London Art Exhibitions 2025 A Month By Month Guide – Artlyst

As a new year approaches, Artlyst looks forward to the latest blockbuster art exhibitions that will be on view in London in 2025. We will update this month by month London exhibition guide as new information becomes available. Once again, the wide variety of art, artists, and genres, from classical to contemporary, will satisfy all tastes. Highlights to look forward to are the Leigh Bowery retrospective at Tate Modern, the Edvard Munch portraits at the National Portrait Gallery, the Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery, Jenny Saville at the National Portrait Gallery and Lee Miller at Tate Britain.

January

Brasil! Brasil! the Birth of Modernism

28 January – 21 April 2025

Royal Academy of Arts

This major exhibition features over 130 works by ten important Brazilian artists from the 1910s to the 1970s, 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.

 

February

 

Linder Sterling

11 February – 5 May 2025

Hayward Gallery

The first London retrospective from the acclaimed British artist, offering an illuminating overview on Linder’s 50 year-long career. The exhibition will present the full trajectory of Linder’s artistic production, from her early work involved in the punk scene of 1970s Manchester, to new works yet to be displayed. 

 

Mickalene Thomas

11 February – 5 May 2025

Hayward Gallery

The pioneering artist’s first solo presentation in a UK public art gallery, having previously collaborated with Dior and Solange Knowles. Renowned for her large-scale paintings drawing on the tenets of Black feminist theory, Mickalene is the first Black femme artist to have a scholarship in her name at the Yale School of Art.

 

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.

Noah Davis 

6 February – 11 May 2025 

Barbican Art Gallery 

In February 2025, the Barbican Art Gallery will host the largest institutional survey to date of the work of the late American artist Noah Davis (1983 – 2015). Bringing together over 50 works spanning the artist’s career, this major touring exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Davis’ extraordinary practice in painting as well as his work in curating and community-building as co-founder of The Underground Museum. 

 Based primarily in Los Angeles, Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explore a range of Black life. Believing he had a “responsibility to represent the people around me,” Davis drew on anonymous photography found in flea markets, personal archives, film and television, music, literature, art history and his imagination to create a ravishing body of work.  Figures dive into swimming pools, sleep, dance, and look at public art in settings that can be both realistic and dreamlike, joyful, and melancholic. Often enigmatic and uncanny, Davis’ paintings reveal a deep feeling for people, humanity, and the emotional textures of everyday life. 

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift

20 February – 18 May 2025

National Portrait Gallery

The Face Magazine: Culture Shift celebrates iconic fashion images and portraits fromThe 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, Davies & Starr and Sølve Sundsbø. It will feature over 200 photographs – a unique opportunity to see many of these images away from the magazine page for the first time.

March

Alison Watt – From Light

5 March – 1 June 2025

Pitzzhanger Manor & Gallery

The exhibition features a new series of paintings which resonate with the architecture and collection of Sir John Soane, the architect of Pitzhanger Manor. Watt’s practice, rooted in a fascination with light, echoes strongly with Soane’s innovative manipulation of light to shape space and create atmosphere.

Visit Here

Siena: The Rise Of Painting 1300 – 1350

8 March – 22 June 2025  

National Gallery

Paintings by some of the greatest Italian artists of the 14th century will be reunited at the National Gallery in 2025 – having been dispersed throughout the world for centuries. Some of the most innovative works in the Western painting tradition, many of which were part of larger ensembles before they were separated, are being brought back together. These influential and precious paintings, many in gold ground, will be among the highlights of a rarely staged exhibition of art of the first half of the 14th century. Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300‒1350, which marks the 200th anniversary of the National Gallery and celebrates the earliest pictures in its collection, will open in spring 2025.

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.

 

José María Velasco: A View Of Mexico

29 March – 17 August 2025

National Gallery

The first monographic exhibition in the UK devoted to José María Velasco (1840–1912), Mexico’s most celebrated 19th-century painter, will take place at the National Gallery. José María Velasco: A View of Mexico coincides with the 200th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UK and Mexico. Velasco is famed for his monumental paintings of the Valle de México, the area surrounding Mexico City, the nation’s capital. Painted during decades of tremendous social change, his precise yet lyrical works depicted Mexico’s magnificent scenery and rapid industrialisation.

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo

21 March – 29 June 2025

Royal Academy of Arts

Victor Hugo was a leading public figure in 19th-century France. His books Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame were printed worldwide. As both a poet and a politician, and during his near twenty-year exile in the Channel Islands, he came to symbolise the ideals of the French Republic: equality and freedom. In private, his refuge was drawing. Hugo’s ink and wash visions of imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes are as poetic as his writing. His works inspired Romantic and Symbolist poets and many artists, including the Surrealists. Vincent van Gogh compared them to “astonishing things”.

In March 2024, the Royal Academy of Arts will present a comprehensive survey of Hugo’s rarely seen works on paper, last exhibited in the UK over 50 years ago. The exhibition will follow Hugo’s preoccupation with drawing, from his early caricatures and travel drawings to his dramatic landscapes and his experiments with abstraction.

 

April

 

Ed Atkins

2 Apr – 25 Aug 2025

Tate Britain

For over a decade, Atkins has been making videos and animations that trace the dwindling gap between representation and embodied experience. This career-spanning exhibition will assemble paintings, writing, embroideries, and drawings alongside his acclaimed moving-image works in a succession of large-scale installations.

 

The Carracci Cartoons: Myths in the Making

10 April – 6 July 2025

National Gallery

Coinciding with the re-hang of its collection, the National Gallery will present the Carracci cartoons (about 1599) in Room 1. This is a rare chance to see these works, which, at nearly four metres wide and two metres tall and in the delicate medium of charcoal and white chalk, are not often displayed. The works came into the National Gallery collection in 1837 as part of a gift by Lord Francis Egerton. They were initially made in preparation for the painted ceiling in the gallery of one of Rome’s greatest Renaissance palaces, the Palazzo Farnese.

May

The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh 

1 May – 26 Oct 2025

Tate Modern

The exhibition will invite visitors into the captivating world of this Korean-born, London-based artist. Do Ho Suh’s immersive fabric installations, life-size replicas of his past homes, videos and delicate works on paper, ask timely questions about belonging and connection, and explore the intricate relationship between architecture and the body. 

Giacometti at the BarbicanCentre

From May 2025, the Barbican Centre, London, will partner with Fondation Giacometti, Paris, for a series of three groundbreaking exhibitions taking place over the course of a year. The exhibitions bring together the practices of three contemporary artists known for their originality and ingenuity, alongside historic works by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966). Staged in a newly established, intimate exhibition space within the Barbican, the series launches on 8 May 2025 with an exhibition by Huma Bhabha, followed by Mona Hatoum on 4 September 2025 and Lynda Benglis in February 2026. 

 

June

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.

 

Edward Burra  /  Ithell Colquhoun

13 Jun – 19 Oct 2025

Tate Britain

Two renowned modern artists – Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun – will each be the subject of solo exhibitions, giving visitors the chance to see the breadth of their vivid and enigmatic paintings. Both artists took surrealism in different directions from the 1930s onwards, as Burra’s lively scenes of urban subcultures developed into brooding images of war and landscape, while Colquhoun’s treatment of sexual, mythological and dreamlike imagery reflected her fascination with the occult.

 

RA Summer Exhibition 2025

Main Galleries, Royal Academy of Arts

17 June – 17 August 2025

The Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, the world’s largest open-submission contemporary art show, will be in its 257th year. It will provide a unique platform for emerging and established artists to showcase their works to an international audience, comprising a range of media from painting, printmaking and photography to sculpture, architecture and film. It has been held each year without interruption since 1769. Around 1200 works will go on display, the majority of which will be for sale, offering visitors an opportunity to purchase original work. Funds raised support the exhibiting artists, the postgraduate students studying in the RA Schools and the work of the Royal Academy. 

 

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting

20 June – 7 September 2025

National Portrait Gallery

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 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 and 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. 

 

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.

 

July

Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award

10 July – 12 October 2025

National Portrait Gallery

The Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award is a prestigious painting competition that celebrates the very best in contemporary portraiture. 2025’s exhibition will display captivating works from around the world, by both self-taught and more established painters, that provide a snapshot of portrait painting today. Since its inception, the long-standing competition has attracted over 40,000 entries from more than 100 countries and has been seen by over 6 million people. Artists demonstrate an impressive range and complexity of skill, with artworks exploring both classical and innovative techniques that show the enduring relevance of portraiture today. A new publication, including all works exhibited as part of the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award, will be available from July 2025.

 

Jeremy Deller’s The Triumph of Art

From 26 July 2025

National Gallery

A new commission by Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller rounding off the National Gallery’s Bicentenary celebrations. The Triumph of Art marks how festivals are part and parcel of art, culture and civic life and that art and artists can be catalysts of collaboration and joy, with a year of talks, workshops and procession-style performances happening in partnership with arts organisations all over the UK. The role art plays in our public collections, cultural spaces, and museums is the new work’s main theme. Deller has drawn inspiration from the Renaissance painter Titian’s wild processions of the Roman gods, as in his famous Bacchus and Ariadne (1520‒23), as well as folklore, dances, plays, rave culture and popular arts – all culminating in a celebratory performance in Trafalgar Square in July.

 

Emily Kam Kngwarray

10 Jul 2025 – 13 Jan 2026

Tate Modern

The first major exhibition of work by Emily Kam Kngwarray ever held in Europe. One of Australia’s greatest artists, Kngwarray, was a senior Anmatyerr woman, a community from the Utopia region (north-east of Mparntwe/Alice Springs), whose paintings reflected her ritual, spiritual and ecological engagement with her homelands. Tate Modern will tell her powerful story and showcase the monumental, shimmering canvases she created in her late 70s and early 80s, many of which have never been shown outside Australia.

 

August

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). 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.

 

September

Radical Harmony:  Helene Kröller-Muller’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.

Kerry James Marshall

20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026

Royal Academy of Arts

In September 2025, the Royal Academy of Arts will mark the 70th birthday year of the celebrated American artist Kerry James Marshall Hon RA with a major solo exhibition. The exhibition will explore Marshall’s expansive career to date, and it will be his first institutional presentation in the UK for almost 20 years. Kerry James Marshall will feature around 70 works, including a new series of paintings made especially for the show and his commemorative sculpture Wake, 2003 – ongoing, which evolves each time it is exhibited.

 

Picasso: The Three Dancers 

 25 Sep 2025 – Spring 2026

Tate Modern

Marking 100 years since this iconic painting was made. Foregrounding Picasso’s fascination with dance, sex and death, this deep dive will put a pivotal work of modern art in dialogue with its historic context and with contemporary dance. 

October

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.

 

Gilbert & George: 

7 October 2025 –  4 January 2026.

Hayward Gallery

A landmark exhibition from the pioneering London-based artists. Set to be their largest exhibition to date, this presentation will focus on their new pictures from the start of the millennium as well as pictures that have never been seen in the UK, inviting audiences to embark on a multifaceted exploration of the human experience.

 

Nigerian Modernism

8 Oct 2025 – Spring 2026

Tate Modern

 

The show will celebrate the artists who revolutionised modern art in Nigeria before and after national independence in 1960, combining African and European traditions to create new, multidisciplinary forms across painting, sculpture, textile, literature and poetry.

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

9 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

National Portrait Gallery

Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Cecil Beaton – ‘The King of Vogue’ – was an extraordinary force in the 20th-century British and American creative scenes. Elevating fashion and portrait photography into an art form, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour, and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras. No previous exhibition has exclusively spotlighted his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. With this in mind, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World will showcase Beaton at his most triumphant – from the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things, to the high fashion brilliance of the Fifties and the glittering, Oscar-winning success of My Fair Lady. In between, he endured the hardship of war as a photographer of the home front and of the Western Desert campaign and beyond. From 1939, as a royal photographer, by appointment to the House of Windsor, he propelled the monarchy into the modern age. 

 

A Story of South Asain Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle

24 October 2025 – 25 January 2026

Royal Academy of Arts

This exhibition will present an important network of South Asian artists working alongside the Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015). Featuring drawings, paintings and sculptures by Mukherjee’s peers and teachers, including her parents Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee who taught at the influential Bhavana art school in Santiniketan; as well as pioneers of modernist art in India such as KG Subramanyan; and prominent artists such as Nilima Sheikh and Jagdish Swamitnathan, the exhibition will also include works from Mukherjee’s prolific 40-year career. Mukherjee’s intricate artworks fuse abstraction with the human form, drawing influence from nature, South Asian traditions of architecture and craft, and international modernist art and design.

 

Peter Doig – House of Music.

October 2025 to February 2026

Serpentine Galleries

Presenting Doig’s paintings with sound for the first time, the exhibition will highlight the significance of other disciplines to the artist’s practice, including music and film, alongside the importance of sites of communal gathering and creative exchange. 

Doig has accumulated a substantial archive of vinyl over decades and an in-depth knowledge of musical genres. For House of Music, Doig will bring his archive to life through a sculptural installation of rare, restored analogue speakers. During the course of the exhibition Doig will invite a roster of musicians and other music enthusiasts to animate this ‘high fidelity’ equipment with their own selection of vinyl through a series of residencies.

Envisaged as a multi-sensory environment, Doig will present new and recent paintings alongside the sound installation,  inviting visitors to pause and linger as they listen, transforming the gallery into place of contemplation, reflection and conversation.

 

November

Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize

13 November 2025 – 8 February 2026

National Portrait Gallery

The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize showcases the work of talented young photographers, gifted amateurs and established professionals in the very best of contemporary photography. The competition celebrates a diverse range of images and tells the fascinating stories behind the creation of works, from formal commissioned portraits to more spontaneous and intimate moments capturing friends and family. The selected images, many of which are on display for the first time, explore both traditional and contemporary approaches to the photographic portrait whilst capturing a range of characters, moods and locations. The annual In Focus display will also highlight new work by an established photographer. The 2025 edition will see the unveiling of a new commission for the Gallery’s Collection, to be announced in November 2024. A new publication, including all works exhibited as part of theTaylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize, will be available from November 2025.

 

Turner & Constable

27 Nov 2025 – 12 Apr 2026

Tate Britain

Turner & Constable will bring together Britain’s most famous artistic rivals, marking the 250th anniversary of their births. These two great artists vied for success through very different but equally bold approaches, transforming landscape painting in the process. This exhibition will be an unmissable chance to directly compare their spectacular works and see how their rivalry changed the course of British art.

December

Global Pictorialism 

 4 Dec 2025 – 25 May 2026

Tate Modern

The final exhibition of the year will be a major photography exhibition about Global Pictorialism, the international movement which first transformed the camera into an artistic tool. It will show how photographers from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town, and Brazil to Singapore created beautiful and atmospheric images between the 1880s and 1960s, using experimental new techniques to redefine photography as an art form.