Eddy Frankel

This city is absolutely rammed full of amazing art galleries and museums. We've got everything from major contemporary art museums to high end commercial galleries, stunning local institutions to incredible independent spaces. That means that there are a lot of exhibitions to see, especially in 2025.  But how do you sort the good from the bad? How do you decide which shows are worth spending your meagre free time on? Well, we're here to help. We go to every major exhibition in London, and a lot of the smaller ones, and we figure out what's a masterpiece and what's a disasterpiece. Our art editor (me!) spends his week trudging the streets of London, going from gallery to gallery, to help you figure out what's worth heading into town for. Our critera is simple: we want the best. It doesn't matter if it's painting or conceptual installation, if it's old or new, it just has to be good. Really good. And this list right here is the best art we've seen recently, and it's updated throughout the week. Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, he literally forces himself to get out of bed every day just to go look at paintings and sculptures. It's a tough job, but apparently someone's got to do it.  Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.

Wondering where’s best to get your art and culture fix this year? You’ve come to the right place, as Time Out has done some research. Warhol and Pollock will be on display in New York, while retrospectives of sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century female artists will be showcased in Rome. There’s an exhibition of Ukrainian art taking place in Berlin, digital sea explorations in Norway and glass sculpture displays in Australia – but there’s plenty more where that came from. Read on for the coolest exhibitions taking place all across the planet throughout 2025. RECOMMENDED:🛶The best things to do in the world in 2025🛍️ The coolest neighbourhoods in the world🎪 The world’s best music festivals for 2025🌃 The best cities in the world right now  

London is absolutely world-class when it comes to museums. Obviously, we’re biased, but with more than 170 of them dotted about the capital – a huge chunk of which are free to visit – we think it’s fair to say that there’s nowhere else in the world that does museums better.  Want to explore the history of TfL? We’ve got a museum for that. Rather learn about advertising? We’ve got a museum for that too. History? Check. Science? Check. 1940s cinema memorabilia, grotesque eighteenth-century surgical instruments, or perhaps a wall of 4,000 mouse skeletons? Check, check, check! Being the cultured metropolitans that we are, Time Out’s editors love nothing more than a wholesome afternoon spent gawping at Churchill’s baby rattle or some ancient Egyptian percussion instruments. In my case, the opportunity to live on the doorstep of some of the planet’s most iconic cultural institutions was a big reason why I moved here at the first chance I got, and I’ve racked up countless hours traipsing around display cases and deciphering needlessly verbose wall texts in the eleven years since. From iconic collections, brilliant curation and cutting-edge tech right down to nice loos, adequate signage and a decent place to grab a cuppa; my colleagues and I know exactly what we want from a museum, and we’ve put in a whole lot of time deliberating which of the city’s institutions are worth your time. So here’s our take on the 25 best ones to check out around London, ranging from world-famous cultural

Damn, 2024 came through with some absolute bangers. We had Brat summer with hit-after-hit from Charli xcx, but we also saw Sabrina Carpenter sing silly little outros to her sleeper hit Nonsense, Taylor Swift quite simply refusing to leave the charts (by any means necessary) and Chappell Roan catapult into fame faster than you can say ‘Pink Pony Club’. The past year really was for the pop girlies. But what are the songs that defined the year? Well, aside from the above, we’ve seen chart-topping country boy crooners, instantly iconic rap takedowns and joyously twee indie – all making 2024 a pretty stellar year for new music. I was tasked with building our ranking of the best songs of 2024 and compiled this list by asking our amazing international team of writers and editors to contribute their year-defining tracks. Expect to find a global list of tunes, from personal favourites to chart-toppers that simply can’t be ignored. 

London can be a pretty expensive place to go out in, especially during a cost of living crisis. Sometimes it feels like you can’t step outside your front door without immediately having spent twenty quid. But it doesn’t have to be this way, because there’s plenty to see for free around this fabulous city.  Most of London’s major galleries and museums – as well as many of its smaller institutions and literally every commercial gallery – are free to enter, so you can see world-class art and artefacts without getting out your wallet. From the Tate to the Gagosian, the National Gallery to the Camden Arts Centre, army artefacts to zoology, you’ve got your choice of literally hundreds of amazing art spaces, all free. Want to see masterpieces by Raphael and Turner, a fully intact dinosaur skeleton or some really bad taxidermy? You can, and you don’t have to pay.  Our list of brilliant, and totally free, art galleries and museums in London covers the four corners and centre of the city, so wherever you live, there’s a gratis cultural experience near you. Go forth and enjoy, and save your pennies for something else. RECOMMENDED: The best free things to do in London.

If you can somehow prize the iPad out of your child's filthy mitts and get them out of the house, you'll find a city full of amazing cultural experiences for kids. Historical relics and heirlooms not for them? Drag them through a hall of Egyptian mummies, fighter planes or dinosaur fossils instead. They might not thank you now, but they'll appreciate it when they get to your age.    RECOMMENDED: Discover 101 things to do in London with the kids and here are the 17 best day trips from London.

    London’s skyline might be packed with gleaming, towering buildings these days, but they’re not the only structures that are worth gazing upon in the city. There are plenty of other architectural delights ready to be your new construction crush, from humble, historical buildings to more modern designs. We asked a group of experts to tell us about the London architecture that means the most to them, and some of their picks might surprise you. Our top 50 list features everything from the Jewel Tower – one of the last remaining parts of Westminster’s medieval palace – to an NCP car park. What all of these selections have in common, though, is they all tell the stories of the capital’s history. Peruse the list below and then get out into the city and feast your eyes on some beautiful buildings. With thanks to: Sadiq Khan, Monica Ali, Camille Walala, Anna Eavis, Lucy Inglis, Olivia Laing, Zoe Timmers, Allan Hinton, Tamsie Thomson, Jane Duncan, Architects for Social Housing and Professor Alan Penn

London is notoriously expensive. Flat white? About £4 these days. Pint? That'll be £9 please mate. Rent? You'd better have a couple of kidneys to spare. But art? Well, most art in London is totally, completely, utterly free to see. Every major museum: free. Every single gallery: free. Sure, you still have to pay for the temporary exhibitions at places like the Tate and National Portrait Gallery, but the permanent collections – with their Monets, Michelangelos and Emins – won't cost you a single penny to visit.  Me, personally, I save on heating bills by spending most of my days keeping warm on one of the many leather banquettes at the National Gallery. Cosy. And while sat there, lounging in the luxurious tax-funded warmth of our nation's greatest gallery and incredulously asking 'don't you know who I am?' to passers-by, I update this here list with my reviews of free exhibitions at free galleries (many of which are very good), which you're free to read. As Funkadelic almost said, 'free your mind, and your art will follow.' Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, he is poor in money, but rich in bullshit. RECOMMENDED: explore our full guide to free London

There's so much more to London art than just painting or sculpture. Instead of boring old brushstrokes and dull old canvases, you can lose yourself in all kinds of new worlds by tracking down the best photography exhibitions in London. From sweeping landscape scenes to powerful portraits captured by daring individuals, photography in London offers a full-exposure of thought-provoking, visually captivating art. So in this list, we've compiled reviews of the best photography exhibitions in London. How do we know they're the best? Because we've been: we've quite literally dragged ourselves (well, our art critic has) to every photography exhibition worth going to and figured out what's snappy and what's crappy.  Eddy Frankel is Time Out's art editor, every day he wakes up and consumes endless, copious amounts of art and photography. It's a terrible physical diet, but it's very mentally enriching.  RECOMMENDED: Check our complete guide to photography in London  

I moved to this city in the deep, dark depths of the pandemic. My first flat was, obviously, awful. The landlord was dodgy (shock). It was full of mould. The shower was next to the kitchen and had no door. Still, though, I look back on those days fondly. One rare sunny afternoon we climbed out of my flatmate’s window to sit on the roof, drinking homemade Bloody Marys and blasting the Bad Boy Chiller Crew from a box speaker into the sticky, polluted air of Kingsland Road. We got quite a few glares from passers-by, but also a fair amount of smiles.  Whether you’re moving here for study, work, family, or another reason, your first months in London will be challenging, but you’ll probably look back on them with such fogged-up rose-tinted glasses it will hardly matter anyway. Use this time to meet as many new people as you can and to make mistakes. Be broke, go to M&M world (don’t actually), get lost on the tube. That said, there are some things I wish I’d known before coming here. Hindsight is a blessing, as they say. But we’re not gatekeepers, so we asked Time Out staff to share their top tricks and tips for anyone moving to the capital. Some of these folks have been born and bred here. Others are adopted Londoners, like you might well be one day. Listen up, take note, and good luck. 

Every parent knows the desperation of trying to find something to do with their kids that isn't mind-numbingly tedious. There are, after all, only so many soft plays a human can handle. And while taking the little ones to a museum or gallery may seem like a nice way of culturally enriching your child, it can also be fraught with danger: smashed sculptures, torn paintings, and not to mention the risk of boring your child to literal tears. But there are plenty of art exhibitions that are perfect for kids in London, and this regularly updated list will pick the best of them.  What do you want from a child-friendly art exhibition? Colour, fun, interactivity, and an almost total lack of breakables. These exhibitions should tick most of those boxes for you. Good luck.  Art exhibitions for kids

Everyone loves a good action movie, even if some won’t admit it. Film school snobs may pretend to turn up their noses, but no matter how cultured you’d like to think you are, there’s a part of your lizard brain that loves explosions and shootouts and badass one-liners – and it needs to be satisfied.  But action flicks needn’t be dumb, loud or graphic to succeed. Some find beauty in orchestrated violence. Others might crane-kick you right in the heart. Some even have – gasp! – character development. And so, to help put together this definitive list of the greatest action movies ever made, we reached out to some of the people who understand the action genre better than anyone, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo. Pull the pin, light the fuse and batten down the hatches – these are the most pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides ever put to film.  Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time

‘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. The basis of his theory is that the codification of language into written form was a turning point for humanity that saw us sever our ties with nature. Not agrarianism, not industrialisation, but pen and bloody paper.  There’s language all over the opening room of this show. Or at least it looks like language. Mirtha Dermisache was an Argentinian artist who published endless written screeds and texts and diatribes, but all in indecipherable, invented alphabets. These amazing, subtle works look like alien love letters, or poems, or shopping lists, but they carry no actual linguistic meaning, they are ruptures of the written form, a breaking of established language borders that resets you in preparation for the rest of the show. A loose grouping of artists who think things are kind of messed up right now Two swirling, psychedelic boars bound across a dark, turbulent countryside in a Kat Lyons painting, rocks and crystals jut out of the wall in a Bronwyn Katz installation, a twisting sculpture on the floor by Marguerite Humeau looks like it was designed by bees, a head on a plinth by Anna Hulačová is filled with honeycomb, two earth-toned paintings by aboriginal Australian artist Yukultji Napangati a

Alice Neel was one of the most important chroniclers of modern life. The American artist painted the people around her, always with tenderness, always with bare honesty. This show – which follows up 2022’s excellent ‘There’s Still Another I See’ – looks at her depictions of figures from queer communities, including politicians, philanthropists, writers, performers, artists, friends and neighbours for a powerful examination of life on the margins, and what it's like to have piercings in unmentionable places. 

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. He painted it at just 23, a commission for a nobleman’s burial chapel. John the Baptist kneels before you at the bottom of the altarpiece, dressed – though barely – in furs. He’s twisting his body, his impossibly long limbs and fingers, to point you towards the scene at the apex. There, the Virgin Mary and Christ child – both monumentally huge – perch on a crescent moon, lit by blinding rays of sunlight. You are dwarfed by the painting, the colossal figures; the looming, circuitous composition not only dominates you, but forces you to follow its curving course. It forces your line of sight to spiral upwards, towards the heavens. Incredible. But there in the foreground, a man lies, seemingly asleep in a densely overgrown forest, cradling a crucifix, a cracked skull at his feet. This is Saint Jerome, but is he dreaming? Is this whole scene a vision? A figment of his imagination? History seems to have lost the answers to that question. But that sense of mystery only adds to the genuinely imposing, moving power of the painting. Newly conserved and re-framed, and flanked by excellent preparatory sketches, this painting is one of the UK’s most mesmerising works of renaissance art. I’m no Christian, but in all Parmig

Going to a Jeff Wall exhibition is like watching 100 films at once. The pioneering Canadian photographer has spent decades creating highly stylised, minutely posed, ultra composed, totally fictional photographic scenes, all filled with enough details to send you spiralling down countless narrative rabbit holes. Each scene is tightly scripted, no detail is accidental. A toddler flails on the ground in front of her frustrated father, a woman in a lab receives a call from a man in uniform, a couple sit lovelessly on a sofa, a cleaner mops a mansion. Every image contains the symbols you need to untangle the story it’s telling; they’re entire movies told in one photo. But three images complicate matters: these small photos of filthy sinks and a mop in Wall’s Vancouver studio are not fictional, they’re of a real place, real things. But are they posed? Is the grime real? Is the soap a prop, is the mop actually that filthy? Then there’s a picture of some houses in LA, how could that be fictional, posed, constructed? A photo of a garden has nothing special in it, nothing to say. What fiction is it delineating?  Now all the lines between real and fake have been left so tangled that nothing can be separated.  Wall’s constant blurring of the boundary between real and fake, documentary and fiction, is dizzying, uncomfortable. He’s not asking you to sort real from fake, truth from lie, he’s forcing you to ask, over and over again: what’s the story? He’s forcing you to look at these images

While the big, imposing, hefty men of mid-century American abstraction were trying to reshape the course of art, Joan Snyder was doing something quieter, but no less important. Now 84, Snyder has spent her life using abstraction not for grand gestures, but for smaller, personal ones. Written across the walls of this career-spanning show is a lifetime of emotions and feelings, of memories and experiences, in big bursts of shape and colour. Most of her career has been a tug of war between abstraction and figuration. The earliest works pull abstraction back from the edge. Thick strokes of paint coalesce into pink and blue landscapes, an almost-portrait of her grandma’s lifeless body. It’s abstract, but dragged back to reality. The best works of that era are collisions of viscous, fleshy pink and slabs of wool painted into the canvases. They look like two bodies coalescing, growing mouldy, becoming one. Very beautiful, very sensual things. Bubblegum pink gardens, toxic dripping landscapes Her 1970s works are even better. They’re filled with grids and thick lines of colour; some drip, some smear, they look like someone melted a Kandinsky. Each one feels like a landscape, a portrait, an outpouring of emotion, a formal exercise in mark making, a furious flurry of splashes and drips, they’re restrained but explosive, intense but free. You can read so much into these compositions of line, colour and drips because Snyder put so much into them. The 1980s works are pretty heinous though

Where there is something new, there are artists: experimenting, expanding, imagining the untold possibilities of possible innovation. So when computers started to become an everyday reality in the 1950s, artists were there, straining at the leash to see how this new technology could be used for art, for beauty. This huge, complex, ambitious show looks at the artists who were present at the dawn of the computer age, artists filled with hope and creativity, long before that tech became fridges that can spy on you and an internet good for nothing but trolling and doomscrolling. Utopianism is there from the start of the show, especially in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem imagining a future for humanity where we’re ‘all watched over by machines of loving grace’. Vera Spencer’s amazing 1954 punch card collage is like a circuit board rendered as modernist minimalism, Steina and Woody Vasulka’s multi-screen video of geometric shapes pushes TV monitors to breaking point: technology, computers, machines, they’re all rife with artistic potential. It’s a great start to the show. The next few rooms deal with kinetic and light art experiments: Brion Gysin’s mindmelting epilepsy-in-a-spinning-tin sculpture, the Zero Group’s shimmering lightboxes, Katsuhiro Yamahuchi’s distorted glass vitrines, Wen-Ying Tsi’s amazing audio-controlled dancing rods. Radical experimentation with programming, when computers become the medium, the method I like all of it just fine, but it clashes with the real gol

On Kawara did one thing, every single day, for most of his life. Over and over again, he painted that day’s date, always in white, usually on black, sometimes on other colours, but with no other variation. Why did he do this? I don’t know. Something to do, I guess. Why brush your teeth, why go to work, why repeatedly update your fantasy football team throughout the week? Because what else are you going to do? That’s life. It really is just dates, painted meticulously and precisely. But I find myself obsessing over the minute, pointless differences. Why does he sometimes do day/month/year, sometimes month/day/year, why is it ‘June’ and ‘July’ but only ‘Nov’, why is ‘Août’ written in French, why is one of them red, and a million more tiny differences. It’s a subeditor’s nightmare. This is literally everything, the whole world is here! But those tiny insignificant discrepancies are the tiny insignificant discrepancies of everyday life, they’re the new pair of boxers, the different route to work, the friend you haven’t seen for years, the thing that makes each day separate, and somehow remarkable. It might feel like I’m reading a lot into some dates painted on black canvases, but that’s On Kawara’s point. These aren’t really paintings, they’re an idea, an idea he’s expressing through the act of painting. He’s marking the passage of time, the slow ebbing away of life, in the simplest way possible. When I was at the gallery an old lady asked the gallery assistant ‘is there anythin

Reverb isn’t just a sonic phenomenon at Stephen Friedman Gallery, it’s a visual, cultural one too. This group show – a kind of extension of Tate Britain’s 2021 ‘Life Between Islands’ exhibition – starts from the idea that art from the Caribbean diaspora reverberates through the ages and across continents, just like a dub siren reverberating through a packed club. And dub is both subject and material for Denzil Forrester, whose huge lilac and purple vision of a west London reggae club greets you as you walk in. It’s a celebration of Jamaican culture as an uprooted, transplanted, transcontinental thing. Because culture moves, gets transported across oceans, just like the detritus found washed up on shores and twisted into writhing multi-coloured shapes by Julien Creuzet. The sea – as a place of historic violence, as the conduit of colonialism – rears its head too in Alberta Whittle’s work; two intricate, bead-adorned tapestries referencing the myth of Drexcya, an underwater realm populated by the 1.8million Africans who died in the Atlantic slave trade. There’s more mythology in Kathia St.Hilarie’s gorgeous, rough, gloopy paintings, filled with nods to vodou, spiritualism and history, while Charmaine Watkiss’s images draw on the indigenous histories of the Caribbean as a sort of ancestral knowledge, passed down, shared, shaping each generation. Some of the art here doesn’t fit all that comfortably, but reverb as a theme works. It ties all of this disparate work together into th

The world Sedrick Chisom creates in his paintings feels too shocking, awful and revolting to be real; but the work is a warning, a fictional, horrifying caution against the constant, looming threat of race war. The world in the young American artist’s paintings is an America without Black people, a world ruled by white supremacy but where all the surviving white people have been infected with some vile, disfiguring virus. Where his work was once outwardly and obviously horrific – as seen in ‘In The Black Fantastic’ at the Hayward Gallery in 2022 – the evil here is subtler, more insidious.  Soldiers elsewhere sit on horseback or watch over battlefields in dress that is half-Civil War reenactment, half-contemporary alt right fash fashion, his vision of Mount Rushmore reimagines the fathers of his nation as gloopy demonic presences. A boy and his dog murder a bog troll, an olde worlde general stands proudly before a huge tank. Whiteness is a dominant force, but the fight isn’t over. Good sci fi isn’t actually about spaceships and aliens, it just uses spaceships and aliens as a way of speaking about the real world, about actual life. It’s metaphorical, allegorical. Which is what Chisom’s alternate history is too: its aim is to lay bare an uncomfortable truth the artist sees all around him; that the far right, the alt right, the white supremacists are all winning. I don’t think these are his best, most direct paintings, and maybe they’re a little hamstrung by their washed out, kno

Like a blast of hairspray to the eyes, the Tate is about to blind you with the ’80s. This expansive, exhaustive and exhausting exhibition features dozens of photographers and hundreds of photographs depicting all the turbulence of that most turbulent of decades. It opens with Greenham Common, the miners’ strike, Rock Against Racism, the poll tax and the gay rights movement. Dozens of black and white images depict riots, protests, banners, shouting and marches. At first it hits all the right spots: anger, resistance, a nation in turmoil and all these amazing photographers there to capture it. But then you realise that half of these photos, these events, are from the 1970s, and it all falls apart. What it does do however is set the tone of the show: by 1980, Britain was so broken, divided and impoverished that the coming decade was going to be a wild ride. The second room is maybe the best in the show: Martin Parr hobnobs with the comfortable classes as they chit chat at soirées and art openings and Anna Fox infiltrates offices to watch deals getting done; while Tish Murtha captures the abject dereliction of life on the dole and Paul Graham brilliantly snaps candid images of filthy, miserable waiting rooms at the Department of Health and Social Security. From there we’re taken on a journey through all the big issues of 80s Britain. The troubles are here in the work of Paul Graham, environmental destruction in Keith Arnatt photos, the everyday reality of poverty rears its ugly b

Your parents told you that if you got too close to the TV your eyes would go square, but no one warns you about what happens when you get too close to a painting. What happens is Mary Ramsden’s show, where everything is blown out, fuzzy and hazy. The English abstract artist was last seen flirting dangerously, but successfully, with figuration in recent years, but these latest works are a return to full on, no compromise abstraction. They’re big washed out colourfields, drenched in lilac and soft, sunny yellow. They look like she’s zoomed in microscopically-close on a tiny segment of a Pierre Bonnard or Edouard Vuillard painting, something impressionistically bright, then blown up that minuscule view to monumental size.  The canvases mash together splashy washes of pigment with precise little squares of thickly marked paint to create abstract landscapes. It’s all about texture, surface, these moments of intense daubing mixed with empty, calm spaces. Seen from a distance they become one big gradient; up close they’re filled with tiny detail.  The pieces that don’t work feel a bit like a freshly plastered wall, but the good ones almost seem to hum, vibrate with colour, with allusions to art history, with gestures and textures. Despite being bigger than a lot of her other work, they’re somehow subtler, they take longer to make sense to your eyes. They’re like enforced glaucoma, a blanket of fuzz wrapping your eyeballs, like Ramsden has spent way too long staring way too close at

It’s grim up north they say, but George Shaw’s paintings prove that it’s not much better anywhere else in this country. This group of six small enamel paintings – and a handful of watercolours of flowers – see Shaw returning to his childhood estate in Coventry to continue documenting its long, slow decline into dereliction. It’s a decline you can take as a metaphor for the rest of England, not just the industrial midlands. One painting shows a shuttered garage, another depicts a rusted shipping container; the plants all around are either overgrown or dying, a fridge has been left abandoned, render is crumbling off the grim, minimal houses as Union Jacks and St George’s crosses flutter in the wind. There are no people here, only the places they’ve been left to rot in. But there is light, there is colour: a painting of a rose bush seen through a UPVC window, watercolours of flowers grown from cuttings. They are slices of hope in the darkness. But that hope still feels pretty pointless. This small show is full of allusions to William Blake and the histories and legends of England, but this is a portrait of a nation constantly treading water, kicking against the sinking, the decline. These paintings are depictions of how we strive, we do our best, but we inevitably all give up. They are such beautiful, stunningly done paintings. Intricate, precise and obsessively dedicated to capturing every detail of this nation’s crumbling decrepitude.

There is no better way to usher in the new year than New Contemporaries. The annual group show brings together the best recent art grads in the country and whacks them in an art institution, all at a time of year when most galleries are still stumbling bleary eyed out of their Christmas slumbers. This year, it’s taking place at the venerable old ICA, and it’s great; full of fun, funny, joyful, surreal, silly, it’s a genuinely enjoyable crop of young artists. The lack of painting compared to previous years is notable, as is the slight overabundance of video, but the themes are enjoyably Gen Z; plenty of ideas around identity, migration, fantasy, mental health and gender. The kids, they’re alright, and their art’s not bad either. 🎨 The 9 best art exhibitions to see in London this January. Eight artists we loved at New Contemporaries 2024 Molly Burrows/New Contemporaries Molly Burrows, ‘Publication for Young Visitors’ One of my favourite things in the show is this brilliant little zine by Molly Burrows which acts as a guide to some of the art and artists in the exhibition. It’s totally accessible, totally intelligible, totally approachable – the opposite to every other gallery guide ever, including the ICA’s own bollocks-saturated one for this show – and makes the rest of the show even more enjoyable. Siomha Harrington/New Contemporaries Siomha Harrington, ‘People are People and a Fool is a Fool’ There’s not a lot of painting this year, but the painting they have included i

Ah, 2025: new year, new you, new exhibitions to look forward to. And it looks set to be a stellar year for shows at London’s major art institutions. There’s boundary-pushing conceptualism, pointilist perfection, abstraction, modernism, pop and so much painting it’ll make you wish for more of that boundary-pushing conceptualism instead. So much art to see, so little time, but these exhibitions are the ones we reckon you can’t afford to miss. 12 London art exhibitions we can’t wait to see in 2025 Ithell Colquhoun, Scylla 1938 Tate. © Spire Healthcare, © Noise Abatement Society, © Samaritans Ithell Colquhoun: ‘Between Worlds’ at Tate Britain Over the past few years we’ve been awash with Wicca, wallowing in witchcraft and overwhelmed with the occult. To capitalise on the trend for all things pointy hatted and spiritual, Tate Britain is finally giving much-overlooked radical English artist Ithell Colquhoun a major show. Colquhoun was a practicing occultist who used myth, magic and surrealism to explore the idea of divine feminine power through painting, drawing and tarot.Ithell Colquhoun: ‘Between Worlds’ is at Tate Britain, Feb-May 2025. More details here. Donald Rodney, In the House of My Father, 1997, Image © The Donald Rodney Estate Donald Rodney at Whitechapel Gallery In his far too short career, Donald Rodney (1961-1998) created an incredibly varied body of work, using a huge breadth of mediums to confront the prejudices that course through British society. The works her

Big art blockbusters don’t get bigger or blockbusterier than the National Gallery’s ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’. It’s just room after room of gorgeous, world famous paintings by one of art history’s biggest stars, and it has attracted a pretty staggering 280,000 visitors. And now, in its final weeks, visitors will get the chance to go see it at 3am if they really, really want to.  Tickets to the show have consistently sold out, so if you want to see it, this one-off 24-hour access might be your only chance. The extra timed slots (which will get you in from 9pm on Friday 17 January until 10am Saturday 18 January) just went on sale, so you’d better be quick. This is only the second time the National Gallery has opened through the night, the first time being for ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ in 2012, so if you can hack staying up that late (or getting up that early) it’s sure to be a special, unique opportunity to see the guy who did Starry Night while it’s literally starry and at night.The National Gallery’s ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ 24 hour access is on Jan 17, tickets available here. Want more? Here are the top 10 exhibitions in London.

For 25 years, Art on the Underground has been filling the Underground with art. It’s what they do, and they do it well. They’ve put Mark Wallinger, Zadie Xa, David Hockney, Laure Prouvost and tons of others on the Underground: if you’ve spotted a beautiful painting on your way into Brixton tube station, or maybe seen a maze-like image on any number of platforms around the tube network, that’s them what done it.  And to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Art on the Underground, the programme is launching four new artworks across the city to brighten up your commutes. The works include a sound installation at Waterloo by Rory Pilgrim, a new pocket tube map by Agnes Denes, a large-scale collaborative artwork by Ahmet Öğüt and a new mural at Brixton station (taking the place of Claudette Johnson’s current work) by Rudy Loewe. ‘Across 2025, the programme will interrogate how art can save us and what it means to gather together, in shared space and with local communities. Seen and heard by millions, the 2025 programme is a response to London today, whilst always reflecting on our past and possible futures,’ says Eleanor Pinfield, the head of the programme.  Commuting can be tough even at the best of times, but Art on the Underground has helped take the edge off over the past 25 years. Here’s to another quarter century of putting art where it don’t belong. The four new artworks will be unveiled throughout the year, more details here.  Want more art? Here are the top ten exhibitions i

January, it’s not all bad. Sure, everyone likes to complain about the weather, the damp, the darkness, the misery, the fat hanging around your gut from Christmas, the paltry sums remaining in your poor bank account, but cheer up, there’s art to see. Loads of it, actually, with everything from painting to sculpture and concrete poetry to scent-infused installations. It won’t help you shift your Christmas pounds, but it’s something to do eh.  Nine London art exhibitions to see in January Intallation view of Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2024, photo by Rob Harris New Contemporaries at ICA The annual celebration of the UK’s best art graduates returns, this time in a new venue. New Contemporaries is always a chance to see what the art schools are churning out, an opportunity to spot some potential stars of the future and to take the pulse of young art in the UK right now.  New Contemporaries is at the ICA, Jan 15-Mar 23 2025. More details here. Condo ‘Condo’  Condo is a city-wide mega-exhibition, a collaboration between dozens of galleries from around the world, and it’s the best thing that happens in the London art world every January. The idea is that galleries from over here invite galleries from over there to share their spaces for a month. This year’s edition will see 49 galleries showing across 22 spaces, including Sadie Coles HQ hosting Jahmek Contemporary Art from Luanda, The Sunday Painter hosting Proyectos Ultravioleta from Guatemala, Project Native Informant hosting

January is a famously and notably miserable time of year. All the weather of December but not of the yuletide joy, all the daylight of February but none of the romance. A new pop-up immersive art experience is promising to fix all that though: The Observatory will take place from Jan 6-31 and is billing itself as a ‘space for art and wellness’. The Observatory features two artworks: the first one (called ‘Harmony 2.0’ by We Are Midnight) is a digital well for six participants to gather around while wearing headsets that interpret their brainwaves. The organisers say that ‘the more participants achieve a state of calm, the more vividly their collective thoughts shape a stunning visual masterpiece in the well’s surface’. Pretty liberal use of the word masterpiece, there.  The second artwork, ‘Soul Paint’ by Sarah Ticho (Hatsumi) and Niki Smit (Monobanda), is a virtual reality experience intended to help viewers ‘explore their emotions and sensations through body mapping, 3D drawing, and movement’.  The whole thing is in aid of mental health charity CALM, and it’s totally free (though donations to CALM are encouraged). Immersive art for a good cause, and it won’t cost you a penny, it’s a January miracle. The Observatory is open Jan 6-31. 56 Old Broad Street, London, EC2N. Free. More details here. Want more art? Here are the top 10 exhibitions in London.  Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out UK newsletter for the latest UK news and the best stuff happening across the c

It’s the most wonderful time of the year, people say. But those people clearly aren’t art fans, because if you like to spend your days traipsing around London’s galleries, it’s a genuinely dismal time of year. There’s no cheer here: literally every single commercial gallery in London will be closed over the Christmas period, so if you were hoping to catch Jeff Wall at White Cube or Takashi Murakami at Gagosian in the lull between festivities, you are out of luck. But London’s big art museums and institutions definitely are open, which is perfect if you’re the kind of person who thinks the brutality, trauma, pain and violence of Francis Bacon sounds like an escape from the family. Below, we’ve compiled a list of London’s biggest art galleries, what their Christmas opening hours are and what exhibitions they’ve got on. Merry Christm-arts.  Which London art museums and galleries are open over Christmas 2024 Claude Monet ( 1840 - 1926 ), Waterloo Bridge , 1903 , oil on canvas, Private collection . Photo © rulandphotodesign The Courtauld Gallery Housing the UK’s finest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, the Courtauld Gallery is also the most open of all of London’s art institutions, closing only on Christmas Day and Boxing Day. The ultra-popular Monet exhibition is sold out, but you can still go luxuriate in the permanent collection with all of its Cezannes and Gauguins and pretend you can remember what sunshine looks like.  The Courtauld Gallery is closed

The National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing has been closed for refurbishment for two years, but is now set to reopen in May 2025. And what a relief that is, because the Sainsbury Wing housed some of London’s greatest art treasures. It was there that you could find gleaming, golden, Byzantine altarpieces, early renaissance masterpieces and the amazing Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, one of the greatest artworks in the whole city (now on loan at the Royal Academy of Arts’ ‘Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael’ exhibition). The Sainsbury Wing (which King Charles once called a ‘monstrous carbuncle’) was added to the National Gallery in 1991, designed by postmodern architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. But only 30 years later it was deemed not fit for purpose, and a competition was held to find an architect to reboot the building. Annabelle Selldorf got the job, and has spent the past two years opening the Sainsbury Wing up to allow in more light, and more people.  The refurbed wing will allow visitors to gaze adoringly at Piero della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’, their earliest painting, in a specially designed chapel-like room. There’ll also be Paolo Uccello’s ‘The Battle of San Romano’ returning from its three-year restoration process, and a whole room dedicated to the theme of gold. To accompany the reopening of the wing, the whole National Gallery collection is being rehung too. Quite the way to celebrate your 200th birthday.  The Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery is reo

It’s Christmas time, and there’s no need to be afraid, as Paul Young said. Unless you have a phobia of street art, in which case you’d better start quaking in your boots because incorrigible street art maverick Banksy has just posted a mysterious new artwork.  Yesterday (December 16), Banksy posted an image to his Instagram of the Virgin Mary attempting to feed the little baby Jesus from a toxic-looking rusted nipple. The last time he posted a mysterious artwork it was when he was announcing his menagerie of nine animal-themed artworks plonked around London in the summer, so understandably this new post has sent Banksy lovers into conniptions, with fans trying desperately to sniff out where this new artwork is, and what it might mean.  Is it in Bethlehem? Is it a comment on the situation in Gaza? Is it in Slough? Is it a comment on the situation in…. Slough? All plausible theories posited on social media. But one Redditor thinks they have the real answer: this isn’t a new artwork on some secret street corner at all, but instead a framed piece which was for sale at a ‘private’ exhibition in Shoreditch in February. A little bit of digging shows that the work does indeed seem to be a framed work on what looks like metal, as seen in this post. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Banksy (@banksy) This isn’t the first time Banksy has tackled the idea of the Virgin Mary’s off milk. A 2003 screenprint called ‘Toxic Mary’ shows the virgin mother attempting

How did you celebrate your 25th birthday? Eight lagers, four sambuccas and a whole heap of regret? Same. But Tate Modern isn’t like us, and it’s celebrating its birthday in a far more refined way.  To mark the anniversary of the opening of what is apparently the world’s most popular modern and contemporary art museum, Tate Modern is bringing back Louise Bourgeois’ iconic ‘Maman’ sculpture. The monumental metallic spider, standing at 10 metres tall, was the first work to greet visitors in the then new Turbine Hall, and now it’s coming back to launch a trail of 25 newly installed artworks (to celebrate 25 years, obviously) placed around the museum. That trail will include the return of arguably the most important work in Tate’s collection, Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals, which will be coming back from their holiday at Tate St Ives. Other pieces in the trail will include Dorothea Tanning’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’, an immersive multi-screen film installation by Nalini Malani and a series of live tarot readings staged as part of an installation by Meschac Gaba. It’s not quite vomiting on the carpet in a Wetherspoons after your umpteenth turbo shandy, but we all celebrate our birthdays in our own ways. Tate Modern turns 25, May 9-12 2025. More details here.  Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up to our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of th

2024 has seen London galleries churn out hundreds, maybe thousands, of exhibitions. From blockbuster painting shows at huge museums to minimal installations at under-the-radar galleries, this city has seen it all – and Time Out’s been there for the whole ride. I’ve been to countless shows over the course of the year and reviewed more than 120 of them in this very publication. At some points it felt like my eyes were going to melt right out of my skull and form little sad puddles on the ground, but they didn’t; I ran the gauntlet of London’s art calendar and lived to tell the tale. That tale is one filled with some very bad art, some very okay art, and, luckily, some very good art. This, right here, is a list of the best of the best; the top exhibitions I saw all year. It’s got everything from contemporary photography to Renaissance painting, modernism to erotica. Yeehaw, let’s do this. The 12 best London art exhibitions of 2024 Ryan McGinley Studios 1. ‘Fragile Beauty’ at the V&A One of the many benefits of being Elton John is that you’ve got the dosh and star power to buy some of the finest art on earth. And his collection of photography, as this huge V&A exhibition proved, is absolutely world class, filled with the best works by the biggest names. The show was quite literally a ‘best of’ compilation of modern photography, including fashion, reportage, erotic and fine art takes on the genre, and all tied together with the narrative thread of Elton John and David Furnish’

Anyone who has ever paid rent in this city knows that space in London comes at a shocking premium. And it’s no different for art galleries, so a project next year is taking an unusual approach by staging an exhibition in an actual Airbnb apartment.  ‘New cosy 1 bed home | Shoreditch | Long Stays’ is named after the apartment’s online listing, and ‘aims to explore the commodification of the domestic and its impact on social and economic networks.’ The group show – which includes artists Jonathan Monk, Arthur Marie and Gretchen Lawrence – is full of work about alienation, the uncanny and the emotional, societal impact of living in temporary housing.  As cities around Europe fight against the impact of tourism and endlessly rising rents, this exploration of domesticity and alienation feels entirely prescient. The exhibition will be free to visit. But you may have to pay a cleaning fee. New cosy 1 bed home | Shoreditch | Long Stays', is at Flat 3, St James Court, 331 Bethnal Green Road, E2 6LJ, Jan 16-Mar 9 2025. 12-6pm, Thu-Sun. Free.  Want more art? Here are the top 10 exhibitions in London. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.