Artlyst has selected twelve art exhibitions that will take place outside of London in Autumn / Winter 2025, from inspirational women artists like Bridget Riley at Turner Contemporary and photographer Jane Bown and Newlands House and Gallery to Modern British artists William Nicholson, Stanley Spencer and Roger Fry—not forgetting this year’s Turner Prize exhibition at Cartwright Hall, Bradford. All well worth leaving the capital for.
Michael Landy /Sophie Barber / Isabel Rock
27 September 2025 – 15 March 2026
Hastings Contemporary
Three distinct shows pulled together by the vision of Kathleen Soriano, Director of Hastings Contemporary.
The Michael Landy exhibition celebrates his skill as a draughtsman. In LOOK, Landy presents a group of intensely personal drawings relating to his own experience of testicular cancer and his father’s tunnelling accident. These works are accompanied by a new self-portrait and Landy’s Nourishment etchings that render overlooked city weeds as icons of survival and endurance.
See the bold and experimental paintings of Sophie Barber in her hometown of Hastings.
With intimate ‘cushion‘ canvas paintings and large-scale works, Barber’s approach mixes humour and popular culture with folklore and the surreal, playing with the possibilities of scale, reference and materiality.
Giant slugs, feral rats and colossal pigs take over the gallery in this new exhibition from artist and activist Isabel Rock.
Rock imagines a new world order populated by strange hybrid species who have inherited the ruins of human civilisation.
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Read Jude Montague’s review Here
Turner Prize 2025
27 September 2025 – 22 February 2026
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford
Nnena Kalu, Rene Matić, Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa are the four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2025.
The Turner Prize is one of the world’s best-known prizes for the visual arts. It aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. This year, the annual exhibition takes place in Bradford with the winner announced on 9 December 2025.
The prize is awarded annually to a British artist and is named in honour of the radical painter J.M.W. Turner. In the year that the UK celebrates the 250th anniversary of Turner’s birth, the Turner Prize is heading to Bradford.
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Read Sue Hubbard’s Review Here
Into Abstraction: Modern British Art and the Landscape
18 October 2025 – 18 January 2026
Firstsite Colchester
Into Abstraction: Modern British Art and the Landscape explores the evolution of abstract art during periods of sweeping social change during the last century.
Spanning the 1920s to the 1970s, the exhibition traces how abstract art developed across five decades: from early experiments in colour and form, through the influence of Surrealism, to the impact of war and the rise of industrial Britain. The exhibition brings works by some of the most influential artists of the 20th century to the Essex gallery, including Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), Henry Moore (1898–1986), Duncan Grant (1885–1978), and L.S. Lowry (1887–1976). Together, their works offer an in-depth look at how these artists interpreted and influenced abstract art in response to the environments and times in which they lived.
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To Improvise A Mountain: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Curates
25 October 2025 – 25 January 2026
MK Gallery
An exhibition of international artists working across painting, photography, drawing, film, installation and sculpture from the 19th century to today, curated by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Featuring: Bas Jan Ader, Pierre Bonnard, Lisa Brice, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Samuel Fosso, Peter Hujar, Kahlil Joseph, Zoe Leonard, Glenn Ligon, Toyin Ojih Odutola, The Otolith Group, Jennifer Packer, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Walter Sickert, Édouard Vuillard, David Wojnarowicz and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
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Jane Bown: Play Shadow
1 November 2025 – 15 February 2026
Newlands House Gallery, Petworth
Jane Bown: Play Shadow offers an intimate portrait of one of Britain’s most revered photographers, Jane Bown (1925–2014), whose quietly powerful black-and-white portraits have become iconic within the canon of 20th-century photography.
The exhibition expands beyond the familiar public image of Bown’s work as a photographer with The Observer newspaper, to reveal the deeply personal vision and consistent philosophy that guided her work: a belief in simplicity, natural light, and the decisive presence of a good face.
Play Shadow presents a selection of photographs, some rarely publicly displayed, across several thematic groupings that explore Jane Bown’s approach to composition, light, and emotional presence. It includes archival material and personal reflections, offering insight into a photographer who saw technological restraint not as a limitation, but as a creative discipline.
Jane Bown photographed some of the most influential artists of the 20th century, including Henry Moore, Paula Rego, David Hockney and Francis Bacon. The exhibition features not only Bown’s portraits of such figures, but also selected works by the artists themselves, creating a dynamic conversation between sitter and maker, photograph and artwork.
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Still Life with T’ang Horse circa 1919–21, Tate
Roger Fry
15 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
Charleston Firle
The first major exhibition in over 25 years dedicated to Roger Fry as a painter, unveiling a lesser-known aspect of one of the most influential figures in 20th-century British art.
Best known for his work as an art critic, writer, and curator, Fry was instrumental in bringing post-impressionism to England. His 1910 and 1912 exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in London, featuring Cézanne, Matisse, Van Gogh, and others, were revolutionary. They introduced a shocked British public to this bold new movement, helping to ignite the modernist era in Britain and forever changing the course of British art.
This exhibition features Fry’s vibrant portraits, landscapes, and interiors, capturing the essence of his time in Paris during the 1920s. Showcasing never-before-seen artworks from private collections alongside national treasures, the exhibition highlights Fry’s innovative use of colour and his theory of formalism – the idea that a work’s impact comes from its form, the way lines, colours and shapes are arranged, rather than its subject or story.
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Harold Offeh: Mmm Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet
15 November 2025 – 1 March 2026,
Kettle’s Yard
The first major solo exhibition of Harold Offeh’s work in a UK institution, this exhibition will explore two decades of the artist’s videos, performances and projects that have taken place across the world.
For more than twenty years, Offeh (b. 1977, Ghana) has been making playful, provocative performance and video works that explore subjects ranging from pop culture to identity and conformity.
Offeh draws from popular music, film and mainstream cultural trends to interrogate our acceptance of political, class, gender and racial models in society. Recently, his practice has approached themes of happiness, play and Afrofuturism through performance and collective live engagements.
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Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk
15 November 2025— 22 March 2026
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, Suffolk
The most ambitious exhibition dedicated to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) in a decade will open at Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, this November, before transferring to the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, from April 2026.
The partnership between the two museums will feature over 20 works from the Stanley Spencer Gallery presented alongside major loans from Tate, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, and other public lenders, as well as rarely seen works from private collections.
Although Spencer’s life and career are largely synonymous with his native village of Cookham in Berkshire, he also spent a great deal of time in Suffolk, most notably Wangford and Southwold on the coast. His association with the county spanned four decades, initially through the experience of his first wife, Hilda Carline (1889-1950).
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William Nicholson
22 November 2025 – 10 May 2026
Pallant House Gallery
This is the first major exhibition of the celebrated artist William Nicholson (1872 – 1949) in more than 20 years.
Spanning Nicholson’s entire career, this landmark show reveals the breadth of his artistic vision – from world-renowned still lifes, insightful portraits and evocative landscapes to his poster designs and playful book illustrations.
Highlights include the bold posters he produced with his brother-in-law James Pryde as ‘J. & W. Beggarstaff’, his celebrated woodcuts from An Alphabet (1898), original illustrations for The Velveteen Rabbit, works created during travels to India, and poignant wartime paintings, as well as his glittering still lifes, which showcase his mastery of light and texture.
Visitors can view rarely seen works, and intimate depictions of family and friends – including a newly displayed portrait of his son, artist Ben Nicholson.
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Bridget Riley
Turner Contemporary, Margate
22 November 2025 – 4 May 2026
Press view: Thursday 20 November, 11.30am–1.30pm
Turner Contemporary will present a major new solo exhibition by Bridget Riley, conceived in close collaboration with the artist and in dialogue with the gallery’s unique coastal setting. Over the past seven decades, Riley has developed a distinctive visual language rooted in colour, form and rhythm-generating sensations of movement, light and space. Her abstract compositions explore the perceptual activity of colour and the potential of geometric patterns to create optical sensations. Featuring works from across her career, this exhibition will affirm the enduring clarity and energy of Riley’s vision, and her influence as a pioneer of abstraction and one of Britain’s most important living artists.
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Playing with Fire: Edmund de Waal
22 November 2025- 3 May 2026
The Hepworth Wakefield
The artist and author Edmund de Waal (b.1954, Nottingham) has curated the first major exhibition of acclaimed Danish ceramicist Axel Salto (1889 – 1961), considered one of the greatest masters of 20th-century ceramic art. Salto was a radical polymathic figure who crossed boundaries from one discipline to another, producing an extraordinary body of ceramic work alongside paintings, wood- cuts, drawings, book illustration and textiles.
After studying at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where he became intrigued by modernism and a progressive aesthetic, Salto travelled to Paris, where he met Picasso and Matisse. An accomplished poet and author, he founded the influential Danish art journal Klingen (The Blade), an important forum for critical thinking in Denmark. Salto is internationally renowned for his highly individual and expressive stoneware inspired by organic forms, characterised by budding, sprouting and fluted surface textures that appear to ripple and burst with life.
Salto’s ceramics will be shown alongside lesser-known and unseen works on paper, illustrations, writings and textiles, with a major new installation by de Waal reflecting on Salto’s enduring influence.
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Seeds of Hate and Hope
28 November – 17 May 2026
Sainsbury Centre
Seeds of Hate and Hope highlights personal artistic responses to global mass atrocities, such as genocides, ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries artists have witnessed, experienced, and responded to atrocity crimes and conflicts with powerful and compelling works. Drawing courage and inspiration from personal experience as well as shared histories, they have reacted to these events for many reasons including but not limited to bearing witness, expressing grief, and promoting healing.
With the aim of raising awareness about global conflicts and the role of art in confronting their legacy, the exhibition highlights artistic responses to such devastating events with creativity and courage. It features works by Mona Hatoum, William Kentridge, Hew Locke, Zoran Mušič, Peter Oloya and Kimberly Fulton Orozco, Indrė Šerpytytė, and many more. Focussing mostly on abstract representations, Seeds of Hate and Hope challenges typical depictions of war and conflict often shown in the media.
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