The Courtauld Gallery’s Abstract Erotic is a delight for two reasons – because an institution that has often seemed locked in the past is now embracing change and also because the sculptures on show are clever, suggestive and subversively funny.

Hamad Butt studied at Goldsmiths College at the same time as YBAs (Young British Artists) like Damien Hirst and Gillian Wearing; but whereas they would become household names so their work is now familiar, he disappeared from view. It makes his Whitechapel retrospective feel like a rediscovery – incredibly fresh and immediate.

Botanical forms, lurid and bright, now tower above a footpath on a moor otherwise famed for darkness and frankly terrible weather. But the trio of 5m-high contemporary sculptures grow in place here, drawing life from limestone soil. These metallic buds, blooms and supersize tubers reflect a deep, tropical past that predates the very English landscape we now associate with this part of the world.

I thought I might never be able to say it’s been a great year for women artists, so forgive me for focusing solely on them.

Mati Diop’s “speculative documentary” reverses the transatlantic journey of her feature debut Atlantics’ ghost Senegalese migrants, as plundered Beninese artefacts are returned from France. Dahomey is about African displacement and despoilment, and Diop chooses to give these ancient, ritually charged statues of men and beasts the sonorous voice of some alien god found floating in an sf space-capsule, an Afrofuturist deity speaking across centuries.

Michael Craig-Martin was the most playful and provocative of the conceptual artists. His early sculptures are like visual puns, a play on the laws of nature. On the Table, 1970 (pictured below right), for instance, appears to defy gravity. Four buckets filled with water stand on a table; so far so ordinary. But the table has no legs and is suspended from the ceiling by ropes and pulleys.

It’s been a long time since the Whitechapel Gallery has presented three seriously good exhibitions at the same time. Already reviewed are Gavin Jantjes’ paintings on show in the main gallery. He is now joined, in gallery 2, by Dominique White, winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in galleries 5, 6 & 7, by Peter Kennard.

One hundred and twenty sculptures, and so much more: the current Brancusi blockbuster at the Centre Pompidou, the first large Paris show of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work since 1995, provides an exhilarating and in many ways definitive perspective on one of the founding figures of 20^th century modernism.

Yinka Shonibare’s Serpentine Gallery exhibition opens with a piece of cloth twirling in the breeze; except that it’s a bronze sculpture probably weighing a ton or more – such is the power of art (pictured below right: detail of Wind Sculpture IV, 2024 with African Bird Magic, 2023).

Under the guidance of director Ralph Rugoff, the Hayward Gallery seems hell bent on reducing art to the level of fun for all the family. And as though to prove the point, cretinous captions strip the work of all meaning beyond the banal, while press pictures showcase kids gazing at large sculptures.