London and the surrounding region are set for a dynamic year in 2025, with an extensive program of exhibitions covering art, history, design, and culture. To assist those planning to explore this schedule, I have compiled a list of 17 notable exhibitions. Spanning museums and galleries, these events offer a range of thought-provoking themes and significant productions. This selection showcases the region’s rich cultural opportunities for 2025.
1. Winter Show 2025
The Winter Show 2025 features a carefully curated collection of highlights from the gallery’s archive, alongside newly created works by artist studios.
The Winter Show 2025
Until 1 February 2025
John Martin Gallery
2. Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture
Beyond the Visual will explore engagements with contemporary sculpture using senses other than sight, challenging the dominance of sight in the making and appreciation of art.
This landmark exhibition will mark the first major UK-based sculpture showcase predominantly featuring works by blind or partially blind artists within a national institution, and is rare in having a blind curator as intrinsic to the project.
Central to Beyond the Visual is the connection between Dr Ken Wilder and Dr Aaron McPeake, who is registered blind.
The two artists have been collaborating for nearly two decades since they first met during their PhD studies at Chelsea College of Arts. Together, they question the assumption that art appreciation and creation are confined to those with full visual perception.
Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture
Until March 2025
Henry Moore Studios
3. Anthony McCall: Solid Light
Your movements and interactions bring artworks to life inside Solid Light, a focused exhibition dedicated to the immersive works of Anthony McCall.
Beams of light projected through a thin mist create large three-dimensional forms in space, which slowly shift and change. As you move through these translucent sculptures of light, you’ll create new shapes and discover your own mesmerising perspectives.
Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema, drawing, and performance, McCall is known for his innovative installations of light. In 1973, his seminal work Line Describing a Cone redefined the possibilities of sculpture.
Anthony McCall: Solid Light
Until 27 April 2025
Tate Modern
4. Earth Unwrapped
With preoccupations spanning the vast to the particular, and materials ranging from Otjize pigment from Namibia to fifty million year old London clay, this exhibition will coincide with Kings Place Music Foundation’s 2025 festival of the same name to spark questions about, and wonder for, Earth.
Featured artists include Julie Brook, Jon Buck, Zachary Eastwood-Bloom, Andy Holden, Paul Huxley, Peter Oloya, Angela Palmer, Maja Quille and Sean Alec Auld.
Earth Unwrapped
15 January – 15 June 2025
Pangolin London
5. SOIL: The World at Our Feet
This groundbreaking exhibition unites visionary artists and thinkers from around the world to explore the remarkable power and potential of soil.
Through a range of artworks, artefacts and innovative approaches, visitors are invited to reconsider the crucial role soil plays in our planet’s health. The exhibition delivers a message of hope and urgency, encouraging a more sustainable, harmonious relationship with the Earth—if we choose to act now.
SOIL: The World at Our Feet
Group Exhibition
23 January – 13 April 2025
Somerset House
6. RWA Biennial Open 2025: Paper Works
Paper Works, the RWA’s Biennial exhibition opening in January, is all about paper. Selected from an open submission it celebrates paper as a surface for drawing and printmaking and as a sculptural material. Paper is the star of the show revealing itself in many different guises. Hand made paper, different types of Japanese tissue, papier maché, and paper pulp are just some of the materials being used to create drawings paintings sculpture and architectural models. It is manipulated, burnt, cast, folded, walked on and torn. It is used for collage and all types of printmaking from lino to collograph, lithography, etching and woodcut.
RWA Biennial Open 2025: Paper Works
25 January – 27 April 2025
RWA: Royal West of England Academy
7. Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism
A major exhibition featuring over 130 works by ten important Brazilian artists from the twentieth century, capturing the diversity of Brazilian art at the time.
In the early 20th century a new modern art was emerging in Brazil. Starting in the 1910s and continuing into the 1970s, Brazilian artists were adapting contemporary trends, international influences and artistic traditions to create a new type of modern art; art informed by the vibrant cultures, identities and landscapes of Brazil.
The exhibition will bring an expanded view of Brazilian Modernism to UK audiences, showing work by artists who have historically received less exposure in this country, including Anita Malfatti, who spearheaded the movement, and Tarsila do Amaral, now internationally celebrated as a leading female figure of Brazilian Modernism. The exhibition will also include the self-taught artists Alfredo Volpi and Djanira da Motta e Silva, an artist of indigenous descent, Afro-Brazilian artist Rubem Valentim and performance artist, Flávio de Carvalho.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism
28 January – 21 April 2025
Royal Academy
8. Flowers – Flora In Contemporary Art & Culture
Flowers have, throughout history, inspired artists, writers and creatives. FLOWERS – FLORA IN CONTEMPORARY ART & CULTURE seeks to reveal the myriad ways that flowers continue to be depicted by artists and their omnipresence within our contemporary culture. Occupying two floors and over nine major gallery spaces, this exhibition features large-scale installations, original art, photography, fashion, archival objects and graphic design exploring the ongoing influence of flowers on creativity and human expression.
Aside from studies of their inherent beauty and drama, flowers are also utilised as symbols, signifiers or metaphors for human emotions and impulses. Flora lies at the heart of myths and stories that inform our cultural outlook and language. Recognised as unparalleled objects of beauty in nature, artists continue to evoke the power and beauty of flora to convey a multitude of messages and meanings.
Flowers – Flora In Contemporary Art & Culture
12 February – 5 May 2025
Saatchi Gallery
9. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works will be a landmark survey of the artist’s work produced between 1969-1982. Organised in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation and drawn from the Hall Collection, the exhibition will show approximately 45 works rarely displayed in public before.
This major exhibition will return to Anselm Kiefer’s roots, featuring important early paintings, photos, prints, artist books, watercolours and mixed-media work, including less well-known, intimate pieces.
Born in 1945, Anselm Kiefer has become a towering figure of post-war art and is best known for his monumental paintings and installations. His immense body of work covers an array of cultural, literary and philosophical subjects.
Kiefer’s artistic techniques and materials – which include straw, lead, concrete, fire, and ash – are similarly expansive, with pieces endlessly changing in their organic nature.
Anselm Kiefer: Early Works
14 February – 15 June 2025
Ashmolean Museum
10. Emily Powell: Paintings on prescription
Portland Gallery is delighted to present Emily Powell’s latest solo exhibition, a vibrant exploration of flowers in all their forms. Flowers have always been an important source of inspiration for Powell, whether captured in a traditional still life, blooming in a sun-drenched garden, or enveloping the viewer in an edge-to-edge extravaganza. These varied depictions reflect the artist’s deep connection to the transient beauty of nature and the pleasure that flowers bring when they are in full bloom.
Emily Powell: Paintings on prescription
20 February – 7 March 2025
Portland Gallery
11. Colour
Colour presents the work of a group of artists who are interested in Colour and exploring its possibilities, while bringing their own contemporary perspectives. Free of form, gesture or any specific meaning, the works in this exhibition are an exploration of colour activation, more in key with the spontaneity found in nature and the subsequent optical experience provoked in the viewer. The artists will explore how colour can envelop, provoke and communicate through diverse mediums and techniques including weaving, dripping, pouring, soaking, staining, spraying and more.
The exhibition serves as a reminder that while colour is a shared aspect of human experience, the ways we perceive and are affected by it are as varied as individuals themselves.
Curated by Flora Hesketh and Omar Mazhar, Colour is the sixth in a series of thematic exhibitions produced with Tristan Hoare gallery, and will include works by Markus Amm, Sussy Cazalet, Vipeksha Gupta, Howard Hodgkin, Jeff McMillan, Ptolemy Mann, Alev Siesbye & William Turnbull among others.
Curated by Flora Hesketh and Omar Mazhar, Colour is the sixth in a series of thematic exhibitions produced with Tristan Hoare gallery, and will include works by Markus Amm, Sussy Cazalet, Vipeksha Gupta, Howard Hodgkin, Jeff McMillan, Ptolemy Mann, Alev Siesbye & William Turnbull among others.
Colour
27 February – 29 March 2025
Tristan Hoare
12. Nicola Hicks: Dressed for the Woods
Messums is thrilled to announce the first solo retrospective of Nicola Hicks MBE FRSS – one of the most significant British sculptors of the 21st century. In celebration of the artist’s 65th birthday, the gallery will present more than 30 exceptional works, drawn from each major series of Hicks’ career to date.
The magnificent 13th century tithe barn at Messums West will be the setting for this visual journey through the anthropomorphic, allegorical world of the artist, revealing her vision of humanity and the modern world, and exploring her idiosyncratic visual language that has garnered her enormous acclaim over the past four decades.
Nicola Hicks: Dressed for the Woods
Solo Exhibition
8 March – 4 May 2025
13. Richard Wright
This will be the largest institutional solo exhibition in the UK for more than 20 years of the work of British artist and Turner Prize winner Richard Wright (b. 1960, London, UK). Known primarily for his site-specific and ephemeral wall-based paintings, the exhibition will also include new and rarely exhibited works on paper and in sculpture and glass.
Wright’s work is an active and extended investigation into the material conditions of the physical world. Engaging with both the tangible and immaterial, he opens up spaces which shift and alter our perception, drawing on histories of painting, design, metaphysics, aesthetics, counter-culture and architecture.
Richard Wright
11 April – 22 June 2025
Camden Art Centre
14. Peter Logan
Peter Logan has made sculpture since leaving the Slade School of Art, London. Creating kinetic sculptures that express the spirit and movement of life is the essence of his work. Informed inter-disciplinarily by mathematics and engineering, his sculptures are the visual meeting point between art and science, aesthetics and technology.
Recently he has completed two large-scale commissions for solar energised mobile sculpture in the atrium spaces of new buildings. He is currently working on a new generation of solar and wind powered sculptures.
Peter Logan
10 May – 21 July 2025
Messums West
15. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
British artist Helen Chadwick (1953 – 1996) embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the ‘traditional’ or ‘beautiful’ in art history. This major retrospective will be the first in over 25 years, and will chart the development of Chadwick’s art from her renowned degree show piece In the Kitchen (1977) through to her Piss Flowers (1991–2).
Chadwick’s experiments across mediums were innovative and unconventional; typically combining aesthetic beauty with an alliance of unusual, often grotesque materials. She consistently expressed a feminist perspective steeped in humour, and employed a vast range of materials in unexpected ways, incorporating bodily fluids, meat, flowers, chocolate and compost into her works. Through her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies, she quickly established herself as a leading figure amongst Britain’s post-war avant-garde, becoming one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987.
The exhibition will highlight Chadwick’s significant impact and contributions to British and international art history by demonstrating her relevance to contemporary feminist concerns, her evolution of material culture and her consistently playful approach.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
17 May – 27 October 2025
Hepworth Wakefield
16. Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
British artist Helen Chadwick (1953 – 1996) embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the ‘traditional’ or ‘beautiful’ in art history. This major retrospective will be the first in over 25 years, and will chart the development of Chadwick’s art from her renowned degree show piece In the Kitchen (1977) through to her Piss Flowers (1991–2).
Chadwick’s experiments across mediums were innovative and unconventional; typically combining aesthetic beauty with an alliance of unusual, often grotesque materials. She consistently expressed a feminist perspective steeped in humour, and employed a vast range of materials in unexpected ways, incorporating bodily fluids, meat, flowers, chocolate and compost into her works. Through her skilled use of traditional fabrication methods and sophisticated technologies, she quickly established herself as a leading figure amongst Britain’s post-war avant-garde, becoming one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987.
The exhibition will highlight Chadwick’s significant impact and contributions to British and international art history by demonstrating her relevance to contemporary feminist concerns, her evolution of material culture and her consistently playful approach.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
17 May – 27 October 2025
Hepworth Wakefield
17. Abstract Erotic
This major exhibition of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams at The Courtauld Gallery foregrounds their shared commitment to using humour and abstract form to ask important questions about sexuality and bodies.
The influential critic and curator Lucy Lippard dubbed this kind of work ‘abstract erotic’, and in 1966, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams were the only women artists included in Lippard’s ground-breaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Prior to the emergence of the women’s movement, these artists engaged with a feminist politics of the body with their visceral, playful, and abstract forms in materials such as latex, expanding foam, string, and plaster. As Lippard later reflected, ‘I can see now that I was looking for “feminist art”’.
Abstract Erotic
20 June – 14 Jeptember 2025
The Courtauld Gallery
About Jacqueline Duncan
A Devon-based artist born in 1967 who has worked in Milan, São Paulo, and New York. Her work, known for its intricate detail and dynamic use of light, has been exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts and the London Art Biennale.