The latest art and photography exhibition reviews (updated for 2025)

Since 2021, the Cosmic House – the fascinating former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks – has operated as a museum, and each year, the Jencks Foundation commissions an artist to respond to the surroundings. This time round, it’s a video work by Lithuanian-born musician Lina Lapelytė, composed of 12 screens dotted around the house to be hunted down like a game of hide and seek. Beautiful and peculiar, this is immersive art as it should be.

Fashion icon, model, club promoter, musician; Leigh Bowery was a multi-hyphenate before multi-hyphenate became a thing. But above all else, he was a muse, as the Tate Modern’s extensive new exhibition tracing the Melbourne native’s life and legacy does an excellent job of portraying. 

If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, then the intensely staring, delinquent characters created by Yoshimoto Nara have a lot going on inside. As one of the best-known (and best-selling) Japanese artists of our time, Nara has earned this massive retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. It’s his largest ever UK exhibition by far: spanning not only his paintings, but also drawings, installations, and sculpture across a four-decades-long career.

The RA Summer Exhibition has been held every year since 1769, and in 2025, it’s been coordinated by renowned British-Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi. You’ll see architectural drawings, models and nods to our built environment dotted throughout the exhibition, not bound by one room. As usual, there’s plenty of the big dawgs here – Tracey Emin, Frank Bowling, Cindy Sherman – as well as art by emerging artists.

This is an exhibition about exhibitions and about exhibition-making as an act of passion, generosity and curiosity shared between artists. Every image, sound and object here is like a mushroom grown from a vast, international and intergenerational network of mutual support and encouragement that expands far beyond this gallery’s walls.

Walking through the high-ceilinged halls of The Perimeter in Bloomsbury, where natural light spills across bare walls and polished floors, you might not expect to stumble across something so disturbing and intimate. Gaaaaaaasp is London-born artist Alexandra Metcalf’s first solo institutional exhibition, turning the gallery’s four floors into a disorienting world of 1960s patterns and clinical sterility, brought together under themes of domestic and gendered labour.

Reflecting on themes of memory, migration and the home, South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh is internationally renowned for his vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. This year, he’s finally presenting a major exhibition at Tate Modern, in the city he currently lives, showcasing three decades of his work including brand-new, site-specific pieces. 

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. 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.

Ithell Colquhoun didn’t sit still, visually or spiritually. This exhibition attempts to make sense of a sprawling oeuvre that engages with an incredibly wide gamut of spiritual, religious and formal ideas. Though not always coherent, it reveals her to be an artist of immense talent and invention. Across her engagements with the occult, Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism and the Jewish Kabbalah, Colquhoun’s eye for composition remains a constant, and might be the best part of a sometimes confusing show.

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image. Burra collapses our sense of perspective, stacking his subjects vertically to fit as much action as he can into each image. Each shape is impossibly smooth and rendered so precisely as to look airbrushed.

Regarded as one of the UK’s most influential contemporary artists, this new exhibition at Tate Britain surveys Ed Atkins’ career to date, showcasing 15 years of work spanning computer-generated videos, animations, sculpture, installation, sound, painting and drawing. The result is something urgent and deeply human. 

What is a portrait, really? What is its role? And what makes it different from ‘just’ a photograph of a person? These are all questions that spring to mind when walking around A Thousand Small Stories, the first ever retrospective of Eileen Perrier’s photography. Since the 1990s, the London-born photographer has used her camera to capture individuals in their local communities, and this show highlights some of her finest work. 

As anyone who has ever tried to secure a booking at the London Fields Lido on a warm summer day will know, us Londoners love a good dip. So it’s only natural that the capital’s Design Museum should stage an exhibition dedicated to our adoration of swimming. With more than 200 objects, Splash! presents a whistle-stop tour for water babies taking us all the way from bizarre Victorian bathing carriages, to the present-day mermaidcore TikTok trend. The only thing missing is the smell of chlorine.  

The clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep on, the carpets beneath our feet. Textiles are everywhere; we can’t escape them. That’s what this show at the Fashion and Textile Museum sets out to explore: the long-running connection between us, the earth, and textiles, in just about every sense of the word. 

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.