Top 10 art exhibitions of the week

The best art exhibitions on now across the UK – Alastair Sooke and Richard Dorment's pick of the week.

1. Antoine Watteau | Royal Academy and Wallace Collection; until 5 June

Watteau’s influence on French art during the 18th century and beyond was profound. His chief contribution to art history was the invention of a strange, mercurial genre known as the fête galante, defined in a contemporary dictionary as “festivities by decent folk”.

The Wallace Collection in London has some of the finest examples. To complement the superb exhibition of his sketches at the Royal Academy, all eight of their canvases, plus two loans, are being shown in the West Gallery at the Wallace Collection’s home, Hertford House in west London.

2. Dieter Roth: Reykjavik Slides | Hauser & Wirth London, Savile Row | until 30 April

In love with Iceland's "housebuilding", German artist Dieter Roth (1930 - 1998) set out to photograph every building in Reykjavik, his home since 1957. The resulting 31,035 slides are shown all together for the first time.

3. Jan Gossaert | National Gallery; until 30 May

Gossaert’s ability to humanise characters from the Bible and mythology is of a piece with the way he was able to enter imaginatively into the lives of the men, women and children whose portraits he painted. His double portrait of an elderly couple, to take an obvious example, is as harrowing a depiction of old age as I know in art, in which the artist misses no opportunity to chronicle the indignity of decrepitude.

4. Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World | British Museum; until July 3

Thanks to men who risked their lives for art, some of Afghanistan’s most prized relics are on show, which reveal the country's ancient culture, its immense fragility and its remarkable place in world history.

As curator Dr St John Simpson puts it: “To me, what these objects speak of is the world of the steppe. These are nomads who are migrating possibly on a seasonal basis. The finds from Tillya Tepe open up the wealth of these nomads. These are all personal possessions, made to be worn on the saddle. This whole idea of personal ornaments stitched onto cloth is a steppe tradition, so too is the lavish use of turquoise.”

5. The Poetry of Drawing | Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; until 15 May

Major art movements come into being when young artists get together and provide each other with moral and material support. This magisterial survey of the drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites is a good example of this phenomenon. Most of the artists in it knew each other and many worked side by side, in particular John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt and (briefly) Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

6. Ai Weiwei: Sunflower Seeds | Tate Modern, until May 2

In the week that a pile of 100,000 of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s porcelain seeds sold for around £3.50 each at auction at Sotheby’s, why not go and see the real thing: a sombre, subtle installation consisting of a 10cm-deep bed of more than 100 million of his imitation sunflower seed husks.

7. Gabriel Orozco, Tate Modern, until 11 April

Gabriel Orozco is one of the most popular artists working anywhere in the world today, and yet the full-scale retrospective opening this week at Tate Modern is the first chance many people in this country have had to see his work in depth.

8. Susan Hiller | Tate Britain, until May 15

Eerie installations by the US-born artist who has lived in Britain for the past 30 years, and whose work probes the realm of the paranormal and the nether regions of the imagination. An Entertainment (1990), her menacing video piece featuring a Punch and Judy show gone very badly wrong, is a dark, unforgettable slice of terror.

9. Modern British Sculpture | Royal Academy of Arts, until April 7

A challenging and eccentric look at the evolution of modern British sculpture over the last century. Curators Penelope Curtis, who recently took over as director of Tate Britain, and the artist Keith Wilson are challenging assumptions about what constitutes “sculpture”. Instead of providing a comprehensive, textbook overview, which might have been a little dull, they stage dramatic juxtapositions between sculptures that have been carefully selected to exemplify wider trends.

10. An American Experiment | National Gallery; until 30 May

The artist George Bellows was one of the most interesting and complex figures of the Ashcan painters, a small group of early 20th Century realists who sought to represent the harsh realities of urban living through their tumultuous allegorical landscapes. ‘Ashcan’ is an Americanism for a street rubbish bin, an image you might struggle to match with this thumpingly musical celebration of muscle and light.

Bellows was best known for his brutal boxing paintings but, intriguingly, American novelist Joyce Carol Oates calls his portrayals of women “among the most brilliant in American art”. Seven of his diverse works have come to Britain for the first time for this show.