John Piper, Chichester

Even a lay visitor to Chichester Cathedral is bound to notice the tapestry hanging behind the main altar, its bold splashes of colour in stark contrast to the surrounding Norman and Gothic architecture. Hinting towards traditional Christian symbols such as crosses and fish, it is the work of John Piper (1903-1992), one of Britain’s leading modernists. Despite his radical use of abstract form, the painter, printmaker and stained-glass designer was nonetheless fascinated by the Romantic traditions of Britain. Alongside his more voguish commissions designing theatre sets for the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company and many of Benjamin Britten’s first operas, Piper undertook various projects for the Church. It’s these tapestries and Piper’s screen-printed preparatory studies – both characterised by their messy liveliness, jazzy, rhythmic forms and keen use of repetition – that are the highlights of this retrospective on his textile designs.

Pallant House Gallery, Sat to 12 Jun

OB

Russia And The Arts, London

This exhibition of portraits of Russia’s creative great and good features many a heavyweight subject, from Tolstoy to Chekhov. However, in a way, the fame of the sitters can be something of a distraction; the real joy, regardless of who is being painted, is the breadth of talent on display, from realist Ilya Repin (portrait of architect Vladimir Stasov) to Mikhail Vrubel, a fan of the supernatural. The narrative is one of painterly development in the period, which plots a line from the energetic realism of the 1870s to brighter impressionism and symbolism. However, whether these images of towering figures reveal some collective artistic personality is up for debate.

National Portrait Gallery, WC2, Thu to 26 Jun

OB

Underground: 100 Years Of Edward Johnston’s Lettering For London, nr Hassocks

It seems unlikely that something as ubiquitous as the London Underground typeface and that familiar red-and-blue roundel were the work of a forgotten early 20th-century art collective founded in the rural village of Ditchling, East Sussex. This show tells the story of local artists Edward Johnston and his student Eric Gill, who co-founded the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in 1907 to marry Catholicism and collective living. Many of their early commissions were for village businesses, but in 1913 the Underground Electric Railways Company of London approached the pair to help establish an identity for its new transport network. Together, they came up with Johnston Sans, a sans-serif font that drew inspiration from Roman inscriptions.

Ditchling Museum Of Art + Craft, Sat to 11 Sep

OB

David Jones, Nottingham

To a 20th-century art world concerned with progressive innovation, purist form and painterly painting, David Jones’s work seemed some kind of anathema. His conversion to Roman Catholicism and penchant for Arthurian legend hardly helped his modernist credibility, either. Predictably, he has been under-recognised, although TS Eliot for one reckoned him a genius. Ranging from first-hand observations of the first world war to celebrations of his beloved Sussex countryside and a depiction of Lourdes, the more than 80 works shown here are tinged with mysticism.

Lakeside Art Centre, to 5 Jun

RC

Ad Minoliti, London

Changing notions of what it is to be human – and, specifically, what it is to have a gendered or non-gendered body in the digital age – is the subject of this young Buenos Aires-based painter’s work. Many of the pieces in her first UK show stem from her Queer Deco series. Here, the settings are often the kind of suburban Californian homes that featured in early advertising. The architecture evokes the nuclear family – hard-working husband and demure wife, two healthy smiling Wasp kids – yet where these figures might stand, Minoliti instead paints abstract angular forms. These alien elements seem to signal the destabilisation of heteronormative society and, in their bright, colourful patterns, celebrate the far more complicated, fluid identities that have replaced it. In keeping with an artist who was instrumental in forming PintorAs, an Argentinian feminist collective, Minoliti will intermingle other artists’ work with her own.

Edel Assanti, W1, Wed to 23 Apr

Sara Barker, Edinburgh

Glasgow-based artist Sara Barker has expressed an enthusiasm for Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, and there are hints here of their self-reflective sensitivities and vulnerabilities as well as their highly individualistic experimentation. Perched at times across the gallery floor and hanging precariously at others from the walls, Barker’s angulated structures of steel rods, painted aluminium and sheets of glass conjure an almost painfully fragile collective presence. They might be rigorously abstract but they’re also full of real-life evocations, from dream furniture and robotic skeletons to daddy longlegs petrified in their nervy flittering. Like drawings in 3D space or sculptural armatures free of the filling-in, they come across as instinctive, her colour palette leaning towards the faded and crepuscular.

Fruitmarket Gallery, Sat to 30 May

RC

Richard Gorman, Dublin

Gorman’s exhibition, Iwano, is named in honour of late friend and colleague Iwano Heizaburo, who came from a dynasty of Japanese paper makers. Painted on beautiful Echizen Washi paper measuring precisely 275 x 320 cm and hung unframed, Gorman’s images, although almost minimally abstract, appear to continue the Japanese tradition of narrative scroll work. They all feature narrow-waisted amoebic blobs, sometimes punctuated by circular motifs such as oversized full-stops, as they roll around the off-white paper surface, their large scale defiantly belying an undeniable fragility. Chosen “not randomly, but intuitively”, as the artist says, their charm lies in their simplicity.

Kerlin Gallery, Wed to 7 May

RC