vallierojas: This week's new exhibitions

Kenneth Grange, London

Grange is the man behind the smooth snouts of InterCity 125 trains, curvy Adshel park benches and ubiquitous glass bus shelters, that 1970s kitchen icon, the Kenwood Mini Mixer, and the comfortingly round form of the new black cab. Over the past five decades the designer, along with his consultancy Pentagram, has been responsible for many of these small details that make up the big face of Britain. His work is simply everywhere, from family bathrooms to city streets. That Grange remains a bit of an unsung genius is something this survey show should remedy. His accomplishments can be explored across more than 150 products, prototypes and drawings alongside film and photos.

Design Museum, SE1, to 30 Oct

Skye Sherwin

Songs Of The Sea, Sunderland

The National Glass Centre continues to stage charming exhibitions by treating its glass medium remit with a certain amount of poetic licence. There's Laura Bel�m's installation of glass bells with a polyphonic soundtrack, and Richard Marquis's wheel-carved glass sculpture Razzle Dazzle Boat. But there's also Susan Collins's pixelated photographs, recordings of sea shanties, and even research conducted charting historical ships' logs as possible evidence of climate change. This is what exhibition themes should be: a catalyst for wayward reverie and imaginative enquiry.

National Glass Centre, to 30 Oct

Robert Clark

David Askevold, London

David Askevold will be unknown to most in Britain. For a key generation of artists in the US, however, the late Canadian conceptualist left an indelible impression. It was as a teacher that he really made his mark, revolutionising the art college in Nova Scotia, where he invited the likes of Lawrence Weiner and Robert Smithson to set tasks for students, and then at CalArts. Video art mavericks Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley have acknowledged their debt to Askevold's leftfield approach and this show includes the works he made with these young guns in the 1970s. Many works here are sensual and eerie, with smudged images or faces double exposed like ghostly visitations.

Camden Arts Centre, NW1, to 25 Sep

Transmitter/Receiver, Middlesbrough

One of the big innovatory breakthroughs of early-20th century art resulted from three or four irreverent individuals cutting out fragments of photographic scraps and sticking them together in outlandish combinations. This show, subtitled The Persistence Of Collage, charts cut-up's development through the 20th and into the 21st century of British art, including sculpture and film as well as paper. Eileen Agar provides an early point of departure with hybrid images of displacement and disquiet. Of contemporary artists John Stezaker stands out by demonstrating what poetic metaphors might be conjured by simply gluing photographic landscapes on top of portrait photographs. Look out too for contributions from David Batchelor and Grayson Perry.

MIMA, to 6 Nov

Darren Harvey-Regan, Exeter

The animal kingdom, or rather how we see it, is the subject of recent graduate Darren Harvey-Regan's meditative show of photography and installation, A Collection Of Gaps. In his series Elisions, a drawing of a bird is carefully labelled all the way from its upper mandible to its hind toe. Sombre photos recalling museum catalogues depict 3D depictions of creatures against dark backgrounds, including a taxidermy badger swathed in plastic. What seems to be a real live mouse pauses above his reflection in one shot. What it's looking at and what we're seeing, naming and embellishing with our own uniquely human anthropomorphisms, are a universe apart, no matter how many scientific tags and labels we might impose.

Phoenix Gallery, to 1 Sep

Mervyn Peake, Carlisle

To contribute to the centenary celebrations of Peake's birth, an extensive show of his drawings and illustrations for his popular Gormenghast trilogy of novels as well as for such appropriately dark literary fantasies as Tales By The Brothers Grimm and Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. It's easy to dismiss Peake's visual output as indulgent gothic fantasy; and indeed his images set the tone for so many subsequent cliches of the genre: the emaciated pallor of his somnambulistic protagonists, the obsessive detailing and filigree patterning of his graphic mannerisms, the too easy reliance on grotesque distortions. Yet when you read them as momentary punctuations of his undeniably inventive storytelling they do add an extra intense air of hallucinatory clarity. After all, this stuff is much more individualistic, personal and genuinely creepy than most of the fantasy art around these days.

Tullie House Art Gallery, to 25 Sep

Von Ribbentrop In St Ives, Cambridge

Andrew Lanyon's show hinges on a curious conceit linking the Cornish holidays of Hitler's ambassador with the innovations of the British modernists who flocked to St Ives at that time. Rumours and wry fictions breeding in the show's ether include Nazi plans to invade Britain using postcards of the coast as a guide. Or that the abstract innovations of the likes of Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and Lanyon's father, the renowned landscape painter Peter Lanyon, could reflect paranoia about realist depictions of a country threatened by invasion. Work by these St Ives school greats and others including the famed outsider artist and local fisherman Alfred Wallis, who so captivated Nicholson and Christopher Wood, takes its place in a narrative exploring art and war.

Kettle's Yard, to 18 Sep

Atsuko Tanaka, Birmingham

The first works in this retrospective of the renowned Japanese artist are two paper collages titled Calendar (1954). Dating from a prolonged period when Tanaka was confined to hospital, their meticulous graphic order marks out a countdown to her release into the outside world. So the scene is set for an art of highly sensitive existential necessity. The most internationally known piece here is Electric Dress, a costume constructed of a mass of live strip lights and lightbulbs. Typical and emblemetic of postwar Japanese popular culture, the dress conflates a traditionalist taste for ritual with a fascination for the electronic networks of the urban environment. Her later works here, mostly acrylic paintings, might appear utterly abstract but they too seem to be the result of some kind of marking out of existential rhythms.

Ikon Gallery, Wed to 11 Sep

Skye Sherwin

Robert Clark

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