Museums and galleries outside of London and across the UK will host a variety of major exhibitions in 2026. From the celebration of home-grown gems like Gwen John, Euan Uglow, John Piper and Sir John Vanburgh to Indigenous North American artists and European master Marc Chagall, Artlyst has selected ten exhibitions to add to your calendar.
Frank Bowling, The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge
Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime
27 March 2026 – 17 January 2027
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
One of the most important British artists working today, Frank Bowling has, for over six decades, relentlessly pursued a practice that boldly expands the possibilities and properties of paint. The Fitzwilliam will present a career-spanning survey of Bowling’s work, bringing together figurative pieces from the early 1960s, poured works from the 1970s and concluding with a significant new painting, Untitled Map Painting 2 (2025).
Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime offers a rare opportunity to see the breadth of Bowling’s career, from his earlier figurative works from the 1960s to the dramatic, abstract paintings that the artist is best known for today.
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Venus, Palazzo Massimo, Rome 2022, Don McCullin,
© Don McCullin, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
Don McCullin: Broken Beauty
30 January – 4 May 2026
The Holburne Museum, Bath
One of the most celebrated photographers and photojournalists of the late 20th century, Sir Don McCullin OBE is known for carefully composed and dramatic black-and-white photographs, with subjects spanning conflict, humanitarian crises and post-war Britain. This exhibition brings together some of the most iconic images from his seven-decade career, as well as a lesser-known side of McCullin’s work, including landscape, portraits, and quiet still-life, as well as several images of Roman sculpture, which have not previously been shown in the UK.
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Sue Webster photo by Jill Mead
Sue Webster: Birth of an Icon
31 January – 10 May 2026
Firstsite, Colchester
This landmark show centres around The Crime Scene – an installation Webster has been developing since 2019. The work acts as an exorcism of sorts, weaving together personal objects and images from past and present to examine what it means to be an artist. Among these threads is a reflection on her youth, shaped by the music of Siouxsie and the Banshees, which inspired a dynamic body of work, including a memoir, a series of defaced leather jackets, and more recently, a striking series of self-portraits in oil.
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The Pilgrim by Gwen John. Photo credit – Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Gwen John: Strange Beauties
7 February – 28 June 2026
National Museum Cardiff
Gwen John is one of Wales’ most extraordinary artists. She saw the world differently — quietly, attentively, and with extraordinary depth. That difference shaped everything: her subjects, her method, her colours, her words, her work.nGwen John: Strange Beauties is a once-in-a-generation exhibition, bringing together rarely seen works from Amgueddfa Cymru and collections from around the world to celebrate her 150th birthday. It is the first major collection of her work in over forty years.
It tells Gwen’s story as it’s never been told before — revealing new ways of seeing her life and art and celebrating an artist whose vision still feels strikingly modern today.
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Marc Chagall, Le Cirque, 1967, Lithograph. Collec- tion of Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso, Münster. © 2025 ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London.
Marc Chagall: The Circus
21 November 2026 – 1 April 2027
The Hepworth Wakefield
Throughout his prolific career, Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) returned time and again to the vivid imagery of acrobats, clowns and fantastical performers, transforming the circus into a metaphor for the complexities, joys and sorrows of the human experience. Marc Chagall: The Circus will present Chagall’s celebrated lithographs on this subject, alongside paintings and archival material, both providing an introduction to Chagall’s work and life, and exploring his unique vision and symbology.
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Vanburgh 300
Blueprints of Power
14th February to 10th April 2026
Blenheim Palace
Part of Vanburgh 300 – A year-long celebration of Sir John Vanbrugh, England’s finest Baroque architect and dramatist. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Rockstar of the English Baroque’, Vanbrugh’s architectural work was as bold and daring as his early political activism and risqué plays.
This year-long festival will explore how he became the most prominent architect of his time, through events and activities at six of his major country houses and further afield: Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace, Seaton Delaval, Grimsthorpe Castle, Kimbolton Castle and Stowe House.
Blueprints of Power will shine a light on Sir John Vanbrugh’s brilliant mind, his rivalries and ambitions and take visitors on an immersive visual experience through his early life and theatrics as playwright all the way to his high-stakes partnership with Sarah Churchill, first Duchess of Marlborough. Blueprints of Power will combine immersive experiences with rare archive material, recognisable outfits and costumes and the dramatic stories behind them. Visitors will be able to step back in time and discover how this flamboyant architect’s relationship with high society helped to define an age.
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John Piper, Wiltshire Museum
John Piper in the South Country
7 March – 7 June 2026
The Wiltshire Museum, Devizes
The first ever exhibition devoted to showing how the late artist John Piper (1903-92) responded to the landscape and architecture of Wiltshire and Dorset – including Devizes, his favourite market town – will open at Wiltshire Museum in March 2026.
More than three decades after his death, Piper’s work remains highly popular, and he is considered one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. It was in the South Country that he made some of his most important paintings, portraying subjects from the region, including Stourhead, Fonthill and Lacock – yet there has never been an exhibition focusing on the work he did in this area, until now.
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Jeffrey Gibson, to My Nation 2017 ©Jeffrey Gibson, Tia Collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Culver City, CA
Hold to this Earth: Works by Contemporary
Indigenous North American Artists from Tia Collection
13 June 2026 – 18 April 2027
Underground Gallery, YSP
Headlining YSP’s 2026 programme is a major presentation of work by contemporary Indigenous North American artists from Tia Collection. The first group exhibition staged in YSP’s prestigious Underground Gallery in its twenty-year history, brings together over 60 works by more than 30 artists, whose practices are rooted in deep relationships to land, cultural memory and community. This exhibition offers a rare encounter with contemporary Indigenous North American art that is unprecedented in Europe. Spanning numerous regions and genres, it features a richly diverse range of sculpture, textiles, ceramics, photography, film and painting.
Artists including Rose B. Simpson, Jeffrey Gibson, Nicholas Galanin, Raven Chacon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Marie Watt, Emmi Whitehorse, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, George Morrison, Bob Haozous, Yatika Starr Fields, Tyrrell Tapaha, Eric-Paul Riege and Raven Halfmoon explore identity, resilience and the enduring connections between body and place. Their work confronts ongoing histories of colonialism, erasure and displacement, while also celebrating creativity, sovereignty and Indigenous futurisms.
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Euan Uglow, MK Gallery
Euan Uglow: An Arc From The Eye
14 February – 31 May 2026
MK Gallery
MK Gallery in Milton Keynes will present Euan Uglow: An Arc from the Eye, the first major UK exhibition in over twenty years dedicated to one of the most significant British figurative artists.
Curated by Catherine Lampert, this landmark exhibition brings together over 70 of Euan Uglow’s paintings and drawings from public and private collections, ranging from his iconic large-scale nudes, studio-based still lifes, to landscape works from his summers in Europe, shown alongside a series of works by artists who have influenced him including Paul Cezanne and Alberto Giacometti, and his tutors William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, and Claude Rogers.
Euan Uglow (1932-2000) is best known for his meticulous method of painting from life. Often taking many months or even years to complete one of his nudes or still life paintings, Uglow’s exacting process of repeated, careful measurements and a wholly devised set-up resulted in a very limited body of work, marking this exhibition a rare occasion.
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Nancy Holt
Nancy Holt
opening 2 May 2026
Goodwood Art Foundation
Nancy Holt (1938-2014) was one of the few women central to the Land Art movement that emerged in the 1960s and is best known for her large-scale earthworks and site-specific installations. Her extensive output also encompassed concrete poetry, audio works, film and video, as well as photography and drawings. Goodwood Art Foundation’s presentation, which will extend beyond the gallery into the landscape, will explore Holt’s sustained inquiry into systems, time, space and location.
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