White Cube Bermondsey, London, 28 January–18 April
Following the huge success of his 24-hour video installation The Clock (2010), which montaged thousands of movie clips to chronicle the passing of a day, Christian Marclay returns to White Cube with a solo show that includes the video Pub Crawl (2014), whose soundtrack is provided by empty glasses, cans and bottles found on London streets.

Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, 27 January–28 February
Fellow British artist Tania Kovats, in contrast, fills glass vessels for her installation All the Sea (2014), the centrepiece of her show at Sidney Cooper Gallery at Canterbury Christ Church University. A year instead of a day is the metric, with each of the 365 bottles containing water collected from seas across the globe, furthering Kovats’ investigation into natural materials and processes.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, until 21 February
From the natural fluid of water to the synthetic material of paint, which, once thinned with turpentine, was pooled on canvas by Helen Frankenthaler Hon RA to produce her seminal ‘stain’ paintings. Recent RA Schools graduate Aimée Parrott also uses staining in her work, in which watercolour, once permeated through a polyester mesh, forms thin layers of pigment. Pippy Houldsworth Gallery compares their practices from this week.

Pilar Corrias Gallery, London, until 28 February
Another RA School alumna, painter Mary Ramsden, privileges a process of masking rather than staining. Strokes of paint in a single colour, or rectangles of white, consciously block out layers underneath, so that the subsumed elements either echo at the edges or from the deep. Pilar Corrias presents a solo exhibition of her latest work.

Royal Academy of Arts, London, until 10 April
And it would be remiss of me, while discussing painting, to not remind readers that the RA’s show on Rubens – ‘the prince of painters’ – opens this weekend. It is as much about Rubens as the history of painting, mapping how fantastic artists who followed afterwards were influenced by the Flemish master, from Delacroix and Constable to Cézanne and Cy Twombly.

Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RA Magazine.