Top 10 art exhibitions in London (Updated 2025)

Chew it all up and spit it out, that’s what the Brazilian modernists did. In the early twentieth century it was a country shackled by artistic conservatism but bursting at the seams with vibrant indigenous and immigrant cultures, so the modernists decided to gorge themselves on ‘cultural cannibalism.’ It’s a term from the writer Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropofago’, urging artists to ‘devour’ other influences in order to spit out something new and totally Brazilian.

Why go: It's an almost psychedelic telling of a lost bit of modern art history.

A vast engine spins, spilling noxious, viscous liquid onto the floor of the Turbine Hall. Mire Lee’s machine is draped in tentacles which ooze and flop around, drenching the cavernous space. This latest Turbine Hall installation is the best for years.

Why go: Lee's vision of industrial decline feels all too terrifyingly real. 

A contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe and Nan Goldin, and a close friend of Paul Thek and David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar rubbed shoulders with countless artists and literary luminaries from New York’s downtown scene in the ’70s and ’80s. Many of these photographs are on display in this landmark exhibition, alongside tender, poised, compassionate, beautiful work spanning a huge variety of subjects.

Why go The largest-ever exhibition of his work in the UK cements Hujar’s reputation as a major force in 20th-century photography.

Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there. She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera.

Why go: This is what photojournalism is all about: the truth.

‘Where did it all go wrong’ is a question I ask myself almost daily. American ecologist David Abram, whose 1996 book ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ is the inspiration for this group show at Edel Assanti, thought he knew the answer: it all went to shit when we figured out how to write.

Why go: It's a fascinating exploration of our basic relationship with nature.

Chaos, noise, torture, lies, laughter and trauma. Mike Kelley’s show at Tate Modern is not an easy or comfortable place to be, and that’s how he would've wanted it. The hugely influential American punk-performer-poet-conceptual-weirdo died in 2012 after dedicating his life to a long, unstoppable process of constant, ceaseless subversion. This exhibition is room after room of conventions and expectations being undermined, twisted and destroyed.

Why go: This maelstrom of ideas is a brilliant, shocking guide to how to live more freely.

Standing in front of ‘The Vision of Saint Jerome’ is like slipping down a water slide. The most important painting by sixteenth century Italian maestro Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, aka Parmigianino, is an exercise in sinuous, surreal psychedelia, and it’s stunning.

Why go: This is a beautiful celebration of an unbelievably gorgeous painting.

Everyone in 1970s Lagos was cooler than you. At least they were on the evidence of this show, which collects together the best work of Abi Morocco Photos, a husband and wife duo who documented life in Nigeria as prosperity blossomed and the economy boomed.

Why go: Beautiful images of from a life dedicated to photography.

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 Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.

The camera is meant to be a tool of truth, an instrument that captures reality. But it captures something else in Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work: fantasy.

The Nigerian-born artist lived in Brixton until his early death in his 30s in 1989. In the privacy of his studio, he was able to use the camera to explore ideas of difference, identity and a whole lot of desire. The first images here are full of African masks and twisted, nude anguish: naked bodies contorted and writhing in a cold, bare, unhomely South London flat. They’re images that express the reality of being an outsider in western society, of his Africanness, his queerness, his everythingness rubbing up awkwardly against the strictures of 1980s English life.

The camera gave voice to his frustration, but it also allowed him to express his sexuality, his erotic fantasies. The back wall of this exhibition is a riot of leather and muscles and bulges and pearls and wrestling and total, unbridled desire. They’re beautiful images of beautiful men expressing their deepest urges.

The final wall is almost all portraits of two men embracing, carrying, holding each other. A Black man and a white man, allowed to live free, naked, here in the studio if not out in the real world.

Fani-Kayode’s mashing together of Yoruba culture, eroticism and a deep dissatisfaction with society’s injustices is powerful. The camera allowed him to live out his fantasies of a kinder, more accepting and much sexier world. That’s a reality we can all hope for.