Riotous ... Real Special Very Painting by Barry Reigate, on show at Newspeak in London. Photograph: Barry Reigate
Newspeak: British Art Now Part 1, London
After art from China and the Middle East, Charles Saatchi's back on home turf for the third survey show at his west London gallery. The title Newspeak refers to the lingo of dictatorship from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: a new language in which words are limited and experience thus restricted. Though intended to be taken ironically, the restriction in this show is a crucial one: Saatchi doesn't collect video, which means some of the most dynamic work to emerge in recent years is absent. Nonetheless, his pick of 29 artists has enough going on to give a sense of the questioning approach and variety of contemporary British art, a marked contrast to the YBA moment that cemented the collector's rep. Highlights include Karla Black's vulnerable, makeup-dusted sculpture, Spartacus Chetwynd's handmade animal costumes and Barry Reigate's riotous pop art collage, Real Special Very Painting.
Saatchi Gallery, SW3, Wed to 17 Oct
Skye Sherwin
David Nash, Wakefield
It's easy to belittle David Nash as the ultimate back-to-nature artist, one for the macho men of the woods, hacking away with his chainsaw, churning out monumental erections. Yet there's something disarming in Nash's singularity of purpose. "I want a simple approach to living and doing," he has said. The more than 300 works in this retrospective could well temporarily find their true cultural home amid Yorkshire Sculpture Park's undulating hillsides. Indoors and out, there are eucalyptus spheres, redwood towers, burnt twig drawings and extensive documentation of such site-specific projects as Wooden Boulder, a sculptural lump of oak set to sail on a stream in the Welsh mountains in 1978. Organic flux and decay are essential elements of Nash's various projects, with warping and cracking contributing a crucial finesse to the works' blunt and bold aesthetic.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, to 27 Feb, 2011
Robert Clark
Rachel Khedoori, London
For the past seven years, Rachel Khedoori has been searching the internet for news stories about the Iraq war. As her Iraq project demonstrates, that's a weighty amount of text. Collated in giant tomes, they're dictionary-dense, the articles running on and on: a physical testament to the burden of recent history, which the words circle and repeat, in near countless attempts to nail the fugitive business of what happened and what's still happening. Shifting from global politics to personal meditation, a new film work explores this effect on the landscape of the artist's childhood home, Australia. Both works create a sense of shifting space, inside the mind and in the world.
Hauser & Wirth, W1, Fri to 31 Jul
Skye Sherwin
The Glass Delusion, Sunderland
The Glass Delusion takes its title from a term, coined in the Middle Ages, for a form of depression in which sufferers fear they are made of glass and therefore impossibly vulnerable to psychic and physical breakage. It is recorded that victims would refuse to sit down as they believed their body weight would fracture their buttocks. So here, an impressive array of artists, including Susan Hiller and Matt Mullican, reflect on the dual nature of glass's hardness and fragility. A highlight is bound to be Beryl Sokoloff's film celebration of the House of Mirrors, built in 1960s Woodstock by the wonderfully obsessive Clarence Schmidt.
National Glass Centre, to 3 Oct
Robert Clark
001 London, London
The big city is the subject of this zingy show of prints created by a who's who of up-to-the-minute graphic artists. There's the mastermind behind big boys' "character toy" company Arnos, James Jarvis, whose 2D orange ball on legs looks like a distant cousin to Tony Hart's iconic Plasticine chum Morph. Fashion designer and fabric-print whiz David David has created a signature bright op-art design. Meanwhile Anthony Burrill, a kingpin of the scene, provides a tart take on life in the capital with a print featuring a mass of prohibitive road signs. Look out, too, for young designer Kate Moross, Lizzie Finn's needlework-inspired illustration, plus "Victorian punk revivalists" the Rubbishmen.
7 Marshall St, W1, to 3 Jul
Skye Sherwin
Dürer and Italy, Port Sunlight
A lovely show on loan from Glasgow's Hunterian Museum, enchantingly displayed in the quirky Port Sunlight village's equally lovely Lady Lever Art Gallery. While the exhibition ostensibly charts in part the great German Renaissance artist's creative cross-fertilisation with his Italian contemporaries, any excuse is welcome to get another glimpse of his engravings, surely some of the most sensitively skilful pieces of printmaking of all time. Each image could only be by Dürer and no one else before or since. Here you can see his Eve with corkscrew locks and Adam with his naked foot planted, for some reason, on a mouse's tail. Here's his Self-Portrait, all dolled-up hippy-style like someone out of the Incredible String Band. But Dürer's most unforgettable print is Melancholia, an enigmatic reflection on the mysteries of creation and the expectation for artists to be somewhat wired to the moon.
Lady Lever Art Gallery, to 26 Sep
Robert Clark
Lily Van Der Stokker: No Big Deal Thing, St Ives
Lily Van Der Stokker's art will do anything to make friends. The Dutch artist's relentlessly cheery giant wall drawings teem with flowers, greetings-card messages, dopey blobby shapes and candy-coloured polka dots. They indulge in decoration, pretty colours, niceness and mawkish charm. In fact, they're so girly, childish and cute as to become a little belligerent: an alternative kind of feminist challenge to art world machismo and its yen for the grave and drily intellectual. She seems to ask, quite seriously, what's wrong with artists being upbeat or talking about love and family – while also pondering how it is that many people go weak at the knees for this stuff. This is her largest UK exhibition yet and includes wall drawings and works on paper.
Tate St Ives, to 26 Sep
Skye Sherwin
MadeIn, Birmingham
The Chinese artists' collective MadeIn presents installations that make often deceptively playful comment on assumptions of national culture. In addition to amalgamating the words "made in", the term apparently translates phonetically into Chinese as "without a roof". This is art that likes to sidestep easy categorisation as well as the creative restrictions of recent Chinese history, and the work itself tends to tackle big, bad themes of Middle Eastern conflicts with audacious assemblages of throwaway raw materials. The toe-ends of combat desert boots are arranged in an inward facing circle. An inert pile of rubble, like some bomb blast debris, can be seen on closer inspection to be animated by a rhythmical electrical breathing.
Ikon Gallery, to 11 Jul
Robert Clark
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