Artlyst has selected ten exhibitions that will take place out of London this Spring, 2025. Stephen Cox is the subject of the annual sculpture exhibition set in the splendid grounds of Houghton Hall, Norfolk; Hastings Contemporary explores Art and life beneath the waves; Barbara Walker has a first major survey exhibition of her work; Anselm Kiefer’s early works are explored at the Ashmolean; Archibald Knox, Liberty & Co’s foremost designer during the Arts & Crafts period, has a major exhibition on the Isle of Man plus more.
Anselm Kiefer, Ashmolean Museum
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
14 February – 15 June 2025
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is a landmark exhibition of one of the world’s most important living artists, organised in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation and drawn from the Hall Collection.
Featuring paintings, watercolours, artist books, photos and woodcuts, all rarely displayed in the UK, this major exhibition takes us back to the origins of Anselm Kiefer.
With 45 works made during the period 1969–82, the show explores the artist’s roots, covering an array of cultural, literary and philosophical subjects including recent German history.
Best known for his monumental paintings and installations, Anselm Kiefer has become a towering figure of post-war art, and this exhibition is a unique chance for you to see his multi-layered and poignant early works. The exhibition also features three new paintings chosen by Kiefer from his own collection.
Kiefer’s artistic techniques and materials – which include straw, lead, concrete, fire, and ash – are as expansive as the themes of his artworks, with pieces endlessly changing in their organic nature.
Barbara Walker: Being Here
Arnolfini Bristol
08 March – 25 May 2025
The first major survey exhibition by British artist Barbara Walker
Being Here charts the artist’s compelling, figurative practice from the 1990s to today.
Following a hugely successful run at The Whitworth, Being Here presents almost 60 extraordinary artworks, including rarely seen early paintings of Walker’s family, friends and community in her home city of Birmingham, along with her Turner Prize nominated monumental drawing series Burden of Proof (2022-23), which illustrates the impact on the lives of those affected by the Windrush scandal.
For over twenty-five years, Walker has been making intensely observed and empathetic figurative work that creates space for Black presence, power and belonging. Ranging from delicate graphite drawings on archival documents to embossed reliefs spotlighting marginalised Black figures in old Master paintings, Walker tackles wide-ranging themes such as the policing and surveillance of Black life, twentieth-century war histories and immigration to challenge conventions of representation and the histories they are rooted in.
Inventing Post-Impressionism: works from The Barber Institute of Fine Arts
Charleston in Firle
8 March–2 November 2025,
£11
In partnership with The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, we are presenting a major exhibition showcasing one of the most important impressionist and post-impressionist collections in the UK. Join us as we revisit the groundbreaking 1910 and 1912 Grafton Galleries exhibitions, where critic, curator and frequent visitor to Charleston, Roger Fry first introduced post-impressionism to a shocked British public.
Featuring iconic paintings and works on paper by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis, Fernand Léger and more. The exhibition includes items from Charleston’s permanent collection alongside a significant number of works from the Barber, whilst it is closed to enable building repair works.
Alongside the main exhibition, the Spotlight Gallery will feature the return of a Paul Cézanne painting on loan from King’s College, Cambridge. Once owned by economist John Maynard Keynes, this work was famously left in a hedge outside Charleston after an auction trip to wartime Paris.
This exhibition, blending history, art, and Bloomsbury’s role in shaping British modernism, offers a rare opportunity to explore the lasting impact of post-impressionism on British art.
Resonant Forms
The Hepworth Wakefield
8 March 2025 – January 2026
Resonant Forms explores how artists across generations have been inspired by music and sound, engaging with themes of rhythm, harmony, and resonance. Centred on Barbara Hepworth’s stringed sculptures, the exhibition offers insights into the relationship between sound and form.
Music played a crucial role in Hepworth’s creative life. She excelled at the piano from a young age, counted composers among her friends, and by the 1950s, began naming many of her sculptures after musical forms. For Hepworth, rhythm, structure, and harmony were not confined to sound but fundamental to the language of sculpture. Her forms suggest movement and flow, with sweeping curves and open spaces that mirror the dynamic contrasts found in music.
Many of Hepworth’s stringed works, like Landscape Sculpture (1944), Spring (1966), and Orpheus (1957), reflect these principles through taut metal wires reminiscent of the strings of harps or lyres. Through these works, Hepworth crafted sculptures whose sharp lines evoke the clarity and tension of music. Their careful balance recalls the reverberation of an echo, bridging the sensory worlds of sight and sound.
The exhibition expands on these ideas with a selection of works that embody rhythmic energy, reference musical structures, or respond to sound, movement, or even silence. Sculptural forms suggesting melody, vibrant colour compositions influenced by music, and dynamic installations explore how rhythm and resonance shape our experience of art. Together, these artworks highlight the prevalence of a shared creative language between music and visual art—one rooted in rhythm and harmony.
£14
Andy Warhol: Portrait of America
MK Gallery
15 March – 29 June 2025
An ARTIST ROOMS Partnership Exhibition with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland
In celebration of its 25th Anniversary, MK Gallery is delighted to present Andy Warhol: Portrait of America, an ARTIST ROOMS Partnership Exhibition with Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, opening Saturday 15 March 2025.
Almost 25 years since Andy Warhol: Cars was shown in 2001, MK Gallery is set to exhibit the seminal pop artist’s work once again in Milton Keynes. This upcoming exhibition will be a survey of over 130 of Warhol’s most iconic artworks, including the renowned Marilyn series and two paintings by British art duo Gilbert & George, who were the focus of MK Gallery’s inaugural exhibition in 1999.
Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was a leading figure in American Pop art. This exhibition of works from the 1950s – 80s includes early drawings, painted silkscreens and a photographic series featuring Warhol’s collaborations with artists, friends, filmmakers and celebrities. Images of Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and Warhol himself feature alongside icons of American consumerism and symbols of the artist’s fascination with mortality: guns, skulls and war.
Warhol’s fascination with celebrity and commercial culture produced some of the most recognisable images in 20th-century art. Finding success living and working in 1950s New York as an illustrator for magazines, Warhol developed styles and techniques which propelled him to the centre of America’s cultural scene.
This exhibition contains adult themes.
£14.50
Undersea
Hastings Contemporary
29 March 2025 – 14 September 2025
Art and life beneath the waves
Dive into an underwater world and explore the myths, mysteries, and marine life that lurk beneath the waves.
Undersea brings together paintings, prints, drawings, and objects from across different cultures and artistic movements, revealing the sea as a place of wonder, turmoil, and transformation.
With works spanning four centuries and five continents, Undersea celebrates cultural connections and the pleasures of difference. Look out for coral, crabs, lobsters, mermaids, and more, as seen through artists’ eyes.
Undersea follows Seaside Modern (2021) and Seafaring (2022) to complete a trilogy of exhibitions curated by art historian James Russell.
One group of works will explore artists’ study of the marine environment and the creatures that inhabit it, with lobsters, crabs and fish appearing in different guises throughout the show. Greek painter Yiannis Maniatakos donned diving gear to paint haunting views of the seabed – underwater. Intricate representations of the sea and its inhabitants are offered by a group of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Meanwhile there is a rare chance to view a work created by marine organisms: Sea Sculpture (c. 1725) incorporates ceramicware lost at sea and colonised by corals.
Another group of works is inspired by mythology and imaginary aquatic realms, with an impressive display of international artworks depicting mermaids. This includes the celebrated Surrealist painting, A Siren in Full Moonlight by Paul Delvaux (1940) and the startlingly inventive Mermaids series (2023) by contemporary Swiss painter Klodin Erb. Different perspectives on the same subject are offered by Nigerian painter Kelechi Nwaneri in his depiction of the powerful African goddess and water spirit Mami Wata (2021) and in Thomas Lowinsky’s The Dawn of Venus (1922).
One of the oldest works is the beguiling A crocodile, a gigantic fish and an animal that eats flying fish (1750) by an unknown maker, the full meaning of which remains a mystery. Contemporary highlights include the mysterious Deep Dive (2022) by Tom Anholt, Forms Without Life (1992) by Damien Hirst and Octopus’s Veil (2016) by Michael Armitage.
Jyll Bradley: Running and Returning
The Box, Plymouth
5 April – 2 November 2o25
A major exhibition that explores the rich, three-decade career of British artist Jyll Bradley. Known for her large-scale public commissions, ‘Running and Returning’ will also include film, sculptural installations, photography, self-portraits and new works all seen together for the very first time.
Over the last 30 years Bradley’s work has examined notions of identity, urbanity, light, nature, queerness and community through a minimalist approach. Adopted as a child, finding her place has been central to her work. Minimalism has provided an opportunity to carve out a space often using light as a medium to convey metaphors and activate her work.
Stephen Cox: Myth
Houghton Hall, Norfolk
4 May to 28 September 2025
A major exhibition by the acclaimed British sculptor, Stephen Cox: Myth will be presented across the park, gardens and interiors of Houghton Hall from 4 May to 28 September.
The exhibition will represent the largest and most comprehensive group of work the artist has ever shown. Spanning over 40 years, it will include work conceived and produced all over the world from India to Egypt, Italy and the UK.
Around 20 sculptures in marble and stone will be placed in the landscape, while smaller works will be installed in the State Rooms on the first floor of the house, where William Kent’s exuberant decorative scheme has hardly changed since it was created in the early 18th century. A modern gallery space in the South wing of the house will show a group of works on paper together with a large marble and porphyry sculpture, Shrine, which was created for the celebrated Encounters exhibition at the National Gallery in 2000.
Discovering Jewish Country Houses: Photographs by Hélène Binet
Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Bucks
26 March – 22 June 2025
A new body of work by one of the world’s leading photographers, Hélène Binet, capturing an extraordinary group of Jewish country houses.
The display of more than 20 works takes as its inspiration the new book Jewish Country Houses (edited by Juliet Carey and Abigail Green, Profile Books, 2024), which sheds new light on a previously overlooked category of country houses owned, renovated, and at times built by Jews and individuals of Jewish descent.
Binet was commissioned to create photographic essays about nine houses, two mausoleums, and a synagogue, capturing their extraordinary and varied exteriors, gardens, and interiors.
Country houses are powerful symbols of national identity, evoking the glamorous world of the landowning aristocracy. Jewish country houses tell a more complex story of prejudice and integration, difference and connection. Many had spectacular art collections and gardens. Some were stages for lavish entertaining, while others provided inspiration to the European avant garde. A few are now museums of international importance; many more are hidden treasures: all were beloved homes that bear witness to the remarkable achievements of newly emancipated Jews across Europe – and to a dream of belonging that mostly came to a brutal end with the Holocaust.
KNOX: Order & Beauty
Manx Museum, Douglas, Isle of Man
05 April 2025 — 01 March 2026
Archibald Knox was an internationally celebrated artist and foremost designer for Liberty & Co. in London. He was born and lived most of his life on the Isle of Man and was strongly influenced by Manx culture and landscape. The exhibition celebrates the extraordinary legacy of Knox, whilst exploring how the Isle of Man’s unique cultural heritage inspired his work.
In 1897, Knox left the Island to teach in an art school in London. During this period, his association began with the London department store Liberty & Co, which specialised in exclusive designs for an upmarket clientele. His work for Liberty included designs for metalwork, jewellery, ceramics, fabric patterns, and wallpaper.
He was a pioneer of modern 20th-century design, with his work bridging arts and crafts, Celtic revival, art nouveau and modernism. Manx National Heritage has been collecting the art and design work of Archibald Knox for nearly 100 years and has one of the largest collections of Knox-related material in the world. This includes metalwork, jewellery, ceramics, design work, illuminated manuscripts, sketches and a large number of watercolour paintings. The exhibition will feature over 200 pieces from collections across the British Isles, including rare pieces of silver, pewter and jewellery from iconic collections.