Hauser and Wirth, Somerset, 21 March – 21 June 2015
I’m looking forward to visiting Hauser & Wirth Somerset this weekend for the opening of its Architecture Season, which features various site-specific/ architectural interventions and events, from a sound piece from Turner Prize-winner Susan Phillipsz to the installation of last year’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, designed by the Chilean architect Smiljan Radic, in the site’s idyllic grounds. The programme includes the group exhibition Land Marks: Structures for a Poetic Universe, which comprises over 100 visionary examples of architecture, in the forms of models, sculptures and drawings.

Lisson Gallery, London, 25 March – 9 May 2015
Visitors to the Royal Academy’s Anish Kapoor exhibition in 2009 will have seared in their memories the 30-tonne train of thickened paint that moved through the neo-classical galleries, as well as the canon that shot the same red pigment onto their white walls. The possibilities of paint are returned to again in Kapoor’s latest show at Lisson, which features new works formed by overlapping vortex-smears of red and white resin and silicon. If Kapoor sometimes pushes such materials to the edge, then the artist in Lisson’s second space – Lee Ufan, the legendary Korean-born minimalist – restrains them, aiming to make powerful gestures through pared-down forms.

Sotheby’s, London, 20 – 25 March 2015
Restaurant tycoon Richard Caring is refurbishing his famous restaurant The Ivy, and has generously decided to auction for charity the art and objects that once filled the dining rooms. The lots go under the hammer on 25 March, so there are a few days to some of the knockout works before they are sold, such as Grosvenor School prints; works on paper by Freud, Moore, Bacon, Riley, Auerbach and the like; sublime ceramics by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper; and art by a large number of Academicians, including a joyful architectural screen by Joe Tilson RA.

Pangolin London, London, 25 March – 2 May 2015
Kapoor and the other experimental British sculptors who emerged during the 1980s and 1990s had the ground laid for them by influential figures such as Bryan Kneale, who in 1974 became the first abstract sculptor to be elected a Royal Academician, after an acclaimed exhibition at the Whitechapel in 1966. Kings Cross gallery Pangolin celebrates Kneale with a solo show this spring, examining in particular the importance of drawing in the production of his forged and welded fluid metal forms.

The National Portrait Gallery, London, 18 March – 31 August 2015

The National Portrait Gallery presents its first display of abstract art. Although he rose to fame in the 1950s with “Kitchen Sink” social realism, painter Jack Smith embraced abstraction from the 1960s, and during the 1980s embarked on an idiosyncratic series of “abstract portraits”, in which sitters’ characters were evoked through the play of non-representational geometric shapes. The four on view are reminiscent of colourful Kandinskys, and Smith shared the Russian’s love of music, with two of the paintings representing the composers Harrison Birtwistle and Colin Matthews, and a third the choreographer Ashley Page.

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