Fresh art on the scene

This is the first time since 1995 that Damien Hirst has shown new work in a solo London exhibition and, while he taps fresh, religious subject matter and sentiments, he continues to trade on his stock, shock imagery: blood, bell jars and formaldehyde. A lapsed Catholic, Hirst has based two of his installations on the story of Jesus and the disciples, whom he recasts variously as pickled cows' heads and ping-pong balls afloat on a fountain of red wine. Meanwhile, in the square outside the gallery, a sculpture resurrects the poor girl from a Fifties charity donation box.

Joseph Beuys: Jeder Griff MuB Sitzen

A series of glass and steel cabinets is among Damien Hirst's latest works, but back in the Sixties, the experimental artist Joseph Beuys was creating his own 'cabinets' - pieces such as 'Vitrine Nr 21', which includes his signature hat and felt-wrapped cane, and is on show here in this exhibition which translates as Just Hit The Mark. It is one of several works loaned from a private collection. The shamanic Beuys set out to blur the boundaries between art and life, and he left behind a body of work that ran to installations, performance objects and sculptures. He fathered the German avantgarde movement, but his influence continues to extend far beyond that country's borders.

Lucien Freud: Drawings
The drawings in this exhibition have all been plucked from a single sketchbook filled by Lucian Freud, over the course of one winter, when he was 17. Already at art college, Freud and his fellow student David Kentish persuaded their parents to pay for them to stay at Capel Curig, a boarding house in North Wales, over the holidays. They were later joined by the poet Stephen Spender, and both Kentish and Spender find their way into Freud's sketches, along with everything from table-top clutter to slippered feet, all tempered by in-jokes and Freud's already unique way of seeing the world.

John Currin

When this celebrated American artist first took up figurative painting back in the Nineties, he couldn't have picked a more unfashionable medium, but he used it to create potent images inspired by everything from the work of Renaissance masters to vintage pin-ups. This survey charts his career from paintings of couples and women to scenes from suburban life via kitschy nudes in which women are idealised and distorted with bawdy, mischievous intent.