The Independent Recommends: The Five Best Shows

Andreas Gursky (Serpentine Gallery)

Photographs 1994-98: wide-vision, high-finish, micro-detailed vistas of our world - stock-exchange floor, cityscape, airport, alpine valley - images filled with more than the eye can see. To 7 Mar

Grinling Gibbons (V&A)

The finest chisel-work of the master 17th-century woodcarver, who made intricacy and the abundance of nature his trademark. To 24 Jan

Chris Ofili (Whitworth Gallery, Manchester)

This upbeat, 1998 Turner Prize-winner creates dense, decorative paintings with swirls of dots, eyes, Afros, black icons and balls of elephant dung (above). To 24 Jan

Bridget Riley (Abbot Hall Gallery, Kendal)

A small retrospective, spanning Riley's career as top British abstractionist - from the shimmering monochromes of her early Sixties Op Art fame, to colour, stripes, diagonals, curves. To 31 Jan

Oppe Watercolour Collection (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Classic 18th- and 19th-century British watercolours, including Alexander Cozens' blot-derived sketches, John Sell Cotman, Constable and Francis Towne. To 24 Jan

Tom Lubbock