Top 10 art exhibitions in London (updated for 2025)

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s way more to Edvard Munch than ‘The Scream’. The Norwegian expressionist painter is also considered one of the great portraitists of the 19th and 20th centuries, and spent much of his artistic life creating intimate portraits of those in his life – from his family and friends to fellow artists, writers and art collectors in his orbit. Some of these works were commissioned; others were personal projects, but regardless of the motive behind them, all exhibit the elements that made Munch such an influential figure in portraiture. 

Why go: This is the first UK show to focus on this sometimes overlooked aspect of Munch’s work.