Here are ten London Art exhibitions to look out for in 2025. Mark your calendars now. Look out for the Artlyst month-by-month guide coming in the new year for a more in-depth look.
Brasil! Brasil! the Birth of Modernism
28 January – 21 April 2025
Royal Academy of Arts
A major exhibition featuring over 130 works from the 1910s to the 1970s by ten important Brazilian artists capturing the diversity of Brazilian art at this time.
The ten featured artists will include pioneers of early Brazilian Modernism, a movement spearheaded by Anita Malfatti followed by Vicente do Rego Monteiro, the Jewish Lithuanian emigré Lasar Segall, Candido Portinari and Tarsila do Amaral, now internationally celebrated as a leading female figure of Brazilian Modernism. The exhibition will also include the self-taught artists Alfredo Volpi and Djanira da Motta e Silva, an artist of indigenous descent, Afro-Brazilian artist Ruben Valentim, the early Neo-Concrete polymath Geraldo de Barros, and the artist and architect Flávio de Carvalho, who was also one of Brazil’s first performance artists.
Tickets – £23.50-25.50
Leigh Bowery
27 Feb – 2 Sep 2025
Tate Modern
Tate Modern’s first exhibition of 2025 will focus on the boundary-pushing career of artist, performer, model, designer and musician Leigh Bowery. The show will span his emergence in London’s 1980s club scene through to his outrageous performances in galleries, theatres and the street, using the body as a shape-shifting tool in ways that would go on to inspire Alexander McQueen, Lady Gaga and many more.
Tickets: £18
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
20 February – 18 May 2025
National Portrait Gallery
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates iconic fashion images and portraits from The Face, a trail-blazing youth culture and style magazine that has shaped the creative and cultural landscape in Britain and beyond. From 1980 to 2004, The Face played a vital role in creating contemporary culture. Musicians featured on its covers achieved global success and the models it championed – including a young Kate Moss – became the most recognisable faces of their time. The magazine also launched the careers of many leading photographers and fashion stylists, who were given the creative freedom to radically reimagine the visual language of fashion photography and define the spirit of their times. Relaunched in 2019, the magazine continues to provide a disruptive and creative space for image-makers, championing fresh talent in photography, fashion, music and graphic design. This exhibition will bring together the work of over 80 photographers, including Sheila Rock, Stéphane Sednaoui, Corinne Day, David Sims, Elaine Constantine and Sølve Sundsbø, and will feature over 200 photographs – a unique opportunity to see many of these images away from the magazine page for the first time.
L-R: Felix Auerbach by Edvard Munch, 1906 © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation); Seated Model on the Couch, Birgit Prestøe by Edvard Munch, 1924 © Munchmuseet. Photo: Munchmuseet / Sidsel de Jong.
Edvard Munch Portraits
13 March – 15 June 2025
National Portrait Gallery
Edvard Munch is widely regarded as one of the great portraitists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. During the course of his long career, he was consistent in producing portraits of family, friends, lovers, writers, artists, patrons and collectors, together with an extraordinary range of self-portraits. In terms of their energetic execution, bold colour and direct sense of engagement with the sitter, these works have exerted a strong influence on the portrait genre. Edvard Munch Portraits will be the first exhibition in the UK to focus exclusively on this important but sometimes overlooked aspect of the artist’s oeuvre. Curated by Alison Smith, previously Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery and now Director of Collections and Research at the Wallace Collection, the exhibition will show how Munch painted portraits as commissions and for personal reasons, with many pictures doubling up as icons or archetypes of the human condition despite being based on the direct observation of named individuals. The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication of the same name by Alison Smith, with contributions from the Norwegian art historian, Knut Ljøgodt. The Gallery is grateful for the generous support of our Headline Supporter AKO Foundation and that of our new cultural partner, Viking which provides destination-focused journeys around the world.
Tickets_ £21-23.50
Yoshitomo Nara:
10 June – 31 August 2025.
Hayward Gallery
The first UK solo exhibition at a public institution by the internationally acclaimed Japanese artist, also marking his first major European retrospective spanning four decades of Nara’s work. Nara is widely known for his bold images of characters with large heads and wide eyes, challenging the viewer with their direct gaze and defiant stance.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
20 June – 7 September 2025
National Portrait Gallery
Opening in summer 2025, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting will be the first major museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to the work of one of the world’s foremost contemporary artists. Saville rose to prominence in the early 1990s, following her acclaimed degree show at the Glasgow School of Art. In the years since she has played a leading role in the reinvigoration of figurative painting – a genre that she continues to test the limits of to this day. Her unique ability to create visceral portraits from thick layers of paint reveals an artist with a deep passion for the process itself, an act that she experiences as both energetic and bodily.
Bringing together 50 works made throughout the artist’s career, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting will trace the development of her practice from the 1990s to today, spotlighting key artworks from her career and while exploring her lasting connection to art history. From charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings of the human form, this broadly chronological display will include works that question the conventional and historical notions of female beauty, as well as the monumental nudes that launched Saville to acclaim in 1992 and new ‘portraits’ made for the twenty-first century. Rendered in fluorescent, saturated tones, this pioneering series interrogates the connections between the physical and virtual in our image saturated age.
Snow-Covered Field with a Harrow (after Millet), 1890
Oil on canvas. 72.1 cm x 92 cm. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Kiefer/ Van Gogh
28 June – 26 October 2025
Royal Academy of Arts
Vincent van Gogh has had an enduring influence on Anselm Kiefer Hon RA, from his early years to the present day. Kiefer/Van Gogh will feature work by both artists side by side for the first time. The exhibition will bring together paintings and drawings by Van Gogh from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, with works by Kiefer which have been inspired by Van Gogh, including new work that has never been shown before. Kiefer first encountered Van Gogh’s work aged 17 when he received a travel grant to follow in his footsteps, starting in the Netherlands, through to Belgium, Paris and Arles, in the south of France. Over Kiefer’s 60-year career, the pioneer of Post-Impressionism has informed the subjects and techniques of his monumental paintings and sculptures which draw on history, mythology, literature, philosophy and science.
Millet: Life On The Land
7 August – 19 October 2025
National Gallery
The first UK exhibition in nearly 50 years dedicated to Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) will open at the National Gallery in autumn 2025. The show coincides with the 150th anniversary of Millet’s death – by which time his works were well known in the UK and beginning to be eagerly collected by an enthusiastic group of British collectors, resulting in a significant body of his work in UK public collections. Millet: Life on the Land will present around 13 paintings and drawings from British public collections. It will include the National Gallery’s The Winnower (about 1847‒8), and the exceptional loan of L’Angelus (1857‒9) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists
13 September 2025 – 8 February 2026
National Gallery
The first-ever exhibition dedicated to the Neo-Impressionist art movement at the National Gallery will take place in the autumn of 2025. Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists will show works largely drawn from the outstanding collection of the German art collector Helene Kröller-Müller (1869‒1939), at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, in the Netherlands. The exhibition will show radical works of French, Belgian and Dutch artists painted from 1886 to the early 20th century. These include Anna Boch (1848‒1936), Jan Toorop (1858‒1928), Théo van Rysselberghe (1862‒1926), Paul Signac (1863‒1935) and Georges Seurat (1859–1891) himself. One of the first great women art patrons of the 20th century, Kröller-Müller, assembled what is probably the world’s greatest and most comprehensive collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings just two decades after these works were painted.
Lee Miller
2 Oct 2025 – 15 Feb 2026
Tate Britain
Lee Miller will be given the most extensive retrospective of her photography ever staged in the UK. A trailblazing surrealist and an acclaimed fashion and war photographer, Miller’s extraordinary career will be explored through 250 images, including some never previously displayed.