Looking back at 2025, the standout UK Art Exhibitions show that there wasn’t a single aesthetic or tidy narrative linking everything together.
This selection wasn’t created to reward an institution’s agenda. The strongest shows didn’t need to follow a curator’s perspective. They held their ground on the work displayed. They allowed complexity to surface slowly, sometimes awkwardly, without apology. – Paul Carter Robinson Artlyst Editor
We asked our critics to choose three standout UK exhibitions.
Paul Carey Kent
Painting tends to be the medium that garners most attention, and there was no shortage of quality in 2025: Wayne Thiebaud at the Courtauld, Noah Davis at the Barbican, Dana Schutz at Thomas Dane and ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting’ at the National Gallery were all thrillingly good. But I thought I’d choose other media, and found I was most drawn to three retrospectives, the first two of which you can still see:
The Photographers’ Gallery’s overview of the restlessly imaginative and cuttingly mischievous Boris Mikhailov, who has his own way of making ‘bad’ photographs conceptually good. It presents twenty of the Ukrainian’s most important series from the 60s onwards with clear sequencing, helpful explanations and plenty of enlightening quotes from Mikhailov himself.
New series and samples from the past projects of the American artist duo Doug and Mike Starn at HackelBury Gallery. Their fascinating practice uses science as a source of analogies and encourages consideration of questions such as: Why are moths dusty? What determines the shape of snowflakes? How are thoughts like trees? Why is the sky blue or red? How do seas move mountains?
Jyll Bradley: ‘Running and Returning’ at The Box, Plymouth, was a powerfully unified exploration of the politics of the self across forty years of materially varied, but thematically unified, work: such as intimate self-portrait photographs contextualising her queer identity; films exploring the effects of her having been adopted; and installations creating space for the public as a political act.
Sue Hubbard
Chantal Joffe – Victoria Miro, I Remember
I have long admired Chantal Joffe’s autobiographical works. Influenced by two of my favourite female artists, the early German Expressionist, Paula Modersohn-Becker and the American, Alice Neel, this evocative series of large-scale paintings explores the power of memory through images of her own childhood and family life. There’s a sense that, as viewers, we are being plunged into a dream-like past that continues to colour both the present and future. Her 1970s childhood, spent mainly in America, is revisited. The ghosts of Halloween parties and summers spent on the beach are presented in adroitly fluid brushwork that gives her works a nostalgic quality, taking us back to a lost past with the immediacy of Proust’s madeleine dipped in lime tea.
Giuseppe Penone, Serpentine:
Using leaves and imprints of human skin and bark, Penone investigates our (inter)connections with the natural world. Even breathing becomes a creative act, underlining the delicate balance between us and the natural world. His work seems to suggest that only when we return to value nature and place it centrally will humanity begin to heal. Postmodernism spent a long time elevating the commodity and the secular to the level of the ersatz ‘sacred but Penone creates spaces where we can begin anew and undergo spiritual transformation.. He seems to be suggesting that if we look and listen to the world around us, we might find a space for contemplation and reflection that returns us to ourselves.
Lee Miller – Tate Britain.
Lee Miller was a courageous, complex figure who witnessed immense horror during her life, Born in 1907 in Poughkeepsie, New York, where her father was a keen amateur photographer, she initially studied painting and stage design. Beautiful and stylish, she had an instinct for finding the pulse of things, and became a fashion model and a muse to many contemporary artists. A move to Paris in 1929 saw her become assistant, collaborator and sometime lover to Man Ray. But it is as a war photographer that she made her mark, documenting women’s lives on the home front, and capturing the deprivation and devastation of post-war communities across Europe. She was to became a primary witness to the 20th century’s most brutal events. It is thanks to her indomitable courage that those who would deny or glorify the horrors of war, particularly the holocaust, can be confronted with the unvarnished truth that she fearlessly recorded.
James Payne
Kerry James Marshall at RA
This was a landmark retrospective of a living artist at the top of his game. His work asserts the black prescience in art, through huge canvases that engage with and disrupt the familiar dominant figures in classical painting. A true master.
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300 ‒1350 at the National Gallery.
The extraordinary opportunity to see so many works together made this a once-in-a-lifetime show. Brilliantly curated and historically significant, particularly the grouping of masterpieces (including Duccio’s Maestà fragments). Electrifying!
Dermot O’Brien: (Not Only) But Also at Domo Baal.
One of the strongest shows I’ve seen for a while. O’Brien, the artist who can turn dust into magic, finally got the recognition he deserves in a show that rewarded quiet attention: the longer you spend with it, the more it reveals. A rare privilege to spend time in O’Brien’s world – even for a short while.
Revd Jonathan Evens
‘SEEING THE UNSEEN: Reality and Imagination in the Art of Stanley Spencer’, Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham
This exhibition brought together stunning examples of Spencer’s realistic works – his portraits and landscapes – which he often viewed as “potboilers” that merely paid the rent, and his biblical or symbolic works, which had his heart and which, in his mind, formed a vast exhibition in a “church-house”. The curators, through their apt juxtapositions, compellingly demonstrate how Spencer brought together the seen and unseen in his work.
Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The Art of Friendship, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin
Jellett and Hone are significant as pioneering Irish modernists, as women artists undertaking that mission at the time, and as artists whose understanding of the ways in which faith and art intertwine shaped the work they produced. This exhibition allowed their work to speak, sing, and show as it was always intended to do.
Anthony Lawrence (1951-2022): A Retrospective, Palais des Vaches, Lower Exbury
An exciting new discovery for me, Lawrence combined the classical (Renaissance) with the contemporary (Pop Art) and created works that are, by turn, abstract, figurative, and a blend of both abstraction and figuration. His work frequently drew on classical antiquity, religion, and literary themes and did so whether he was working in still life, portraiture, landscape, or with religious iconography.
John K Grande
Giuseppe Penone – Thoughts in the Roots, Serpentine Gallery
Giuseppe Penone’s To Be a River drew interest long ago when he remade a stone found in nature, so one never knows which is real and which is a fake recreation, being part of nature’s endless processes. The Serpentine show underscores Penone’s passion for myth… A seemingly thunderstruck tree painted on top looks like a detail in a neoclassical painting, but it is truly contemporary – a parable on the force of nature in our times.
Some trees have gravity-defying stones in their upper branches. The uncovering of the inner tree within a tree is a radical time-based mystery… nature conceals.. nature reveals … Penone is an Arte Povera shaman from times when post-Duchampian tea kettles and blankets redefined marble and bronze. Anti-gravity can be spiritual. Statement. Giuseppe Penone always gets to the heart of the nature theatre we are a part of – tree branches are survival structures, aren’t they? And a wall of leaves a perfect perfume…
Lee Miller, Tate Britain, October 2, 2025 – February 15, 2026
A follow-up show to the recent film Lee 2023, starring Kate Winslet, is a perfect fit… This must be the most comprehensive show of Miller’s incredible production. The indefatigable photographer Miller, like Robert Capa, was one of the greatest war photographers ever. She passed through any barrier or obstacle to record the truth as it happened. From the Egypt photos, to the Second World War, to people at home, through her extensive publishing. With Cecil Beaton at Vogue, with the Surrealist Roland Penrose, and some of the exploratory avant-garde works with Man Ray…, Lee’s eye and zest for life captured real people and brought them home. The Tate Britain show has it all (even her unmodelled uniform)… Lee Miller grew out of modelling, then held her place in a magazine world men ruled. From image to text, and both together, she knew how to bring it alive. For her life as much as her art!
Paula Rego – Drawing from Life, Cristea Roberts Gallery, Nov. 27, 2025 – Jan. 17, 2026
Paula Rego’s emboldened theatrical artworks truly made an impression. Martin McDonagh had a play going on about child torture that inspired Rego to get in touch with him. McDonagh’s short stories became the raw subject matter for Rego’s curious prints and artworks from 2005 to 2007…(40 of them). McDonagh updates classics like Peter Pan, Jack and Jill and Humpty Dumpty. Children’s stories given a new life, albeit tinged with tragedy, are somewhat darker than you might want. Echoes of Rego’s childhood in fascist Portugal and unspoken memories. Studio memento dolls and creatures called ‘bonecos’ in Portugal in the show were used as props to inspire the art. Drawings from Life – a great late-blooming show by the late Paula Rego (1935-2022)!
Sara Faith
Do Ho Suh, Tate Modern
There was something magical about exploring the large-scale installations and intricate studies of household ironmongery made from coloured netted fabric. Do Ho Suh’s extraordinary attention to detail was fascinating to follow as you wandered through the exhibition, noting lighting fixtures and switches, plug sockets, keyholes, door handles and even fire extinguishers. He asks timely questions about the enigma of home, identity and how we inhabit the world around us.
Wayne Thiebaud, The Courtauld Gallery
I was struck by the painterly qualities of American pre-Pop artist Wayne Thiebaud’s (1920-2021) studies of cakes, deli counters, gumball and pinball machines. His use of paint, in thick strokes and lush colours, elevates the mundane. But the standout feature to me was the thick, creamy backgrounds in white or pale blue.
Ugo Rondinone: The Rainbow Body, Sadie Coles HQ
Rondinone filled Sadie Coles HQ’s Kingly Street gallery with a series of life-size figurative sculptures in rainbow colours, set against a fluorescent backdrop. The walls, floors and ceiling of the gallery were finished in rainbow shades that mirrored the sculptures’ own colours, creating a push-pull dynamic between the individual figure and the gallery walls.
Dr Clare Finn
Lee Miller at Tate Britain – For her eye, the way she homed in on a detail, the focus of which changed the entire meaning of her images. The fearless way she recorded what she saw as a war correspondent in France and Germany in 1944 and 1945, at such a cost to herself. Her work has been buried by herself and others for too long; it richly deserves this retrospective.
Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery– For its reach, for displaying applied arts and textiles from far-off lands that appear in the paintings. For the exquisite detail of the images and for revealing the birth of humanism in the gentle gestures of the images.
Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection at The Courtauld Gallery– this is a personal one, as I saw the Sammlung several times in the early 1970s when it first opened to the public. Toulouse-Lautrec’s La Clownesse (at the Courtauld titled The clown Cho-U-Kao) has long lived in my mind’s eye, so women could be clowns too! The rare Renoir flower piece, the Goyas, the Cezannes, the Van Goghs – old friends that I remember well. Though I think I preferred their setting in Winterthur to the Courtauld’s white walls.
Paul Carter Robinson
Kiefer / Van Gogh – Royal Academy
Vincent van Gogh’s presence runs insistently through Anselm Kiefer’s work. This exhibition brought the two artists into direct conversation, placing paintings and drawings by Van Gogh alongside works made by Kiefer across nearly six decades of practice. Van Gogh’s final paintings were made in 1890. Seventy-two years later, an eighteen-year-old Kiefer set out on a journey funded by a modest travel grant, tracing Van Gogh’s route from the Netherlands through Belgium and Paris, ending in Arles.
Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals – Tate Britain
Two of Britain’s most iconic painters, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, were born just a year apart — Turner in 1775, Constable in 1776 — and almost immediately set the art world buzzing. Critics of the day framed their work as a duel: fire versus water, storm versus calm. Turner rose from the gritty streets of Georgian London, a prodigy whose talent and ambition propelled him quickly into the public eye. Constable, by contrast, grew up in Suffolk as the son of a prosperous merchant. His path to recognition was slower, marked by persistence and painstaking observation of the natural world. Despite these differences, both shared a fierce determination to redefine landscape painting. Each brought originality, daring, and an uncompromising vision to their work — one stormy, the other pastoral — shaping the very language of British art for generations to come. This was a wonderfully curated show!
Maggi Hambling & Sarah Lucas: OOO LA LA Sadie Coles HQ
Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas are friends. Close ones. Their first meeting was on 23 October 2000, on the same birthday, the Colony Room Club in Soho, ushered together by the inimitable Sebastian Horsley, who drifted through the works of both artists like a ghostly cameo. This winter, Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects hosted an exhibition across two galleries on Bury Street, bringing their distinct practices into dialogue. The show illuminates the affinities between them: a restless awareness of mortality, a flair for excess, and that unmistakable, defiant exuberance.
Sophie Parkin
Right: Ithell Colquhoun Scylla 1938 Tate Purchased 1977 © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans
I am grateful for the Tate Britain – Ithell Colquhoun + Edward Burra.
I went to this show four times, and I wish I’d gone another couple of times, because it is one I will never forget. This crucial show cemented the lives of two 20th-century artists. Understanding that it all comes back to the mystical nature of the earth and that man should be a damn lot more respectful, beware the volcanoes! Their lives were not lived in vain, however much it is saddening to see that Colquhoun was so under-recognised in her lifetime, Burra was seen; better late than never. A remarkable show, more of these please.
I am grateful to The Serpentine for realising Sir Peter Cook’s Play Pavilion June-August 2025 with Lego. This showed how joyful the Pavilion idea could and should be, and yet so often isn’t. It lasted a short time in the summer and then, like the weather, it was gone, whilst the huge grey cloud on the other side by Marina Tabassum stayed up, the official boring Pavilion.
Choosing one commercial show in 2025 is a misfortune; choosing two looks like carelessness. So I feel I can saucily slide a few in carelessly, since these are half commercial/temporary spaces! In January, featuring @Nataliazagorskathomas (and sometimes @juliaMadisson), NZT makes original funny, surreal, feminist, joyous pieces. I can’t forget Kiss Kiss Bang Bang or Bags for life (or Julia’s A fuck and a cheese sandwich Tea Towel). There is also a matter of @NathalieFrost, her exquisite pieces threaded together with shells, mess, loss, tears, silk and joy in Lee Miller’s old home @FarleysHG House and Gallery. @WilmaJohnson show of glorious goddesses and ancient myths, Ghosts of the Madrugada @highgategallery, in September.
Jude Montague
Ivon Hitchens, Day’s Rest, Day’s Work, 1960. Wax and oil on four panels, 365.6 × 731.5 cm. University of Sussex. All rights reserved, DACS 2024.
Sussex Modernism Towner Eastbourne 23 May – 28 September 2025
This exhibition celebrates the exceptional artists associated with Sussex’s radical modernist tradition. Historic figures such as Jacob Epstein, Ivon Hitchens, and Carlyle Brown are shown alongside contemporary practitioners, including Neo-Naturist Jennifer Binnie and painter Geraldine Swayne. The display is both excellent and ambitious, presenting phenomenal works while making modernism newly relevant. By connecting historical art with contemporary practice, the exhibition resonates strongly with the current revival of neo-folk art and neo-paganism, positioning these movements as forms of resistance to xenophobic nationalism.
Three Artists: Sophie Barber, Michael Landy, Isabel Rock – Hastings Contemporary
This presentation brings together three singular artist exhibitions that complement one another despite their differing approaches.
For me, the standout contribution comes from Sophie Barber, whose work feels genuinely trailblazing for a new generation. Her success, combined with a grounded and generous attitude, inspires young women artists to believe in themselves and the value of their work.
Tadek Beutlich: Prints and Drawings Emma Mason Gallery, Eastbourne 4 April – 3 May 2025
In collaboration with Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, this exhibition is a strong example of a commercial gallery working in partnership with a public museum to invigorate and extend their respective programmes. Coloured woodcuts and drawings are shown side by side. Many of the prints, made during Beutlich’s life in Germany in the 1960s, had been stored “under a bed” for over fifty years. The drawings come directly from the artist’s studio and are being exhibited publicly for the first time. Tadek Beutlich: On and Off the Loom Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft 18 January – 22 June 2025. Presented by Emma Mason Gallery and Ditchling Museum, this ambitious exhibition spans Beutlich’s career, bringing together textiles, prints, and drawings that demonstrate his mastery of multiple techniques. Born in Poland, Beutlich was a soldier-weaver who worked from his Ditchling studio, ‘Gospels’, between 1967 and 1974. He is particularly known for his innovative use of materials, including tree sections, Lycra, and foam rubber. The exhibition is challenging in scale and ambition, not least due to the complexity of the works involved. A significant highlight is Dream Revealed (1968), a monumental, high-hanging shroud made from unspun jute, mohair, and horsehair, which has not been seen in public since 1969.
Nico Kos-Earle
Top pick has to be House of Music by Peter Doig at the Serpentine, for its riotous, inclusive use of sound. My standout exhibition of the year is Peter Doig’s House of Music at the Serpentine South Gallery, a generous, multisensory exhibition that celebrates the musicality of his process. To get beneath the surface of things, Doig often paints through the night whilst listening to music; during Doig’s years in Trinidad (2002–21), his relationship with music intensified through sound-system culture and cinema. Doig reflects this by transforming the gallery into a listening space and features two sets of rare, restored analogue speakers, initially designed for cinemas and large auditoriums. Music selected by the artist – from his substantial archive of vinyl records and cassette tapes accumulated over decades – plays through a set of ‘high fidelity’ 1950s wooden Klangfilm Euronor speakers. Doig explained at the opening, “I’ve tried over the years to make paintings that are imagistic and atmospheric in the way music can be.” Each painting in the exhibition engages with music differently: some depict spaces where music is played or heard, others show musicians performing or people dancing. Sharing his tunes is a monumentally generous act, giving us access to the soundtrack of his inner life. What we find in his paintings are magnificent figures illuminated by the moon or enveloped in the cloak of night. In the final darkened room, black-and-white bodies dance, pose, and linger with the kind of ease that follows when the lights go out. Illuminated by the light of the moon, these figures are a reminder that colour categories are things we carry in the mind, and as the French say, “dans le noir tous les chats sont gris.”
Oskar Reinhard Collection at the Courtauld
When the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” closed for renovations, the Courtauld seized the rare opportunity to borrow masterpieces like Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, ‘Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks’ (1808–1812), for when Reinhart bequeathed the entirety of his collection to the Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture (Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern), he stipulated the works must always remain together. “In our selection, we wanted to do justice to Reinhart’s collection but also set up some interesting aesthetic and thematic connections with the works held at the Courtauld, explained Dr Wright. A mouthwatering, provocative work that captures the melting truth of uncooked flesh, one might think this work is by Manet, with flagrant and viscous flesh looming out of a darkling ground. “The work does resonate with Manet not in the least for his love of Spanish art and culture.” Moreover, it signposts the importance of Still Life, a genre of radical importance to the Post Impressionists – think Cezanne’s apples, or ‘Still Life with a Plate of Peaches’. “One expects the Still Life to depict objects as they are, as they exist, the materialisation of something,” says Richter. “This work shows the dematerialisation of something; it has been a salmon, but now it is slices of flesh (which will be cooked).” It is also emblematic of Reinhart’s incredible appetite for acquiring and a reminder that every collection is defined by peculiar, deeply personal, and often inexplicable tastes cultivated over a lifetime (both Reinhart and Courtauld were contemporaries). It is an unforgettable image; one I am seeing for the first time because, since its purchase, it has never left this building.
Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas “OOO LA LA” at Sadie Coles HQ and Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert/Frankie Rossi Art Projects of
“OOO LA LA” at Sadie Coles HQ and Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert/Frankie Rossi Art Projects on Bury Street is a sensational, museum-level pairing of Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas that stages an intergenerational conversation about sex, death, love and friendship through Lucas’s outrageous, nubile Bunny sculptures and Hambling’s exuberant, crimson-charged paintings, whose “falling apart looseness” expresses a refusal to be prim or proper. Originating in the artists’ long-standing friendship since meeting on their shared birthday at the Colony Room in 2000, the show reveals deep affinities beneath their radically different styles, from mutual portraits (Lucas’s Maggi assemblage and Hambling’s oil portraits of Lucas) to the way both treat making as an eternal present tense that invites the viewer into the act of creation. Installed across two neighbouring galleries without didactic wall texts, the exhibition relies on simple, generous pairings and complementary wall tones to draw viewers into the ongoing dialogue between the works, highlighting how neither artist need compete for the same place in art history even as they occupy the heart of London’s dealer establishment. A dismissive review that praises Lucas’s “male-fantasy” sculptures while deriding Hambling’s “slapdash mess” paintings inadvertently exposes the gendered biases that have long undervalued artists like Hambling and overlooked the complex position of women artists and the subtle dynamics of female friendship that animate this show, which already feels like art history in the making. Framed by Frankie Rossi Art Projects’ serious pedigree with major twentieth-century artists and timed with a new Rizzoli monograph for Hambling’s 80th and a Kiasma survey for Lucas, “OOO LA LA” celebrates the luxurious time and space both artists had to develop new work and ultimately insists there is no “correct” response to art—only the liberating act of letting yourself go, ideally in the company of a friend.