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Sculpture has changed more radically over the past half century than ever before. Once upon a time, sculptors carved wood or stone, or cast models in bronze. But today’s artists have a bewildering array of styles, techniques and materials at their disposal. As a result, it can be tricky to characterise contemporary sculpture. Thankfully, the title of the Saatchi Gallery’s new sculpture exhibition, “The Shape of Things to Come”, promises clarification.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the latest incarnation of the Saatchi Gallery, which now occupies a palatial former military barracks off the King’s Road in Chelsea. Inside, the decor — white walls, controlled lighting and sanded floorboards — is neutral and a little soulless. The rooms are so large that they threaten to swallow up anything but bold, bombastic work.

In such a setting, though, an exhibition of sculpture can thrive. Sculpture is often big. It can command the space it occupies. Consequently it stands a better chance than painting of making an impression within Saatchi’s wilderness of galleries.

“The Shape of Things to Come” showcases the work of 20 contemporary sculptors in the Saatchi collection. The title is something of a misnomer, since the exhibition contains several already established artists, such as Rebecca Warren, Roger Hiorns, who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009, and the Californian conceptualist John Baldessari, who was born in 1931 and, if truth be told, is closer to the end of his career than the beginning. “The Shape of Things Now” would have been more accurate, if less punchy.

But a lot of the sculpture is exciting and invigorating. The first room contains Kris Martin’s Summit: eight craggy megaliths, discovered in Colorado, resting on rusty, industrial supports. Apparently, Martin has placed a small paper cross on top of each rock — a joke, presumably, at the expense of man’s hubristic attempts to conquer nature. I missed the crosses when I walked through the installation, but the standing stones look beautiful, bringing a pleasing chunk of wildness into the metropolitan setting.

Martin’s work feels restrained and classical compared to some of the anarchy nearby, including two madcap, festive pieces by the Canadian David Altmejd. The Healers (2008) presents a group of burlesque mutants engaged in a joyless sexual orgy. As for The New North (2007) — how best to describe it? Part polar bear, part grotto, part helter-skelter, and part disco glitter ball: I’ve never seen anything like it.

Around the corner, there are a number of creepy sculptures by the Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere. Marthe (2008) is the headless body of a desiccated, stick-thin old woman, with skin the waxy pallor of a corpse, metamorphosing into a tangle of branches or tentacles.

There are also two of her unsettling stuffed animals, one presented inside a glass cabinet, like a noteworthy scientific specimen. At first they look like glossy brown horses, but on closer inspection, you realise they are anatomically impossible: eyeless, devoid of hooves and nostrils, and stitched together in improbable contortions. Initially alluring, then terrifying, De Bruyckere’s abortive equine lumps are Frankenstein’s monsters for an age of genetic engineering.

I’ve always admired the deliberately aggressive ugliness of Rebecca Warren’s distorted female nudes, made from bumpy unfired clay — all those ridiculously bulbous breasts and buttocks are a withering riposte to the clichés of male sexual desire. I was impressed, too, by the presence and poise of Thomas Houseago’s hunched figures, which build upon the “flat” sculptures of Picasso’s later years.

Like several artists in the exhibition, Folkert de Jong, who was born in the Netherlands, produces figures imbued with a strong antic energy. In The Dance (2007), a circle of men wearing ruffs and doublets, as though they’ve stepped out of a 17th-century oil painting, stagger drunkenly about, smothered in a sticky black substance like tar. Some of them have thick planks of pink Styrofoam, like enormous pink wafers, in place of arms, lending them the aspect of seabirds futilely attempting to get airborne after becoming mired in an oil slick. It’s a strange, complex and open-ended piece.

Much of the work in the show is abstract. Björn Dahlem’s neon work, The Milky Way (2007), is derivative of Dan Flavin, but Anselm Reyle’s knot of colourful neon tubing suspended in mid-air, like a three-dimensional scribble, is energetic and joyfully free. The Scottish artist David Batchelor makes tremendous colourful abstract compositions out of improbable objects such as found light boxes, shelving units, fly swats and feather dusters.

I left the exhibition unsure about the precise “shape” of things to come. But one thing’s for certain: there’s a lot of misshapen, amorphous work around at the moment — Saatchi’s sculptors seem ashamed to make anything that could be described as heroic. That said, what surprised me was how much of the work was indebted to advances that have been taking place in avant-garde art since at least the 1960s. Several of Saatchi’s forward-thinking artists also have one eye on the past.

Dirk Skreber’s Untitled (Crash 1) and Untitled (Crash 2) offer a good example. In 2009, Skreber took two wrecked sports cars, a bright red Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder and a black Hyundai Tiburon, and wrapped each one around an enormous metal column, freeze-framing the momentous forces of a collision, and offering a ballsy, brash tableau. If cars could be pole-dancers, this is what they would look like.

But Skreber’s car crashes would be unthinkable without the precedent of the American sculptor John Chamberlain, who has been mangling automobile parts and presenting them as sculpture for half a century. To see what I mean, head for the Gagosian Gallery near King’s Cross, where Chamberlain’s most recent batch of sculptures fashioned from mashed-up, mass-produced, mid-century American cars, can be seen until June.

In the past, Chamberlain’s work has been understood as a pessimistic commentary on the high-flown ideals of Modernism, or even the American dream. But these seven new works — Gordian knots of fenders, bumpers, bonnets, grilles, light fittings and aerodynamic fins, resembling extras from the set of the latest Transformers movie — are surprisingly glossy and beautiful, decked out in a smart livery of white, cream, black, gold, and reams of shiny chrome. Here is an artist who was born in the 1920s, yet is still capable of creating a futuristic vision.

'The Shape of Things to Come’ until Oct 16

'John Chamberlain’ until June 18