'it's not true!!! stop lying!' by Nora Turato
Photograph: Installation view 'it's not true!!! stop lying!' by Nora Turato, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers . Photography Robert Wedemeyer
Photograph: Installation view 'it's not true!!! stop lying!' by Nora Turato, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers . Photography Robert Wedemeyer

The latest art and photography exhibition reviews (updated for 2025)

Find out what our critics make of new exhibitions with the latest London art reviews

Chiara Wilkinson
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From blockbuster names to indie shows, Time Out casts our net far and wide to review the biggest and best art exhibitions in the city.

There are new openings every week – from painting to sculpture, photography, contemporary installations and everything in between – and we run from gallery to gallery with our little notebooks, seeing shows, writing about shows, and sorting through the good, the excellent and the not so good. 

Want to see our latest exhibition reviews in one place? Check ’em out below – or shortcut it to our top ten art exhibitions in London for the shows that we already know will blow your socks off. 

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The latest London art reviews

  • 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. 

  • 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. A stunning retrospective of paintings from an artist we lost too early is quietly, yet urgently political. 

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  • Art
  • Holland Park
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

Since 2021, the Cosmic House – the fascinating former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks – has operated as a museum, and 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. Beautiful and peculiar, this is immersive art as it should be.

  • 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. The result is something urgent and deeply human. 

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

What is a portrait, really? What is its role? And what makes it different from ‘just’ a photograph of a person? These are all questions that spring to mind when walking around A Thousand Small Stories, the first ever retrospective of Eileen Perrier’s photography. Since the 1990s, the London-born photographer has used her camera to capture individuals in their local communities, and this show highlights some of her finest work. 

  • Art
  • The Mall
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

pool7 is the seventh iteration of Turato’s ongoing text-based work, a continuation of her pool series in which Turato creates yearly iterations of pools lined with collections of found language drawn from media, conversations, advertising, and online content. This isn’t about what’s happening in the content of our lives, or the world around us – rather, pool7 looks at how we metabolise what’s happening. 

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  • 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. From Goya, Cézanne, van Gogh and Manet to Honoré Daumier, Théodore Géricaul and Gustave Courbet, it features some truly impressive work from some of the world’s best-loved artists – and that’s not to be sniffed at.

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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, many of which look more Victorian or Edwardian than late-twentieth-century.

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  • Museums
  • Art and design
  • Kensington
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

As anyone who has ever tried to secure a booking at the London Fields Lido on a warm summer day will know, us Londoners love a good dip. So it’s only natural that the capital’s Design Museum should stage an exhibition dedicated to our adoration of swimming. With more than 200 objects, Splash! presents a whistle-stop tour for water babies taking us all the way from bizarre Victorian bathing carriages, to the present-day mermaidcore TikTok trend. The only thing missing is the smell of chlorine.  

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  • Art
  • Trafalgar Square
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of the Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.

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