The latest art and photography exhibition reviews (updated for 2026)

Delcy Morelos spent a month filling the Barbican’s Sculpture Court with earth and clay. Working by hand, the Colombian artist and her team layered more than ten tonnes of the stuff to create origo, a mammoth, multi-sensory installation stretching 24 metres wide and 12 metres high, named after the Latin word for ‘origin’.  For more than a decade, Morelos has asked viewers to rethink their relationship with soil; not just as the brown stuff shaken from boots or scrubbed from under our fingernails, but as the substance from which all life emerges and depends. Growing up in Tierralta, northern Colombia, Morelos is influenced by an Andean view that sees landscapes not as resources to be extracted, but deserving of care and protection.  And so here, in the Barbican’s circular courtyard, we earthlings are invited to burrow through Morelos’ ovular structure, weaving through one of six entrances before arriving in the belly of the beast. Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos’ beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain.   Then you emerge into the centre of the installation: the doughnut’s hole, open to the elements and flooded with light. Here, meditative activities such as tai chi are planned to take place, beneath the Brutalist tower...

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...

The chances are, at some point, you have probably come across a print by Collier Campbell, the London-based textile studio founded in the 1960s by Susan Collier and Sarah Campbell. For 50 years, the sister design duo created bold, colourful, and brash hand-painted textile prints featuring everything from vivid still lifes to tropical scenes, pretty flowers, and folk figures. They collaborated with the likes of Terrance Conran, John Lewis, Marks and Spencer, and fashion houses Yves Saint Laurent, Jaeger and Liberty. They designed the carpet in the North Terminal at Gatwick Airport. To celebrate the work of these legendary British textile designers, the Fashion and Textile Museum has staged a small but dense exhibition dedicated to the printmaking sisters. Spanning the 60s to the present day, Paint! Pattern! Print! documents the exuberant creations of Sarah and Susan, from their early works, to employment at Liberty, to the forming of their own company. Original paintings of prints and fabric swatches are displayed alongside clothes, homeware and artefacts that inspired the designers, like a dainty Victorian blouse with incredible striped ribbon details.  If you’re someone who has mastered the art of dopamine dressing, this will be right up your alley Many of the fabrics look like the kind of thing your eccentric, arty auntie would wear. And I mean that as a compliment. These are not your grandmother's curtains, but textiles that deserve to be as well known as the William...

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

If you were to type Michaelina Wautier into the web, the results wouldn’t amount to much. You’d learn she was a painter living and working in Brussels. That she died in 1689 at the age of 75 (pretty good going, given 17th-century Europe’s fondness for endemic infections). And that, since then, she has been largely forgotten. For much of the intervening time, few art historians believed that paintings bearing her signature could possibly have been made by a woman, instead attributing them to her brother or other male artists.  Her altarpiece-sized religious paintings were assumed to be too ambitious for a woman, while nudes posed another problem: how was she meant to accurately paint the human body – let alone the male nude – when the academies that taught such things barred her from entering? You begin to see why Wautier’s authorship was doubted for so long. And yet she did it all: flowers and still lifes, portraits and large-scale history paintings. Twenty-five of them are now on view at the Royal Academy of Arts, in the first UK exhibition devoted to the artist. Her works are shown alongside those of better-known contemporaries - Peter Paul Rubens and David Teniers the Younger - as well paintings by her older brother, Charles Wautier, who she is thought to have shared a studio with. Like someone laying out every qualification in a job interview, she throws everything she can into the canvas You only have to stand in front of Wautier’s flower paintings to see why she...

The National Portrait Gallery is as much a monument to national identity as it is an art gallery. Walk through its hallowed halls, and you’ll witness royals and politicians rendered in rich oil paints, celebrated actors and great thinkers captured by history’s leading artists, athletes and rock stars peering across the room at one another from gilded frames. It’s an education in our collective understanding of British life, culture and history. But who isn’t here? Who doesn’t get to shape the version of the nation’s identity on display to the thousands of tourists, school groups and art lovers who parade through these grand rooms every day? That question is central to the work of American photographer Catherine Opie, whose exhibition, To Be Seen, is currently installed on the second floor of the gallery. Securing Opie’s first major UK exhibition feels like a coup for a gallery that has clearly taken pains to shake off its stuffy image in recent years and is lent an air of transgressive cool by the cult photographer. And fortunately, it turns out that putting her oeuvre in direct conversation with the largest collection of portraiture in the world works wonders. Not only does Opie's work serve to challenge visitors’ ideas about who belongs on the walls of this historic institution, but it also brilliantly elucidates the artist’s Baroque and Renaissance references.  Visitors entering the exhibition are met with the piercing gaze of actor Daniela (now Daniel) Sea, best known...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

Getting on the tube these days means being bombarded with dozens of ugly advertisements, selling you everything from whisky, to electric toothbrushes and LED facemasks. However, things weren’t always this way. Unlike today’s dull Underground adverts, tube stations during the 1920s and 30s were adorned with strikingly vibrant art deco posters that promoted things to do and places to go around London. Over a hundred of these are exhibited at the London Transport Museum’s latest temporary exhibition, Art Deco: the golden age of poster design, alongside objects like a cigarette case, compact mirror, and tea set that express the decadence of that period.  Back then, a post-war economic boom had propelled consumerism, affording people more leisure time than ever.  Speed, freedom, and opportunity became the ethos of an era that could harness industrial technology in recreation rather than warfare. Such carefreeness is reflected in the bold colours, opulent typefaces, sharp geometry, and indulgent scenes of Londoners enjoying a day out. While a younger audience will be drawn to their vintage aesthetic, older visitors might find them charmingly nostalgic. Art deco didn’t get its name until the 1960s when it came under academic scrutiny; during its day it was simply known as Style Moderne. Which is fitting because many of the artists regularly commissioned by London Transport took vivid inspiration from modernist art movements such as cubism, futurism, and vorticism; unknowingly...

Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha is on from May 8 until August 10 2025, followed by Mona Hatoum in September and Lynda Benglis in February 2026.  In the Barbican’s new, light-filled gallery, the City of London skyline provides a fitting backdrop for the tall, wiry works of Alberto Giacometti beside the hybrid, fragmented figures of Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha.  For ‘Encounters’, the Giacometti Foundation lent some of the Swiss artist’s most elemental figures for an exhibition that will evolve in the coming months with responses from other artists, including Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum and American sculptor Lynda Benglis. In the first of the three, Bhabha’s sculptures focus on the fragmented body – but where Giacometti’s figures are stretched and attenuated, expressing solitude and existential suffering, she fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart. Though separated by decades – Giacometti shaped by postwar Europe and Bhabha by postcolonial trauma and global violence after 9/11 – their works share a profound interest in the aftermath of war and the psychological scars left behind, speaking to the bruised and battered bodies that exist beyond the immediate experience of conflict.  Bhabha fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart The exhibition demands a slow and meditative engagement. As visitors move throughout, the sculptors’ works are arranged at shifting heights: frozen in mid-stride or suspended in stillness, some...