At De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill...

Stories commemorating the First World War and its centenary are likely to be everywhere this year.

For a view from the other side of the trenches try Der Krieg (The War), a series of 19 rare prints by formidable German artist Otto Dix, whose bleak portraits of Weimar-era Germany took aim at the authorities and society, and depicted prostitution, violence, old age and death.

The 19 prints loaned to De La Warr Pavilion from the British Museum were made by Dix (who fought at the Battle Of The Somme) six years after the First World War ended, when the disturbing trench experiences had crystallised.

So powerful and groundbreaking were the images that when the Nazis came to power, they regarded Dix as a degenerate and sacked him from his post as an art teacher at the Dresden Academy.

  • May 17 to July 13. Free. Call 01424 229111

At Towner Gallery, Eastbourne...

Swedish film artist John Skoog makes sparse, slow-paced videos.

For his first UK solo show in a public gallery, the winner of the 2013/14 Ars Viva prize for visual arts will make a new film set in the farmlands of the Swedish province of Skåne, where he was born.

Redoubt is a character study of a little-known farmer called Karl Goran Persson who died in 1971 at the age of 81.

Alone after his parents died in the 1940s and worried about a Soviet invasion, Persson began fortifying the farmstead with junk.

“Bicycles, springbeds, anything that he could buy cheap at the junkyard were thrown into the cement with which he casted the building,” says Skoog.

“Today, as the years wear away the concrete, the objects he used to fortify the cement appear: a landscape monument in the middle of a rye field.”

The Frankfurt-based film-maker is also curating an exhibition from Towner’s collection.

  • January 25 to April 6. Free. Call 01323 434670

At Pallant House Gallery, Chichester...

Much-loved English painter Stanley Spencer served in the First World War as a hospital orderly in Bristol and as a soldier on the Salonika front.

His murals based on those experiences – painted between 1927 and 1932 – are considered his greatest achievement, combining the realism of everyday life with dreamlike visions from his imagination.

The paintings are, in his own words, “a symphony of rashers of bacon” with “tea-making obligato”. They describe the banal daily life that, to those from the battlefield, represented a “heaven in a hell of war”.

The culmination of the mural paintings is Spencer’s interpretation of the Resurrection painted directly onto Sandham Memorial Chapel, which is currently undergoing major conservation works.

Pallant House will represent the composition with large-scale working cartoons by Spencer.

  • February 15 to June 15. Call 01243 774557

At Fabrica Gallery, Brighton...

Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren expands on previous work, Heaven Is A Place On Earth, for a large-scale project as part of the gallery’s Out Of The Blue: Woad cross-border programme with Amiens in France.

Working under the title On Balance, Dahlgren will again pick up the minimalist tradition of exploring the relationship between the body and the object, which began with the interactive art work featuring giant banks of dart boards modified by visitors in Heaven Is A Place On Earth.

  • April 5 to May 26. Free. Call 01273 778646.

At Jerwood Gallery, Hastings...

London-based South African artist Ansel Krut makes bright, bold subversions of still life.

He was awarded second prize in the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2004 for his work Heartless Roach.

The exhibition will bring together a selection of works which profile the output of the artist, who trained at the Royal College Of Art.

  • May 3 to July 9. Call 01424 728377

At Phoenix Gallery, Brighton...

Gypsy culture is still misunderstood. Using photography, film, textiles and costumes, outsider artist meets folk artist Delaine Le Bas will aim to clear some of the mist surrounding their plight in Europe.

She will recreate and occupy her own version of “the compounds” – makeshift structures employed by the British government to contain Gypsy families in the New Forest during the first half of the 20th century – for Local Name: Unknown… Gypsies?

Le Bas, who has Romany heritage and family ties to the New Forest, has chosen two glass and metal lanterns as the central metaphor for this new body of work. They were made in the New Forest and remind the artist of the “magic lantern” shows her grandmother and great uncles recounted during her childhood in Hampshire.

  • April 26 to June 15. Call 01273 603700