At Grizedale

Van Lieshout works with clichéd role models of Western society and pushes the limits of his protagonists, his audience and his own understanding of himself as an artist.

In his films, Van Lieshout has cycled from Rotterdam to Rostock in eastern Germany, encountering unrepentantly stupid antisemites and scary neo-Nazi skinheads; wandered the damp Dutch countryside with his brother, Bart, winding his sibling up and offering helpful advice about his sexuality (Bart didn't speak to Erik for a year after this particular film); and fallen among a group of mentally ill patients on a day's outing. The artist's parents sometimes make an appearance. Van Lieshout's films are frequently very funny and touching and painful, not least because he is forever giving himself a hard time – about his love life, his lostness in the world, about being an artist. The tragedy and ridiculousness of masculinity is played out time and again.

As well as making films, Van Lieshout builds ramshackle environments in which to view them, with home-botched Rietveld chairs, bits of old carpet, gaffer-taped walls. Sometimes you have to sit in a circle, like a group-therapy session, or clamber into some snaggy, ill-constructed chamber of dubious cleanliness. Whenever I have come across these funny little pop-up cinemas that he knocks together himself – a ramshackle shed outside the Dutch Pavilion in Venice, a converted shipping container in Berlin, a sort of daft, play-time spaceship at the Frieze art fair.