Top 10 exhibitions in London (updated for 2025)

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.

Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today.

Why go: The show is a joy to experience, and a must-see for anyone with a modicum of interest in fashion. It is a thorough, moving and vivacious display of a young woman with expensive tastes and the budget to match.

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.

From the controversial £1,400 Balenciaga destroyed trainers, to Jordanluca’s pee-soaked jeans, and dresses that have been pulled out of bogs, Dirty Looks peers at the muckier side of fashion design. The exhibition, featuring more than 120 garments from designers including Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, takes a clever thematic approach to the philosophy of dirt within fashion, showing how ideas around industrialisation, colonisation, the body, and waste, can be illustrated on the runway. 

Why go: This show will gross you out, make you think and challenge your perception of haute couture. Not glitzy or shiny, Dirty Looks is a raw, honest and edgy display that should be enough to convince anyone that fashion is art. 

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.

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 Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too.

Why go: Peer into the peak of empire, of grandeur and riches and dominance and avarice and cruelty and subjugation, before an inevitable fall. 

A series of immersive and beguiling installations, kinetic sculptures, interactive machines and large projections explore the relationship between the human body and machine at this landmark dance exhibition, highlighting the work of virtuoso choreographer Wayne McGregor. 

Why go: Looking at how choreography can be augemented and created through AI, machine learning, motion capture and more, tech nerds and ballet lovers alike will adore this mesmeric exhibition. Virtually every work on show at Infinite Bodies is worth stopping at and lingering over for a while.

What do an Enigma machine, an Apple AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s silk underwear all have in common? Well, they’re all currently on display at the British Library’s riveting Secret Maps exhibition. Why are they all together? Because they all tell stories about how information is created, concealed, disseminated and controlled, via mapping. And that’s exactly what Secret Maps is about. 

Why visit: This is a dense, information-packed display with plenty of granular detail to get stuck into. Through more than 100 objects, you will learn about everything from the Cold War, to Taylor Swift’s private jets, and leave with a new-found appreciation for maps. 

A second outing in five years for the trailblazing 20th century photographer, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World presents Beaton as more than just a photographer. Younger audiences are likely to find this show more relatable, through its emphasis on his contributions to costume and set design, given their ascendant roles in contemporary fashion. From curious beginnings to his rise through the cultural upper-class, his war photography and costume designs for My Fair Lady, we get a good look at how places and periods influenced Beaton’s style. 

Why go: Elaborately grandiose outfits, celebrities and stylish hedonism, Beaton’s lens captures the luxury of 1920s high society right from the epicentre. Visiting this show will leave you feeling chic by association. 

Peter Doig is one of the greatest living painters, an artist whose approach to hazy, memory-drenched figuration has had an enormous impact on the visual landscape of today. For his show at the Serpentine, he’s going well beyond the canvas, filling the gallery with speaker systems to explore the impact of music on his work.

Why go: Despite a few technical issues with Doig’s re-creation of a hi-fi listening bar, his majestic paintings speak volumes. House of Music is a wonderful showing from an artist with very little left to prove.