RA Magazine's pick of this week’s art events (13 - 20 Dec)

_{Sarah Lucas, 'Bunny Gets Snookered #10', 1997. Tan tights, red stockings, chair, steel clamp, kapok and wire, 104 x 71 x 89 cm. D.Daskalopoulos Collection. © The Artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London.} From Death to Death and Other Small Tales
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 15 Dec - 8 Sept 2013
The collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art intermingles this winter with that of Mr D. Daskalopoulos, the Greek food magnate and important art collector, in an intriguing titled thematic exhibition at the gallery, ‘From Death to Death and Other Small Tales’.

The significance of the body in art is the common thread wound through the works on view, which range from Picasso’s Seated Nude (1969) and Louise Bourgeois’s hanging carcass of a sculpture Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968) to Helen Chadwick’s Self-Portrait (1991) – a portrait of a brain – and Bunny Gets Snookered #10 (1997) by Sarah Lucas, a female figure slumped in a chair, formed by stockings and tights.

Richard Hughes: Where It All Happened Once
Last chance: Tramway, until 16 December 2012
British artist Richard Hughes takes the detritus of modern life – from discarded clothes to obsolete storage warehouse pallets – and brings it to life again in sculpture, assemblages and installations.

_{Photo © Keith Hunter. Richard Hughes 'Where it All Happened Once' Tramway November 2012.}

His visual wit very rarely lets the viewer down, and his latest show at Glasgow’s Tramway includes the wonderful spectacle of a seemingly life-size replica of a community centre, upside-down as if it had been chucked across the floor of the gallery space. Elsewhere lampposts are cast as large comic legs striding forward and a footprint shape is sculpted from bricks. The show finishes on Sunday.

Sanja Iveković: Unknown Heroine
South London Gallery + Calvert 22, 14 Dec - 24 February 2013
The subtitle of a new survey of Croatian artist Sanja Iveković, staged across the South London Gallery and Shoreditch’s Calvert 22 space,
_{Sanja Iveković, 'Make Up Make Down', 1978. 5'12'', still from video, colour, sound. Image courtesy of the artist.} is ‘Unknown Heroine’, and indeed Iveković remains relatively unknown to Western audiences, despite her groundbreaking work from the 1970s as part of the Nova Umjetnička Praksa (New Art Practice) generation of artists from the former Yugoslavia. An activist, performance artist and filmmaker, Iveković’s work has often drawn attention to gender roles and representations. During the five-minute video Make Up Make Down (1978), for example, the artist applies make-up at such as slow pace that it turns it into almost a religious act – but the viewer only sees Iveković’s torso and hands, her face always cropped out of the frame.

Force of Nature: Picturing Ruskin’s Landscape
Museums Sheffield, 15 Dec – 23 June 2013
The Millennium Gallery in Sheffield draws together works for the city’s art collections for a show dedicated to John Ruskin’s idea of landscape.

_{George Shaw, 'The End of Time', 2008-9. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © the artist.}

The Victorian art critic, known best for his championing of the Pre-Raphaelites and J.M.W. Turner RA, argued in his three-volume The Stones of Venice for “truth to nature”; this was adherence to how an artist perceived nature, rather than a reliance on the pictorial conventions handed down from the art academies. Contemporaneous artists like Turner, G.F. Watts RA and John Brett are shown alongside contemporary practitioners such as Julian Opie, Kathy Prendergast and George Shaw.

Winifred Nicholson
Last chance: Kettle’s Yard, until 21 Dec
If you’re based in Cambridge or nearby, I recommend visiting Kettle’s Yard by Thursday of next week, the last day of the gallery’s exhibition on painter Winifred Nicholson, an important figure in the British avant-garde before the war.

_{Winifred Nicholson, 'Seascape with Two Boats' (aka Seascape with Dinghy), 1926. Oil on canvas. 680 x 870 mm [WN 6]. Trustees of Winifred Nicholson. Kettle's Yard, University of Cambridge.}

She married Ben Nicholson after studying at Byam Shaw School of Art, and in the early 1920s she concentrated on painting, with a free, expressive hand, portraits, still-lifes and landscapes set in Cumbria and Switzerland; after they separated, she lived in Paris, experimented with abstraction and solidified her friendships with artists including Piet Mondrian and Constantin Brancusi. Her figurative work, including that after the war, remains her most enchanting, typified by a poetic sense of palette and a mystical interest in the natural world.

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine

• Royal Academy of Arts