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Ah, Tate. However you feel about the UK’s most famous gallery conglomerate, you can’t deny that the institution behind two of London’s most well-respected arts venues really delivers when it comes to curating season after season of blockbuster exhibitions. It’s done it again with its 2026 programme, which features a whole bunch of thoroughly exciting, just-announced shows running the gamut from the first days of photography to 90s design.
Tate Modern
The year kicks off with a landmark retrospective tracing the 40-year career of key YBA Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern (Feb 26), showcasing career-defining works like her neons and the Turner Prize-nominated installation My Bed alongside material never exhibited before.
Summer sees the South Bank gallery stage a celebration of Argentinian artist Julio Le Parc (Jun 11), an influential figure in the Op Art and Kinetic Art movements best known for his interactive installations and pioneering kinetic sculptures. This arrives alongside two hugely exciting exhibitions on feminist icons. First up is history’s most famous unibrow owner, Frida Kahlo, in Frida: The Making of an Icon (Jun 9), followed by the largest UK exhibition to date on Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta (Jul 9), the 20th-century sculptor, photographer and video artist best known for her ‘earth-body’ sculpture works.
Tate Modern’s year wraps up with Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography (Oct 8), a globe-trotting group exhibition examining the international movement which first transformed the camera into an artistic tool.
The year also sees the return of Tate Modern’s three annual commissions: the cutting-edge Infinities Commission in the Tanks, the participatory summer commission for Uniqlo Tate Play, and the world-renowned Hyundai Commission in the Turbine Hall in the autumn.
Tate Britain
Tate Britain starts the year with a showcase of British-Jamaican painter Hurvin Anderson’s colour-drenched landscapes (Mar 26), followed by a retrospective on UK-based American painter James McNeill Whistler (May 21), the first European exhibition on the documenter of the Gilded Age in 30 years.
If Tate’s 2025 programme is big on the 80s – thanks to Photographing Britain and Leigh Bowery! – then 2026 is all about The 90s, with former Vogue editor Edward Enninful curating Tate Britain’s major autumn exhibition on photography, art and fashion across the decade (Oct 1).
Tate Britain ends the year hosting an exhibition on the 50-year-long creative (and sometime romantic) relationship between Bloomsbury Set stalwarts Vanessa Bell & Duncan Grant (Nov 12), featuring over 250 works and a faithful restaging of Grant’s studio, relocated from his home in Sussex.
Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira will be the next artist to undertake the Tate Britain commission, with the Millbank gallery also hosting new exhibitions of contemporary art throughout the year as part of its ongoing Art Now series.
More details on all of the newly announced exhibitions can be found here. And if you’ve let your Tate membership lapse, you might want to renew it now. That’s a hell of a lot of brilliant art to get through.
Can’t get enough of the Tate? Tate Modern is hosting a massive weekend-long party for its 25th birthday
And also on the South Bank, Meltdown 2025 curator Little Simz has revealed her first wave of artists
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