nose to sniff and smell, my ears to listen and hear."

Christo and Jeanne-Claude, 40 Years, 12 Exhibitions, Annely Juda Fine Art

CHRISTO & JEANNE-CLAUDE: Forty years of wrapping from two artists in a visionary partnership

Two artists, 40 years, 12 exhibitions, 1 gallery: a story of partnerships

A retrospective of an artist’s work is not usually a history of a working relationship, but in the case of Christo, this impressive exhibition of works from the past 40 years also marks two crucial partnerships: with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, who was his equal and co-creator from 1961, and with the Annely Juda gallery, which has mounted 12 exhibitions over four decades, as well as being intimately involved in their massive environmental “wrapped” pieces. Photographs of the end results are breathtaking, but even more gripping is watching the development of the processes over the years.

Charles Matton: Enclosures, All Visual Arts

Miniature rooms ask oversize questions of space and beauty

There is nothing new, nor inherently artistic, about making miniature models. Otherwise everyone who's ever stuffed a small ship into a glass bottle would be in the National Gallery. (Yes, Yinka Shonibare's fourth plinth ship-in-a-bottle outside the National Gallery is different.) But the boîtes (boxes/enclosures) of Charles Matton are of a different order entirely: recreations of artists' studios, imaginings of authors' libraries, tiny real rooms and tiny fake rooms. As well as the craft and the beauty, they challenge our very idea of seeing, space, reality.

Edinburgh Art Festival: A Festival woven together by the city itself

A rich and vivid cornucopia of contemporary art throughout the city

A few days visiting the Edinburgh Art Festival and the city itself becomes the encircling gallery. Under great canvases of lowering grey cloud, plunging up and down the different levels of the Old Town and the New, things unfold against the intense hues of emerald-green spaces, the coppery contrast of the beeches, the cold hardness of the towering walls of stone and the eddying flow of the crowds. Within this frame is the opportunity to see a wide diversity of exhibitions and events in almost 50 museums, non-profit, commercial and artist-run spaces, plus specially commissioned site-specific works.

Jake or Dinos Chapman, White Cube Mason's Yard and Hoxton

An exhibition that is clever, rich, layered. Oh, and very funny

It begins in a so-so fashion. The ground-floor gallery at White Cube’s Mason’s Yard features a sea of Constructivist sculptures on plinths. These are made from bits of torn cardboard and loo rolls, sloppily painted. Jake and Dinos Chapman love corny art jokes, but this gag feels like it’s already a little flat. And I’m disappointed to be disappointed. Chapman exhibitions are always something to look forward to, and I was looking forward to this one, especially since they had in mind a game. And the game in this instance was that they had worked independently for the first time - in separate studios and unseen by the other - and you’d have to guess who’d done what.

theartsdesk in Folkestone: Art Echoes by the Seaside

18 artists' work decorates a seaside town with memories of better times

The locals are understandably proud of Folkestone; Everywhere Means Something to Someone is an idiosyncratic guidebook offering an insider’s view of the town that bears witness to the depth of people’s attachment to it. Put together for the Folkestone Triennial by the artists’ collective Strange Cargo, this compendium of facts, memories and musings makes for compulsive reading.

The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, Tate Britain

A tantalising survey exploring Britain's first 20th-century avant-garde movement

Who were the Vorticists? Were they significant? Were they any good? And does this little-known British avant-garde movement – if it can be called anything as cohesive - really deserve a major survey at Tate Britain? Many of the group’s paintings never survived the First World War, and nor did one of its most talented supporters, the precocious French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; two of the most talented artists who did – David Bomberg and Jacob Epstein – were never signatories to its manifesto, and Epstein, for one, distanced himself; and, in its short life, there was only one exhibition on home turf, while its journal, Blast!, survived only two issues.

Tessa Farmer, Danielle Arnaud Art Gallery/Crypt Gallery

This Saatchi favourite makes art that’s scarily fun but still has gravitas

The world of artist and entomologist Tessa Farmer really is a world, wholly self-contained and free of human kind – unless you see her tiny warring fairies as symbolic of mankind’s conscience-free decimation of our planet’s environment and co-inhabitants. And it’s hard not to when you see them relentlessly picking over the corpse of a bird, mugging a mouse, or scrapping with a hornet, their tiny skeletal forms so industriously yet somehow amusingly destructive.