This is the first Art Diary of 2025. Viewing art, as with its making, involves paying attention. As Simone Weil once pointed out, paying attention equates to prayer. A new exhibition at Fitzrovia Chapel explores these themes. It is, therefore, a very appropriate beginning to a review of upcoming exhibitions in 2025, where each exhibition listed will reward the paying of sustained attention, enabling entry to a state of contemplation and even contemplative prayer. Among the exhibitions highlighted are the work of major ceramicists, major artists exploring the influence of Vincent Van Gogh (and Post-Impressionism more generally), plus exhibitions exploring themes of environment and identity.
IN ATTENDANCE – Paying attention in a fragile world, is a new collaborative exhibition from the Roberts Institute of Art in partnership with the Fitzrovia Chapel as part of the Fitzrovia Chapel’s Cultural Programme 2025. A selection of paintings, sculptures and video by UK and international contemporary artists from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection will be displayed in a space originally built as part of the Middlesex Hospital and that has for decades been used as a place of respite, prayer and contemplation for medical staff, patients and visitors alike.
The exhibition includes work by 11 artists – Etel Adnan, Emmanuel Awuni, Phyllida Barlow, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Gabriella Boyd, Miriam Cahn, Eve Sussman, Rachel Kneenbone, Anj Smith, Paula Rego and Cathy Wilkes – and explores themes of attention, compassion and curiosity. The exhibition asks us to explore attention not as rigid focus but as a receptive, dynamic engagement with the world, inspired by the philosophy of Simone Weil.
Through the diverse works shown in this setting, the exhibition celebrates how attention can help us remain open and receptive rather than always seeking solutions and answers. As Simone Weil suggests, a complete understanding of anyone or anything will remain elusive. Still, the practice of attention can allow for a journey of ongoing discovery and connection with the world and others around us. In this way, the exhibition encourages us to reimagine the idea of attention as an open-ended practice tied to compassion, curiosity and care.
Kate Davies, RIA Director, says: “We are delighted to be partnering with the Fitzrovia Chapel to curate and present a selection of works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection around themes of care, compassion and curiosity. Through the works on display, we explore how artists respond to materials and the challenges of human experience and find new ways through their practice to connect to others and the world around us. The setting of the chapel could not be more fitting, and we hope the exhibition offers visitors an opportunity for contemplation, wonder and a fresh perspective.”
The Fitzrovia Chapel Director, Madeleine Boomgaarden, says: “The themes of personal reflection and marvel embedded in this show fit perfectly with the chapel’s history as a place of sanctuary, prayer and contemplation while it was part of the Middlesex Hospital – and to this day. We’re delighted to partner with the Roberts Institute of Art in showing these exquisite and thoughtful objects in the calm of the chapel.”
Similarly, Alastair Gordon recently installed a new commissioned painting, ‘Prayer of the Saints’, at All Saints Wandsworth. He explains that: “The painting approaches aspects of prayer, bringing together art historical references such as lilies, white roses and feathers with contemporary images of London, matches and prayer journals. It was lovely to be commissioned to make a public painting that also resonates with my personal faith. I hope a blessing to the church and local community too as a permanent public installation.” Additionally, he is about to publish ‘Lost Things’, a limited-edition book of poems by Ed Mayhew coupled with his own paintings. The collection is a whimsical study of the lost and found, overlooked, under-appreciated and flotsam or detritus of the world in all its mundane wonder.
At Kettle’s Yard, ‘Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa’ is an exhibition that takes us onto similar ground. This exhibition, the first solo exhibition by Zvavahera at a public gallery in Europe, draws on southern African culture, Christian iconography, traditional European painting, and African printmaking. It shows artworks informed by the artist’s own dreams and the spiritual traditions she grew up with as a child.
Her semi-autobiographical works use layers of colour, texture and techniques, including batik stencilling, block-printing, drawing and painting with ink. She works on multiple paintings at a time, so all the artworks shown are in conversation, encapsulating all of the emotions she experienced during her dreams. She typically ends her painting series with a ‘victory painting’ to finish the work on a positive note after processing the difficult emotions that she may experience in her dreams during the painting process.
The title of the exhibition, ‘Zvakazarurwa’, means ‘revelations’ in Shona, the language in which Portia thinks and dreams. The title symbolises the things that have been ‘revealed’ to the artist during her dreams and references the book of Revelation in the Bible, also known as ‘The Book of the Apocalypse’. Zvavahera is a Christian, and her paintings often reflect her beliefs. For example, many of the artworks on display at Kettle’s Yard leave large parts of the canvas blank. This is so the blank space can be filled by a ‘higher power’. As an artist, Zvavahera feels she is not always in complete control of everything, so these spaces are left clear, asking God to guide the way and help her finish the work. Like Zvavahera, many other Zimbabwean artists also explore and negotiate their belief systems, a reality that was examined by the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition ‘Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs’ at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, which included work by Zvavahera.
Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery is marking its tenth anniversary with the opening of a second gallery space, in London’s Exmouth Market. Expanding from its original home in Deptford, this new location will further the gallery’s mission to foster cutting-edge contemporary art and support both emerging and established artists on the global stage. The new gallery launches with an exhibition that showcases the essence of Elizabeth Xi Bauer and its vision for the future by featuring a curated selection of works from both the gallery’s represented artists and those who have previously been exhibited.
The gallery’s 2025 programme will feature a series of duo exhibitions, each show comprising one of the gallery’s represented artists alongside a revered international artist, who will be collaborating with Elizabeth Xi Bauer for the first time. This programme will begin in March with a duo exhibition featuring works by Marta Jakobovits and Anderson Borba. Jacobovits’ work in the inaugural show will include a small survey of her ceramic techniques: casting, modelling, firing, and glazing. She works with shape, colour, and texture, building a vast, detailed, personal library of how her use of chemicals informs the physical and vice versa. Her installations often present a special visual dialogue with natural forms, stones, leaves, tree barks, and even found objects. A retrospective of Jacobovits’ work can also be found at Ţării Crişurilor Museum, Oradea, until February 2025.
The curator of an earlier Jacobovits retrospective, Mălina Ionescu, has written: “From the recovery of an archaic, traditional and mythological fund and all the way to the discovery and affirmation of the connection between the natural and the spiritual, her work explores a dimension of the sacred which not only cancels any contradiction with the material but becomes operational only in its indissoluble tie with the substance … Evolution, continuity, journey, ascension are themes central to her permanent exploration of the potential of ceramics—a material which contains the poetics of both malleability and hardness (and the dynamic processed in-between) and of a beauty which is intrinsic to matter, the images from inside of the substance.”
St Stephen Walbrook, where I was previously priest-in-charge, has a wonderful pair of candleholders made by Hans Coper, so I was interested to see that The Gallery at The Arc in Winchester will be hosting a unique exhibition with all three murals made by Coper – the only three he made in his lifetime – being brought together on public display for the first and only time. The three murals were previously displayed at a Winchester military base, a Yorkshire secondary school, and the entrance to a London office.
‘Hans Coper: Resurface’ will also feature over 20 of the artist’s famous pots and items that have rarely, if ever, been on public display before, such as clay prints, the mould for an acoustic wall tile, and a large, incised plaster panel. These are photographs of Coper taken by his wife, Jane, in his Digswell studio around the time he was making the murals.
Known for complex, incised patterns, Coper bridged the gap between pottery and sculpture as his vessels allowed for grander ambitions. Articulating forms that rested on other forms with a disc of clay, he created tough-bodied works with deliberately scratched and abraded surfaces. The murals were an integral touchstone in his career. Made shortly after his first solo exhibition and after leaving Lucy Rie’s Albion Mews studio, they heralded a new, experimental phase and were created in his new studio in Digswell, Hertfordshire. All were site-specific and commissioned for buildings or spaces that were constructed in the 1960s. At the same time as the mural commissions, Coper probably made his most well-known series of works: six monumental candlesticks adorned the steps of Coventry Cathedral. The maquettes for these will be included in the exhibition.
‘Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed’ is the first ever solo exhibition of Hélène de Beauvoir’s work in London. Often overshadowed by her older sister, the writer Simone de Beauvoir, this exhibition features paintings and works on paper from the 1950s to 1980s. ‘The Woman Destroyed’ is an exhibition which took Amar Gallery’s founder, Amar Singh, three years to put together, sourcing works from around the world, meeting patrons of de Beauvoir and discovering how important Hélène de Beauvoir was to her sister and the global feminist movement. Picasso was among the admirers of Hélène’s paintings, becoming familiar with her work when she had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1936.
In 1967, 143 first-edition copies of Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Woman Destroyed’ were published by Gallimard with sixteen etchings by Hélène. First editions of this book are extremely rare, and one copy will be on view at Amar Gallery. This incredibly important book in feminist ideology was the first time the de Beauvoir sisters collaborated together. Referring to her sister, Hélène wrote, “I was her first reader…and I would draw” in her book ‘Souvenirs’, where she recalls how, in the early years, she came to choose the vocation of artist, whilst her elder sister preferred to write.
In February, Lisson Gallery will be showing an exhibition of new works by Ai Weiwei that showcase a provocative exploration of contemporary issues through the lens of historical and artistic reference. Each piece articulates a dialogue between past and present, revealing the artist’s relentless inquiry into the complexities of identity, politics, and cultural heritage. ‘F.U.C.K.’ is a striking installation employing buttons affixed to four Second World War military stretchers to spell out the provocative word. ‘Go Fuck Yourself’, an installation in which the upper sections of military tents are sewn with buttons, creates a visceral commentary on political polarisation and contemporary discourse.
There will also be a playful yet profound reinterpretation of Paul Gauguin’s ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’. Through the medium of toy bricks, this large scale piece reimagines Gauguin’s philosophical inquiries while integrating contemporary elements such as drones and references to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The exhibition also features ‘Wheat Field with Crows’, another reinterpretation rendered in toy bricks, where the crows of Van Gogh’s original painting are replaced with drones, drawing parallels between the artist’s tumultuous mental state and the chaos of today’s world. This transformation highlights the ongoing relevance of historical artworks, revealing how they can serve as mirrors reflecting our current societal challenges. Ai argues that “An individual life can be seen as a coloured brick, but also as intuitive expression of, not only a two-dimensional plane, but also the digital plane – meaning the internet and pixels, which are parallel to the real world.”
‘An Uncommon Thread’ at Hauser and Wirth in Somerset will feature 10 contemporary artists living and working in the UK, highlighting the transformative power of unconventional mediums in evoking personal and collective memories. Each artist places an unwavering commitment to the integral role materials and techniques play in their creative process, employing unexpected painting surfaces, adapting formal craft traditions, and repurposing discarded products into compelling works. Through individual investigations of identity, tradition, nature, fantasy, and the environment, the exhibition will invite viewers to engage with the rich stories woven into each work, driven by a curiosity and inventive approach to materiality and process.
The exhibition includes work by Nengi Omuku, daughter of Bishop Precious Omuku, who, having trained as a horticulturist and florist, invokes a longing for pre-lapsarian tranquillity and oneness with nature. Painted on stitched-together strips of sanyan fabric, her images are visions of a re-communion with nature, which are formed on pieces of Nigerian cultural heritage. In her works, the distinction between her figures and their natural settings is deliberately blurred to seek reconnection with the natural world and the solace to be found there.
With ‘Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’, the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam are joining forces to stage a major exhibition of one of the most important artists of our time. This exhibition will include 25 works by Kiefer, including vast paintings, intricate installations, film, and rarely seen works on paper. The part of the show in the Van Gogh Museum will focus on Kiefer’s continuing interest in the art and legacy of Van Gogh. Kiefer’s interest dates back to 1963, when the young artist undertook a travel scholarship to retrace Van Gogh’s steps through the Netherlands, Belgium, and France.
The exhibition will include seven major works by Van Gogh, such as the ‘Wheatfield with Crows’, presented alongside Kiefer’s monumental pieces that deal with similar themes of nature, renewal, and the passage of time. These juxtapositions promise a dialogue across centuries, inviting visitors to explore the complex interplay between Van Gogh’s vivid, expressive vision and Kiefer’s brooding, layered investigations into history and memory. The exhibition includes a new, never-seen work by Kiefer, with its monumental scale and thematic ambition sure to surprise and overwhelm the audience. It will be presented next to 13 early works by the artist—a rare, unprecedented view into Kiefer’s formative period and development.
Post-Impressionism will be explored more generally at Charleston Farmhouse through ‘Inventing Post-Impressionism: Works from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts’ from March to November 2025. Charleston, the Modernist home and studio of the painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant in East Sussex, is partnering with the Barber to present this major exhibition showcasing one of the UK’s most important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collections.
This show revisits 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. It features a significant number of works from the Barber, including paintings and prints by such influential artists as Paul Cézanne, Van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro. The exhibition, which will also feature pieces from Charleston’s permanent collection, blends history, art, and Bloomsbury’s role in shaping British Modernism, offering a rare opportunity to explore the lasting impact of Post-Impressionism on British art.
Also opening in March is ‘Can the Seas Survive Us?’ at the Sainsbury Centre. Three exhibitions will chart a course through the story of the oceans, and the dangerous future they may be heading towards, featuring historical artworks, maps, atlases, archives, and contemporary art from across the globe. All three exhibitions will delve into humanity’s deep relationship with the seas and act as a call to action – showing how coastal communities are bearing the brunt of human-caused climate change, the bodily and spiritual connections that could be lost, and how to continue with the waters that have shaped the very fabric of global society.
‘A World of Water’ brings together a number of works by British and International artists from the last 250 years who have all offered a unique perspective of evolving marine ecosystems and oceanic environments to raise pivotal questions around how we can transform our interactions with the ocean, responding to climate change, coastal erosion and environmental degradation. In Yuki Kihara’s solo show, the Sainsbury Centre will host the UK premiere and further development of ‘Paradise Camp’, an installation consisting of 12 photographs that echo the works of Paul Gauguin but challenge these past narratives. Closing the series will be ‘Sea Inside’, which turns the oceanic gaze inward, investigating the physical, psychological and imaginary depths of humans with the ocean. Diving in shared watery origins, Indigenous lifeways and the contents we pluck out and display on land, the exhibition will feature a range of mixed media and experimental artworks.
Renowned Essex-based artist Elsa James’ latest exhibition will open at Firstsite in March and present new works, including photography, print, neon, sound, and mixed media. ‘Elsa James: It Should Not Be Forgotten’ will be a profound exploration of her roots, seeking to capture the rupture, erasure, psychological impact, and fragmentation of her Black British heritage. It will focus on narratives of enslavement and Black interiority to challenge Britain’s colonial past.
‘otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua’ [other mountains, adrift beneath the waves] will be a new exhibition curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel at Ocean Space, Venice. The exhibition will present two major new commissions by artists Nadia Huggins and Tessa Mars turning thematically on the Caribbean. Curated by the Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel, a culmination of her three-year cycle as a curatorial fellow of TBA21–Academy’s fellowship program ‘The Current IV: Caribbean (2023-2025)’, the exhibition features site-specific installations and large-scale paintings created for the two spaces of the former church of San Lorenzo. The exhibition will underscore the power of improvisation and freestyle as both tools and aesthetic strategies that can be used to transcend terrestrial and extractivist perspectives for our planet, expanding ideas of what is possible in the creation of systems for sustaining life and grappling with entrenched notions of power.
A major exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland, beginning in April, is dedicated to the pioneering Irish modernists Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett and will bring together 90 of their works of art. It explores their friendship and shared experiences while studying in Paris during the early 1920s and traces their careers back to Ireland. The exhibition highlights the early convergences and later divergences in their styles as they developed distinct artistic voices. Featuring paintings, stained glass, and preparatory drawings, it reveals how both women were trailblazers in Irish art although remaining connected to conventional themes such as religion and landscape. Jellett and Hone through their influential roles in modern Irish art and links to artists such as Albert Gleizes and Georges Rouault, demonstrate the significant role that religion played in modern art’s development.
The National Gallery in London is undertaking a major redisplay of its collection. ‘C C Land: The Wonder of Art’ will display over 1,000 works as part of the Gallery’s free offering at Trafalgar Square, including the most renowned and beloved works collected for the nation over the last 200 years. These will hang alongside new loans of work by Mantegna, Van Dyck, Hogarth, and Van Gogh, as well as acquisitions by Poussin, Eva Gonzalez, and Degas, and a few surprises still to come. Visitors will be able to see the completed redisplay from 10 May 2025, coinciding with the opening to the public of the transformed Sainsbury Wing after more than two years of building works, reshaping the National Gallery for its third century and the next generation of visitors.
‘The Wonder of Art’ will follow a broadly chronological arrangement, with medieval and Renaissance pictures displayed in the Sainsbury Wing and later paintings in the Wilkins Building. It will also include a range of more thematic interventions, such as ‘The Spectacle of Portraiture’, ‘Flowers’ and ‘Still Life’. Some newly restored works will be shown for the first time in several years, and a series of rooms will feature the work of individual artists, marking the first time the Gallery’s works by Titian and Monet will each be brought together. Other artists in focus include Rubens, Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Gainsborough.
‘Shelter: Below and beyond, becoming and belonging’ is the title for the third Helsinki Biennial, which will present and celebrate ambitious works by around 35 Finnish and international artists and artist groups across three distinct venues: Vallisaari island in the Helsinki archipelago, HAM Helsinki Art Museum, and, for the first time, Esplanade Park in central Helsinki. Curated by Blanca de la Torre and Kati Kivinen, ‘Shelter’ takes inspiration from Vallisaari’s protected ecosystem, preserved from human habitation for decades. Against this biodiverse backdrop and amid the global climate crisis, the biennial invites us to rethink shelter not as a physical barrier against the elements but as a nurturing space—psychological, social, or ecological—where all forms of life can find protection and thrive. Shifting away from a human-centric perspective, artists have been invited to foreground non-human actors—plants, animals, fungi, and minerals—as protagonists in the works, reimagining humanity’s relationship with nature to inspire positive environmental action. Artists announced to date include Olafur Eliason (who will also create a permanent new commission for the city of Helsinki), Otobong Nkanga and Ernesto Neto.
Arja Miller, director of the Helsinki Biennial and HAM Helsinki Art Museum says: “Through the Helsinki Biennial, we aim to create a thought-provoking celebration of contemporary art, welcoming broad audiences to experience the beauty of summer in Helsinki. The biennial sees Helsinki transformed into a city of art that attracts visitors far and wide and strengthens international recognition of the entire Finnish art scene.”
For his exhibition ‘Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and its Contents’ at Waddesdon Manor, Bronstein has made a new body of work in response to Waddesdon Manor as a Jewish country house, with a grand assembly of paintings on paper depicting the Temple of Solomon and its contents, both crazy and provocative. Joyful and serious, erudite and subversive, the exhibition will, in the artist’s own words, explore “our vain efforts to infuse the fragmentary, vanished and imaginary with solidity and reality”.
The Temple of Solomon is one of the most famous buildings in history, significant as a place and an idea that has been sought, contested and imitated. Described in detail in the Bible, no one knows what it looked like, and for centuries, it has been reimagined by artists and designers, archaeologists, theorists and ideologues. Unintimidated by the weight of history and holiness, Bronstein creates an assembly of framed paintings on paper. Neoclassicism and Romanticism vie for attention alongside recollections of Bernini and Blondel, John Soane and John Martin. With virtuosic fluency in different languages of architecture, the works offer the viewer alternative ways of reconstructing the lost Temple, from ‘architecture terrible’ to Art Deco, exploring notions of the primitive, the modern and the holy.
The autumn season ‘Can We Stop Killing Each Other?’ at The Sainsbury Centre will wrestle with one of the darkest and deadliest aspects of humanity. A series of exhibitions will explore the fundamental questions of why humans are led to kill and the culture that wrestles with this notion such as in art, film, TV and theatre.
Reflecting on the real material culture linked to particular case studies from the past and present, such as the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda of 1994, the season will be a challenging but eye-opening consideration of some of the most horrifying events in human history. A series of new paintings by Ethiopian artist Tesfaye Urgessa will also be unveiled, reflecting on the refugee crisis and created in dialogue with the Sainsbury Centre collection. Influenced by neo-expressionism and the London school, Urgessa’s figurative paintings explore the politics of race and identity.
Lead image: Mainie Jellett, Western Procession, Photo, National Gallery of Ireland
‘IN ATTENDANCE – Paying attention in a fragile world’, 8 January – 9 February, Fitzrovia Chapel – Visit Here
‘Prayer of the Saints’, installation at All Saints, Wandsworth – Visit Here
‘Portia Zvavahera: Zvakazarurwa’, 22 October – 16 February, Kettle’s Yard – Visit Here
‘Metaterra’, 15 November 2024 – 15 February 2025, Criș Land Museum, Oradea – Visit Here
‘Inaugural Exhibition’, 17 January – 1 March, Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market – Visit Here
‘Hans Coper: Resurface’, 22 January – 24 March, The Gallery at The Arc, Winchester – Visit Here
Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed’, 24 January – 2 March, Amar Gallery – Visit Here
‘Ai Weiwei: A New Chatpter’, 7 February – 15 March, Lisson Gallery – Visit Here
‘An Uncommon Thread’, 8 February – 27 April, Hauser & Wirth, Somerset – Visit Here
‘Anselm Kiefer—Sag mir wo die Blumen sind’, 7 March – 9 June, Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam – Visit Here
‘Inventing Post-Impressionism: Works from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts’, 8 March – 2 November, Charleston Farmhouse, East Sussex – Visit Here
‘Can the Seas Survive Us?’ at the Sainsbury Centre: ‘A World of Water’, 15 March – 3 August; ‘Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara’, 15 March – 3 August; and ‘Sea Inside, 7 June – 26 October – Visit Here
‘Elsa James: It Should Not Be Forgotten’, 29 March – 6 July 2025, Firstsite Visit Here
otras montañas, las que andan sueltas bajo el agua’, 5 April – 2 November, ocean space, Venice – Visit Here
‘Mainie Jellett & Evie Hone – The Art of Friendship’, 10 April – 10 August, National Gallery of Ireland – Visit Here
‘C C Land: The Wonder of Art’, from 10 May, National Gallery – Visit Here
Helsinki Biennial 2025, 8 June – 21 September 2025 – Visit Here
‘Pablo Bronstein: The Temple of Solomon and its Contents’, from 16 July, Waddesdon Manor – Visit Here
‘Can We Stop Killing Each Other?’, 20 September 2025 – 3 May 2026, Sainsbury Centre – Visit Here