The Independent Recommends: The Five Best Shows

Rembrandt by Himself (National Gallery, London)

The self-portraits. The first and most searching autobiography in paint. The great pictorial statements of honesty and mortality, of the human depths. Thirty paintings. To 5 Sept

Bridget Riley (Serpentine Gallery, London)

The classic Op period (right): paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, blazing and shifting in black, white and magically elusive and illusive shades of grey. To 30 Aug

Shape of the Century (Salisbury Festival)

One hundred years of British sculpture - and they're all here: Epstein, Gill, Moore, Caro, Hepworth, Frink, Long, Kapoor, Gormley, Whiteread. To 19 Aug

Presence (Tate Gallery, Liverpool)

Figurative art at the end of the century, from a monumental Lucian Freud nude to Ron Mueck's giant, super-real model of a gawky girl in a swimsuit. To 5 Sept

John Coplans (Dean Gallery, Edinburgh)

Portrait of the artist as a fat old naked man? Coplans' photo-tableaux of close-ups of his body present flesh beyond classification, vulnerable and monumental. To 25 Jul