What’s On

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen will showcase photographic portraits by the American artist Catherine Opie. The exhibition, curated in collaboration with the artist, will be the first major museum exhibition of her work in the UK.

Opie’s work questions representations of home, intimacy and family, politics, identity and power structures.

Over the past 30 years, Opie has explored and positioned the portrait in numerous contexts and visual formats. Conceptually rigorous and formally executed, her photographs make visible queer communities, mentors and collaborators, children, surfers, high school footballers, political crowds and Opie herself through self-portraiture.

Works featured in the exhibition will span her first major work, Being and Having (1991), her portraits of LGBTQ+ friends inspired by court painter Hans Holbein, through to her Baroque-like portraits of artists. Portraits work in dialogue with one another to create new narratives, challenging viewers to reflect on the figures most commonly portrayed in art and those who go unseen.

In addition to this exhibition, a series of interventions will place Opie’s photographs in dialogue with the permanent Collection, probing further representation in the context of the National Portrait Gallery.

£19.50

Open daily: 10.30 – 18.00
Friday & Saturday: 10.30 – 21.00

This exhibition brings together Rose Wylie’s most iconic artworks with brand-new and previously unseen paintings, in the biggest exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

Wylie’s work is alive with references to cinema, celebrities, literature, and ancient civilisations. Her cast of characters—primarily women—includes Elizabeth I, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe, Serena Williams, and Snow White. These cultural and historical references rub alongside her own experiences, such as living through the Blitz as a young girl.

Wylie found success early in her career as a painter, which she started later in life in her fifties. Since then, she has cemented her place as a cultural icon; her art, her singular style and even her paint-strewn studio in the Kent countryside making waves across the art world, fashion scene and beyond.

Wylie’s art is bold and striking, and offers a reminder that life is full of small, often funny, but no less touching moments.

Tickets: £21-23

Tues-Sun 10am-6pm

Fri: 10am-9pm

Lead image: Rose Wylie – Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win) (detail), 2015Oil on canvas. 208 × 329 cm (overall)
Courtesy private collection and JARILAGER Gallery. Photograph courtesy Jari Lager. Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon. © Rose Wylie

This landmark exhibition traces 40 years of Tracey Emin’s groundbreaking practice, showcasing career-defining sensations alongside works never exhibited before. Through painting, video, textiles, neons, writing, sculpture, and installation, Emin continues to challenge boundaries, using the female body as a powerful tool to explore passion, pain, and healing.

Dame Tracey Emin is one of the most important contemporary artists of her generation. She was catapulted into the public eye in the 1990s with iconic works like her Turner Prize nominated My Bed, which sparked fierce critical and public debate, challenging what art could be. Emin’s disregard for any separation of the personal and the public, along with her commitment to unapologetic self-expression, came to define a historic moment in British culture and global art history.

Broadening Emin’s story, this exhibition celebrates her raw and confessional approach as she poses profound questions on love, trauma, and autobiography. It also demonstrates her lifelong commitment to painting, showing her recent work as the culmination of the ways she has channelled her life into her art.

£20

Sunday to Thursday 10.00–18.00

Friday to Saturday 10.00–21.00

The first UK retrospective of the groundbreaking Colombian artist, Beatriz González, whose bold work explores the power and impact of the images we encounter every day.

Bringing together over 150 artworks, many showing in the UK for the first time, this major exhibition explores Beatriz González’s influential practice from the 1960s to now.

From her monumental paintings to repurposed furniture, wallpaper and installations, González draws from found images in popular postcards, reproductions of Western art, and newspaper clippings. In her distinctive graphic style and vivid palette, she transforms these images, playfully questioning ideas of taste, critiquing power structures, bearing witness to violence and offering moving reflections on grief, displacement and community.

£19

Tue–Wed 10am–6pm (last entry 5pm)

Thu–Fri 10am–8pm (last entry 7pm)

Sat–Sun 10am–6pm (last entry 5pm)

Bank Holidays 12–6pm (last entry 5pm)

Chiharu Shiota is best-known for her large-scale installations which engulf ordinary objects – such as shoes, keys, beds, chairs and dresses – within huge web structures made from woollen thread.

The resulting works are immersive and deeply emotive, often drawing from personal experience, which Shiota expands into universal human concerns such as life, death and relationships.

Accompanied by new large-scale sculptures, drawings, early performance videos and photographs, the artist’s signature works are woven from floor-to-ceiling across the Hayward Gallery’s top floor, responding to the gallery’s iconic brutalist architecture in a truly atmospheric presentation.

The exhibition features new iterations of Shiota’s past monumental installations, including During Sleep (2026), which is activated with performances throughout the run of the exhibition.

During Sleep performances are free with a ticket to the exhibition and take place on Saturday 7 March, 11 April & 2 May, 10am – 1pm.

£19

Tue – Fri, 10am – 6pm
Sat, 10am – 8pm
Sun, 10am – 6pm

This exhibition is on display alongside the exhibition Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart.
Each ticket includes entry to both exhibitions.

The Courtauld presents the first ever exhibition dedicated to the seascapes of the French artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891). This major, focused display will be the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years. It will chart the evolution of his radical and distinctive style through the recurring motif of the sea.

The Courtauld holds the largest collection of works by Seurat in the UK. The artist is best known as the creator of the Neo-Impressionist technique, in which shapes and light are rendered by juxtaposing small dots of pure colour. Due to his early death at the age of 31, Seurat has a very small pool of works and exhibitions devoted to him are rare.

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea will bring together 26 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made by Seurat during the five summers he spent on the northern coast of France, between 1885 and 1890. Working in port towns along the English Channel, including Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their seascapes, regattas and port activity in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist technique. He sought, in his words, ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent in the studio [in Paris] and to translate in the most faithful manner the bright clarity, in all its nuances’.

These works are an important counterpoint to his Parisian works, which are better known and more widely studied. This exhibition will therefore provide a unique opportunity to reassess an important but often overlooked aspect of Seurat’s career.

Adult £18 (£20 with donation)

Daily 10:00 – 18:00 (last entry 17:15)

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting will be the UK’s most comprehensive museum exhibition to focus on the artist’s works on paper, including some works seen on display for the first time.

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) achieved recognition as one of Britain’s foremost figurative painters, celebrated for his clinically raw and intensely observed portraits and nude studies. Freud’s working practice, artistic techniques and processes, alongside his dedication to the genre of portraiture all contribute to his popularity as an artist.

The exhibition explores the artist’s lifelong preoccupation with the human face and figure from the 1930s to the early 21st century, focusing on Freud’s mastery of drawing in all its forms – from pencil, pen, and ink to charcoal and etching. In addition, a carefully selected group of important paintings will reveal the dynamic dialogue between his practice on paper and on canvas.

Ahead of the exhibition in 2026, the National Portrait Gallery has acquired 12 new works from the estate of Lucian Freud. Among these are 8 etchings, including a trial proof, which are the first of their medium by Freud to enter the National Portrait Gallery’s Collection. One of the newly acquired etchings, which depicts the artist’s fashion-designer daughter, Bella Freud, will feature in the new exhibition, alongside archive research and previously unseen materials.

Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is the first exhibition of Freud’s work at the National Portrait Gallery since the major retrospective Lucian Freud Portraits held in 2012, shortly after his death.

£23-25 / £25.50-27.50 with donation

Open daily: 10.30 – 18.00
Friday & Saturday: 10.30 – 21.00

27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026

Tate Britain presents the first major exhibition to explore the intertwined lives and legacies of Britain’s most revered landscape artists: JMW Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837).

Radically different painters and personalities, each challenged artistic conventions of the time, developing ways of picturing the world which still resonate today. Marking the 250th anniversaries of their births, this exhibition traces the development of their careers in parallel, revealing how they were celebrated, criticised and pitted against each other, and how this pushed them to new and original artistic visions. It features over 190 paintings and works on paper, from Turner’s momentous 1835 The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, lent by the Cleveland Museum of Art and not seen in Britain for over 60 years, to The White Horse 1819, one of Constable’s greatest artistic achievements, last exhibited in London two decades ago.

Monday to Sunday 10.00–18.00

£24

8 October 2025 – 10 May 2026

Explore the artists who revolutionised modern art in Nigeria in the mid-20th century.

Set against the backdrop of cultural and artistic rebellion, Nigerian Modernism celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working before and after the decade of national independence from British colonial rule in 1960.

Nigerian Modernism tells the story of artistic networks that spanned Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos, and Enugu, as well as London, Munich, and Paris. Through groups like the Zaria Art Society and Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, they fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions to create vibrant, multidimensional works.

Explore a diverse range of paintings, sculpture, textiles and poetry from over 50 artists including Uzo Egonu, El Anatsui, Ladi Kwali and Ben Enwonwu MBE.

List of artists:

Jonathan Adagogo Green, Tayo Adenaike, Jacob Afolabi, Adebisi Akanji, Justus D. Akeredolu, Jimo Akolo, El Anatsui, Chike C. Aniakor, Abayomi Barber, Georgina Beier, Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, Jimoh Buraimoh, Avinash Chandra, Nike Davies-Okundaye, Ndidi Dike, Uzo Egonu, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Afi Ekong, Erhabor Emokpae, Ben Enwonwu, Sir Jacob Epstein, Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Okpu Eze, Adebisi Fabunmi, Agboola Folarin, Buraimoh Gbadamosi, Sàngódáre Gbádégesin Àjàlá, Yusuf Grillo, Felix Idubor, Solomon Irein Wangboje, Ladi Kwali, Akinola Lasekan, Jacob Lawrence, Valente Malangatana, Naoko Matsubara, Demas Nwoko, Olu Oguibe, Rufus Ogundele, J.D Ojeikere, Emmanuel Okechukwu Odita, Simon Okeke, Uche Okeke, Olowe of Ise, Asiru Olatunde, Lamidi Olonade Fakeye, Oseloka Okwudili Osadebe, Aina Onabolu, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ben Osawe, Muraina Oyelami, Ru van Rossem, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Gerard Sekoto, Twins Seven Seven, Ahmad Shibrain, F.N. Souza, Ada Udechukwu, Obiora Udechukwu, Etso Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu and Susanne Wenger.