Estorick Collection, London, until 7 September 2014 The Estorick’s exhibition of Perugia-born painter Gerardo Dottori should broaden our understanding of Futurism. The Italian art movement, so associated with urbanism and – in the famous words of Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909 – the “roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire”, spreads to the rural sublime when it comes to Dottori’s work, with the Umbrian landscape majestically fractured into characteristic cones, circles and cubist facets.

National Portrait Gallery, London, until 26 October 2014 Even reading it today, almost a century later, Virginia Woolf’s writing is like a blast of cold air, hitting a highpoint of British modernism that has rarely been scaled since. A show at the National Portrait Gallery explores in depth her life and achievements with archive material such as diaries and letters, photographs of her and her Bloomsbury Group associates, and some lovely portraits by the likes of Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry.

Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 14 September 2014
Giulio Paolini came to prominence in the 1960s alongside other artists associated with Arte Povera, a conceptual avant-garde that was arguably most significant art movement in Italy since Futurism. And like many conceptualists, Paolini has a penchant for the self-reflexive: in his installation Big Bang (1997-8), one of the works on view in a new Whitechapel Gallery survey, an artist’s studio is created in miniature, enclosed in Perspex and then… set at the centre of a life-size artist’s studio.

Alison Jacques, London, until 9 August 2014
A treat: an exhibition of works by the late American painter Dorothea Tanning at London’s Alison Jacques. Her enigmatic oil and watercolour works on view show figures in flux, often hinting at her Surrealist roots (in her early years Tanning’s associates included Duchamp and Man Ray, and she was married to Ernst). In Tableau vivant (Living Picture, 1954), a naked female figure is hugged/held by a huge dog – a highly ambiguous image that once seen is glued in the mind.

Raven Row, London, until 10 August 2014 Dance and performance art waltz together in the work of Yvonne Rainer who, along with other famous fleet-of-foot figures such as Trisha Brown and Simone Forti in 1960s and 1970s New York, pioneered choreography with complex theoretical content. For her exhibition at London’s Raven Row, she has trained dancers to perform some of her historic pieces in the gallery space; her experimental films, photographs, sketches and texts can also be viewed.

Sam Phillips (@SamP_London) is Editor of RA Magazine.