Top 10 art exhibitions in London (updated for 2025)

Jean-Francois Millet was an artist of the people. Born to a farming family, he spent his life painting rural workers and the conditions of their labour. This exhibition, marking the 150th anniversary of his death, presents an impressive array of his work, which went on to inspire Vincent van Gogh among other artists. Heads down and backs bent, there is a melancholic, weathered beauty to Millet’s characters.

Why go: Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land.

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times.

Why go: The show presents museum goers with an alternative way of looking at art itself. This, the artist’s first major European solo exhibition, is an impressive introduction to a singular talent.

If eyes truly are the windows to the soul, then the intensely staring, delinquent characters created by Yoshimoto Nara have a lot going on inside. As one of the best-known (and best-selling) Japanese artists of our time, Nara has earned this massive retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. It’s his largest ever UK exhibition by far: spanning not only his paintings, but also drawings, installations, and sculpture across a four-decades-long career.

Why go: Nara’s play with western pop culture and darker themes like climate change and nuclear war, all packaged up into a sugary-sweet package, is a real joy to look at. But it’s his painterly skill, when seen up close, which is the real treat. 

In the first of a three-part exhibition, the tall, wiry works of Alberto Giacometti stand beside the hybrid, fragmented figures of Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha. Where Giacometti’s figures are stretched and attenuated, expressing solitude and existential suffering, Bhabha fractures the human form more explicitly, tearing it apart.

Why go: Though separated by decades, these artists share a profound interest in the aftermath of war and the psychological scars left behind. For them, fragility is more than physical material – it is a lens through which the human condition itself is explored.

In his first major UK institutional exhibition, the Ontario-based Omaskêko Ininiwak Duane Linklater’s work interrogates some of the ideas and practices that define western institutions. Incorporating objects made by his grandmother into an installation and showcasing a video shot by his son, he challenges our idea of singular authorship – which is just one of the ways in which he subtly but convincingly invites us to reconsider how our museums work.

Why go: Linklater playfully questions the idea of singular authorship that underpins the art world and, in many ways, defines our understanding of culture. His name might top the press release, but it’s not his show.

The Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani’s new commission in the Somerset House courtyard takes the ongoing sleep of reason as its starting point. In the grand Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, she has installed a 10-metre-tall blue figure, who lays supine, gently breathing with closed eyes.

Why go: It’s a deft balance of content and form: a nuanced message, contained within immediately impressive and accessible art.

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.

This major exhibition showcases three decades of work by South Korean conceptual artist Do Ho Suh, reflecting on themes of memory and migration via vast fabric sculptures and meticulous architectural installations. In an age defined by global migration and shifting borders, Suh views the home as a charged space: at once personal and political, defining a threshold between private and public, past and present.

Why go: Suh’s intricately rendered fabric and paper reconstructions of the houses he’s inhabited go beyond architectural replication: they chart emotion, displacement and adaptation, and they do so beautifully.

Born in London in 1905, the British artist Edward Burra suffered from acute rheumatoid arthritis and pernicious anemia from a young age. He travelled regularly, with a special fondness for Paris and New York. In photographs, though, he appears dour, studious and sickly. Most of the paintings that line the walls of his latest retrospective at the Tate couldn’t be further from this image.

Why go: In their curvaceousness and volume, Burra’s subjects convey a playful sense of abundance that borders on kitsch. In today’s context, where distorted figuration is the order of the day, it’s a style that feels a little hackneyed. Remembering that these paintings are close to a century old makes them feel incredibly fresh.

Since 2021, the Cosmic House – the fascinating former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks – has operated as a museum. Each year, the Jencks Foundation commissions an artist to respond to the surroundings. This time round, it’s a video work by Lithuanian-born musician Lina Lapelytė, composed of 12 screens dotted around the house to be hunted down like a game of hide and seek. 

Why go: Beautiful and peculiar, this is immersive art as it should be. It’s also a chance to see some jaw-droppingly gorgeous interiors.