RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (16 – 23 Aug)

Klimt Illustrated
From 21 August
The Vienna Tourist Board and London’s top street art gallery Lazarides have teamed up to pay respect to Gustav Klimt this week, in celebration of 150 years since the Austrian master’s birth. On Tuesday nine international street artists will produce Klimt-inspired artworks in front of the public in London’s Grosvenor Gardens, from 9am to 7pm. Participants include the American pop art prankster Ron English, Shepard Fairey (of Obama ‘Hope’ poster fame) and Birmingham-based Lucy McLauchlan, an artist whose decorative, geometric mural works have always had something of a Secession-era aesthetic. From Friday, Lazarides in Soho follows up with a week-long exhibition of the artists’ work.

Richard Parry: Elephant Paintings
Until 16 September
Hull-born artist Richard Parry presents five large paintings at Bloomberg SPACE from today. Parry’s work so far has sent up both the art scene and his audience’s expectations: he has produced a catalogue for a fictitious art fair, printed African textiles with counterfeit Louis Vuitton livery and organized the Richard Parry Emerging Artist Award 2011, a prize he described as ‘a work of art in its own right’ that redistributed some of the money he received as the winner of the Dazed/Converse Emerging Artist Award 2011. He claims that the paintings he unveils at Bloomberg – known as ‘Elephant Paintings’ – ‘outsource’ the work of the artist to four baby elephants from Nairobi.

John Currin, 'Red Head', 2012. Oil on canvas, 61 x 46 x 0.3 cm. Unique Last chance: John Currin at Sadie Coles
Until 25 August
Next Saturday the doors close at London’s Sadie Coles gallery on the latest series of works by American painter John Currin. Over the last two decades the New York-based artist has gained critical acclaim, six-figure sales and a certain mainstream notoriety for paintings of female figures, from voluptuous nudes to high-society hostesses, that combine art-historical references – in particular an abiding Cranach-like strangeness – with a satirical edge and ambiguity characteristic of contemporary art practice. His work, often virtuosic in its execution, has become increasingly x-rated over the last few years, and ever more sinister: the pieces at Sadie Coles are twisted takes on pages from 1970s porn magazines.

• Royal Academy of Arts