Can you tell a real Warhol from a fake? Four art exhibitions to see for free

A show of smart forgeries by Sturtevant will test your critical eye. Elsewhere, there’s a chance to dissect America’s cultural corpse and enter a terrifying immersive painting of Mexico

Cady Noland’s US is a violent, celebrity obsessed, consumerist police state. In this small show of big, stark, awkwardly cropped and blurry black and white images and minimal sculptures, the influential American iconoclast is dissecting her country’s cultural detritus, and leaving its splayed corpse on display.

You see celebrity heiress/terrorist accomplice Patty Hearst’s torso brandishing a machine gun; you see Lee Harvey Oswald being shot in the stomach; there are images of protests, Frank Sinatra, guns. Dotted around the space are crushed Pepsi cans and police badges preserved in resin, Coca-Cola crates, trays filled with metal scrap, empty display cases. It’s as if Noland is trying to analyse America’s collapse, piecing together the gory, gossipy, capitalistic pieces of a puzzle that keeps getting uglier.

A model of the exhibition itself has been built on a white desk in the middle of the space – maybe by looking at how things are built on a forensic level Noland can figure out where they went wrong. But most impressive is how all of these ideas gel into such a cohesive visual aesthetic: everything is black and white, steel and plastic, clinical and somehow repulsive. It’s deeply unfriendly, minimal and stark. Terrifying, nasty, excellent art.

You’re looking at a Warhol, but it’s not a Warhol. You’re looking at a Jasper Johns target, a Frank Stella abstract, a Joseph Beuys chair, a Keith Haring doodle … but not one of them is original, not one is real. Each piece is a copy by Sturtevant, a dissident conceptual forger who spent her life duplicating the big (male) artists of her generation and passing their work off as her own.

Whether or not you think that’s a legitimate artistic gambit will largely come down to your tolerance for this kind of conceptualism and how much you buy into Sturtevant’s argument. Me? I’m sold.

There’s an initial gut reaction level of enjoyment from seeing a Warhol screenprint of Marilyn Monroe or the Félix González-Torres pile of sweets – it’s like walking through any world class collection of modern western art.

But nagging at the back of your mind are the words “fake” and “copy”. You start looking for differences between the Warhol or Jasper Johns that you can picture in your mind’s eye, and the copy on the wall, but you can’t pick it out. Then you start asking why Sturtevant’s copy deserves space in a big, fancy gallery. Why does this have value? Why is her copy legitimate art? What makes this good?

And that is the idea: Sturtevant undermines, deflates, pierces the grandeur and importance of art, forcing you to ask why one is good and another isn’t.

In later video works she pushed it further. The Paul McCarthy film sees her replacing his gruff, manly menace with something more feminine but no less weird.

You look at most of the works and think “I like this as much as I like the original”, but you’re not meant to. This fake Warhol isn’t as good as a real one, right? It can’t be, because if it is, the whole idea of originality and artistic genius basically crumbles. How amazing is that?

Turns out, hell is actually located in London, right next to the Oval cricket ground. Mexican artist Paloma Contreras Lomas’s exhibition is an immersive journey into the depths of Hades – a world of skulls, mythical beings, rats, witches, devils and a heck of a lot of blood and guts.

The three vast paintings here tell stories from Mexico’s recent history, a period of time marked by a brutal war on drugs that has seen bodies piling up in unmarked graves. The paintings are psychedelic, cartoony, dark things. There are nods to social media and TV, there are creatures being disembowelled, skulls grinning, demons leering, all in colour-drenched, comic book intensity. A huge plush sculpture nearby shows a figure cradling its own disembodied head.

The film in the next room is studenty and a bit crap, but the rest is a perfectly toxic look at modern violence. This is a vision of contemporary Mexico as a place of exploitation and death, where the authorities and the narcos treat everyday people as collateral, expendable. Grim, vile, colourful stuff.

The thing about collage is that it allows artists to cut right to the heart of an issue. And this group show is filled with artists slicing and dicing up ideas of sexual oppression, racial injustice and body autonomy.

At its core is the idea that collage is a tool of feminist resistance. There’s a display of radical feminist zines from the 1970s alongside work by Penny Slinger, Martha Rosler and Linder. It’s all very punk, a rejection of societal norms and gender ideals through cut-up imagery.

Younger contemporary artists take those themes further, especially the swirling composition of nude flesh by Justine Kurland and the Kafkaesque weirdness of Rachelle Mozman Solano. But the show is more expansive than that: Liz Johnson Artur takes a super personal approach to ideas of blackness and diaspora, Frida Orupabo creates hybrid forms that deal with identity and colonial history, K8 Hardy tackles queerness and sexuality. There are a lot of ideas here.

It feels a bit like an exhibition designed by committee, with too many people trying to squeeze in too many ideas, with the result being something too convoluted to work cohesively. It feels like a book someone is trying to squeeze a show out of.

But if you don’t try too hard to make sense of it, you get to enjoy some of the finest cuts of feminist art collage you’ll see for a long time.