Top 10 art exhibitions in London (updated for 2025)

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.

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. 

Why go: This is art which explores the anxieties, absurdities, and vulnerabilities of life in an age where technology both preserves and distorts who we are. The result is something urgent and deeply human. 

This is an exhibition about exhibitions and about exhibition-making as an act of passion, generosity and curiosity shared between artists. Every image, sound and object here is like a mushroom grown from a vast, international and intergenerational network of mutual support and encouragement that expands far beyond this gallery’s walls.

Why go: In a world of superstar artists and mega-dealers, it’s easy to forget that iconoclastic (and, all too often, transient) spaces like the ones celebrated here are where art really happens.

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.

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. 

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.