The Independent Recommends: The Five Best Shows

The Five Best Shows

Charlotte Salomon Royal Academy

"Life? Or Theatre?", Salomon's life in pictures. Her 405 raw gouaches tell the story of the German Jewish girl's haste before Auschwitz - an expressionistic operetta in three colours. To 17 Jan

Grinling Gibbons

Victoria & Albert Museum

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

Chris Ofili

Whitworth Gallery, Manchester

This 1998 Turner Prize-winner is an upbeat original, his surfaces dense and decorative, with swirls of dots, Afros and black icons, and incorporating elephant dung. To 24 Jan

Edward Burne-Jones

Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery

This centenary exhibition gathers together many favourites illustrating Burne-Jones's romantic and medievalist nether world. To 17 Jan

Aubrey Beardsley (V&A Museum)

Displaying the short and glittering life - he died in 1898 at 25 - of the master aesthete (above) and illustrator of the decadent scene, with his uniquely sinuous and florid line. Drawings, prints and

posters. To 10 Jan