Art extraordinaire

Nuria is a perfect example of a street artist who is moving far beyond urban clichés. Her innovative, intensely colourful work questions the landscape itself, being as much about building forms as it is about paint. The Spain-based artist began to create street pieces in 2000, intitially with her partner El Tono and then in her own right.

Her background was never in graffiti, so her approach to using paint was completely fresh: she began to play with the locations of her paintings, echoing and responding to the lines of street doors and urban alcoves. The abstract, almost constructivist results bring out different aspects of the cityscape.

Nuria has created work on the streets of Madrid, abandoned buildings in Lanzarote, and the favelas in Brazil. Her work aims to reinvent the concept of space, to transform a forgotten location. The street is vitally important to her pieces – apart from the visual influences, she is interested in the social and political aspects of improving the landscape and inspiring thought.

She is now beginning to move into sculptural installations, translating her vibrant coloured lines into 3D shapes. It's work which still has the fascinating contrast of abstract modernist shapes and the freedom of exceptionally bright colours, and work which is still about adding something to the city rather than merely defacing space.

A homely glow from the yellow walls greets you as you enter Richard Wathen's exhibition. And yet we've been tricked into a false sense of security; the faces that gaze at you from the walls are of a contradictory disposition, both inviting and disturbing. They have a timeless quality, appropriated from bygone eras and a multitude of personal and cultural references.

Pale naked children live within a realm built upon Fra Angelico's restrained 15th-century palette and Gainsborough's representational concerns. They watch you, both cautious and confident in their adult stance. In contrast, women with disengaging doll-like eyes are clothed, set against vibrant coloured grounds caught between the Northern Renaissance and the 19th Century.

Wathen presents a collective history, and his subjects' familiarity is alluring and intriguing. But these portraits create a state of ambiguity in which painter, sitter and viewer coexist.

The artworld is made up of two types of people. The people who rule it, who are very rich, very smartly dressed and who play golf; and the artists. And anyone who's ever made any art knows that it's mostly about playing around. In a very serious way, of course.

So Play, an exhibition dedicated to looking at "art as play", pulls in both these directions. Highlights include Matt Franks' luminously-coloured giant cartoon-ish toy sculpture; Jock Mooney's puking comic animals and wreaths of fried eggs, seemingly from the mind of a crazed child; and Doug Fishbone's narrated film of slides and video clips, which appears to follow the chaos theory of editing - "Muhammad Ali G string bean…" he drones as perplexingly relevant images pop up.

However, trying to examine "play" through such faddish work seems to willingly turn a blind eye to the commercialism and materialism of the artworld and its fashions. With a roll call of art's rising and risen stars, including The Chapmans and Bob and Roberta Smith, Play feels more like the result of current art fashions than the self-conscious idea of "art as play.".

Do you know where you're going? Feeling a bit lost and confused by life? Stuck in sin or aiming for more worthy things? The idea of moral guidance in the modern world is at the basis of Francesca Lowe's brilliant exhibition at Riflemaker.

The project is a kind of creative collaboration with Scottish writer/genius Alasdair Gray. Both Lowe and Gray created work - in her case an exhibition, in his a story in a beautiful little booklet for the show – based around similar ideas of moralism and the title of the show, Terminus. Her work, in particular, was loosely inspired by his approach and imagery, though nothing is illustrated or obvious.

The results, however, are fascinating. Lowe's paintings are technically brilliant. She creates work that fuses muscular, neo-classical bodies with text gleaned from fairground imagery and advertising logos. Rather than the strictness of Renaissance figures, Lowe's classicism is more 18th-century inspired - sexy, louche, constantly in flux, chaotic.

The heart of the exhibition is a map, a kind of tree of life, which is also a kind of visual key to the rest of the show. Lowe looks at classic symbols and their traditional meanings and uses them to illustrate and explore ideas around the cycle of life. This tree has dirty vices at the bottom and good, honourable things at the top.

There's a lot of movement in these paintings - this is life as one big merry-go-round. The connection to Gray's writing may not be obvious, but it doesn't matter. His writing in the small book is jaw-droppingly good while Lowe's paintings are lascivious joys.