Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton, 5 February – 4 June
Romanticism – an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that emerged in late 18th Century – counted individualism, nature and emotion amongst its core concerns. By the 1850s, the Romantic Movement was established, studied and celebrated. Since then, art and ideas have evolved, other movements have fallen in and out of fashion and new philosophies have come to the fore. In contemporary Britain, we don’t often discuss Romanticism per se. However, its core values are pervasive, as the Southampton City Art Gallery seeks to illustrate with this new group exhibition. The enduring influence of the movement on British art is charted through work by, amongst others, JMW Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites and Christopher Le Brun PRA. Through this display we come to understand Romanticism as a defining strand of our collective art history.

44 Great Russell Street, London, 11 February – 19 March
This spring a listed Georgian building, opposite the British Museum, will become the London outpost of Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery. The month-long pop-up will be home to new, limited edition commissions from contemporary artists such as Beatriz Milhazes, Richard Deacon RA and Cornelia Parker RA. Aside from being beautiful, all objects on display will be available to purchase. The proceeds will be reinvested into the Ikon gallery, helping to ensure it’s artistic future.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 5 February – 15 May
Unlike his fellow Norwegian Edvard Munch, Nikolai Astrup is not a household name. The Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first British institution to hold an exhibition of his work – and to give him the attention he deserves. Astrup’s brightly coloured paintings and woodcuts have a lushness that is further enriched by reference to the myth, folklore and tradition of his native land. Visit this show to discover a marginalised master and encounter the emotional and physical landscape of the country he calls home.

New Art Centre, Salisbury, 6 February – 2 April 2016
Giants of 20th Century British art come together in this exhibition. Work by Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Kenneth Armitage is joined by, and juxtaposed with, other three dimensional sculptors working from the 1950s onwards. The unifying theme is innovation; the featured artists have contributed to the development of sculpture through radical manipulation of form and material. New Art Centre demonstrates the provocative aspect of the art form, nationally and internationally.

The Graves Gallery, Sheffield, 18 February – 25 June 2016
Bridget Riley, one of Britain’s most important and influential painters, made her name as an op-artist working exclusively in monochrome. This new exhibition focuses on a pivotal period in her career – the moment she began to play with colour. Her experiments began in 1967, the year before Riley became the first Briton to win the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale. The artist has worked with a varied palette ever since. She understands colour to be “unstable and incalculable… rich and comforting”. See how she explores these idiosyncrasies with a visit to Sheffield’s Graves Gallery.