Tarsila do Amaral Jaime Acioli
Photo: Jaime Acioli
Photo: Jaime Acioli

Top 10 art exhibitions in London (updated for 2025)

Check out our critics’ picks of the ten best art shows coming up in the capital at some of the world’s best art galleries

Chiara Wilkinson
Contributor: Rosie Hewitson
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Art lover? You really can’t get much better than London. Not only do you have all of the world-leading permanent collections of our namesake art galleries and museums at your disposal, you also have high end commercial galleries, amazing local community spaces and outdoor public art on every other corner – and that’s before we get onto the exciting, constantly-evolving calendar of temporary exhibitions. In other words, there is a hell of a lot of art to see in this city, especially in 2025.

Some might say there’s even too much art to see – and what a problem to have. That’s where we come in. Time Out has been sending experts to review all of the major exhibitions in London, as well as a lot of the smaller ones, for decades. Working out what is actually good, and what is not, is our job: be it sculpture, painting, performance art, photography or anything in between. 

Check out our list of the best art we’ve seen recently, and check back in for updates every week. These are the best exhibitions in London right now.

Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.

The ten best art exhibitions in London

  • Art
  • Millbank
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

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. 

Why go: This is art which explores the anxieties, absurdities, and vulnerabilities of life in an age where technology both preserves and distorts who we are. The result is something urgent and deeply human. 

  • Art
  • Barbican
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Noah Davis, the Los Angeles painter known for his figurative works depicting dreamlike visions of everyday Black life, was not one to be pigeonholed. He pushed back against the perceived expectations of the art world and played with paint, commanded it. There’s an element of the uncanny about it all – sometimes sinister, otherworldly – or a sense that things were not always this way. 

Why go: This stunning retrospective of paintings from an artist we lost too early is quietly, yet urgently political. 

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  • Art
  • Photography
  • Soho
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Leeds is another planet in this exhibition from veteran British photographer Peter Mitchell, a name nowhere near as well-known as contemporaries like Don McCullin or Martin Parr – but a truly worthwhile discovery if you’ve never heard of him. A Londoner who moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left, Mitchell’s photos in this small but transporting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery take us on a tour of the backstreets and alleys of his adopted city, mainly during the 1970s, giving us proud shopkeepers and aproned artisans standing in front of crumbling premises.

Why go: There’s now a retro appeal to his vision, but to his contemporaries, this was strange, modern, radical work.

  • Art
  • Aldwych
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

London has seen no shortage of Impressionism exhibitions in recent years. Do we need another? Possibly not. But this one does offer the chance to see some magnificent paintings from the collection of arts patron and Impressionism superfan Oskar Reinhart for the first time outside of his native Switzerland. 

Why go: This is some truly impressive work from some of the world’s best-loved artists, like Géricault, Monet and van Gogh.

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  • Art
  • Trafalgar Square

Take a trip to the Tuscan city of Siena and its discipline-changing art scene from 700 years ago. Artists like Duccio, Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Pietro brothers brought previously unseen levels of drama, emotion and movement to their work, creating fresh strokes that bore huge impact not just in their local art circles but around the world. Now, the National Gallery is capturing the energy that fuelled the crew, displaying some of their finest – and most significant – work.

Why go: This is a unique chance to see some of the most impactful paintings of 14th century Europe, right here in London.

  • Art
  • Bankside
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

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. 

Why go: This show is vast, dynamic; a testament to London’s creative community in the 80s and a vision of a true artist who was not afraid of pushing the limits.

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  • Art
  • Piccadilly
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

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.

  • Art
  • Charing Cross Road
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

For Brits of a certain age, The Face was the pop culture bible of their youth. Its pages were a chaotic, colourful blend of music, fashion, nightlife, and subcultural anthropology, combining the grit, tone, and subject matter of the era’s music publications with the creative flair, quality, and splashy colour photography of the big fashion magazines. All of this is on display on the walls of the Portrait Gallery, which are filled with eye-popping and properly creative fashion shoots, youthful, hedonistic, wonderfully British street photography, and just about every UK pop culture icon of the last 40 years.

Why go: To be surrounded by vibrant, energetic, cool photography that almost makes you proud to be British. Almost.

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  • Art
  • Spitalfields
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

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.

  • Art
  • Bankside
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid.

Why go: At its core, this is about line and light. And that’s basically what art is, in its very purest form.

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