Serpentine Gallery, until 9 February 2014
The weekend’s major art opening in London is the Serpentine Sackler Gallery’s presentation of The Chapman Brothers, christened les enfants terribles of the British art scene in the 1990s and early noughties for their images that pushed the boundaries of taste, from mangled nude mannequins of young girls to works like Hell (2000), memorably the centrepiece of the Academy’s ‘Apocalypse’ show of the same year, which represented hyper-horrific genocide in a vitrine using Action Man-style figurines.

It will be interesting to see whether their work still has the capacity to inflame its audience, more than a decade on from the height of its notoriety. As a counterpoint, the main Serpentine space is showing the work of Wael Shawky, an Egyptian artist who recently used puppets in two films that showed the horrors of the Crusades.

Fitzwilliam Museum, 3 December - 21 April 2014
Although an important figure in modern British art, John Craxton RA – the subject of a major survey at the University of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum – spent much of his time in Crete from the 1960s to his death in 2009, taking influence from Mediterranean light, landscape and myths for his highly graphic figurative works.

The Fitzwilliam explores his whole career in full with more than 60 paintings, beginning in war-time London when he associated with artists including John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Augustus John and his then flatmate Lucian Freud. Former RA Magazine editor Sarah Greenberg interviewed Craxton in 2007 and her piece is worth a read ahead of visiting the exhibition.

Modern Art Oxford, 30 November - 2 February 2014
Czech artist Eva Kotátková creates environments and performances that question our expectations of behaviour, as well as the objects around us. “It’s rules and conventions that hold us prisoner,” Kotátková said of a previous work. “I wanted to render that visible.”

In her first UK exhibition at Modern Art Oxford that opens this weekend, she creates a theatrical environment in which performers interact with everyday objects and sculptures, while in another gallery an actor plays the part of a professor, lecturing about the nature of storytelling.

The Wallace Collection, 27 November - 23 February 2014
Following its display during this year’s Venice Biennale, an exhibition of artist’s glass opens in London at two institutions that might not normally appear aligned: The Wallace Collection and London School of Fashion.

Instead of creating vases and chandeliers, the majority of the artists involved – who range from Academicians Tracey Emin and Cornelia Parker to fashion designer Hussein Chalayan – have incorporated glass as just another substance to be included at will in their wider practice. Conrad Shawcross RA, for example, has produced a jutting, geometric, two-metre-wide aluminium matrix, with certain of its sides stretched with yellow glass.

Contemporary Art Society People around the Royal Academy have been kvelling like Jewish grandmothers about the fact that former RA Schools student Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has been nominated for this year’s Turner Prize. The winner is announced on Monday live on Channel 4 as per usual, and I’ll be at the ceremony in Derry rooting for Yiadom-Boakye’s enigmatic paintings of figures. Another nominee, Laure Prouvost, has a small show opening at London’s Contemporary Art Society on Wednesday.