Exhibitions To See In London This Summer: MyArtBroker's Guide To The London Art World
Image © flickr / Staircase-III at Tate Modern © Do Ho Suh 2010
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This summer, London’s leading galleries present a thoughtfully curated mix of historical and contemporary art. Whether you’re drawn to the immersive scale of installation or the intimate intensity of a portrait, these exhibitions offer fresh perspectives on how art shapes, and is shaped by, our cultural and personal landscapes.
Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection
Dates: 14 February - 26 May 2025
Venue: The Courtauld Gallery
In the first display outside Switzerland of the Oskar Reinhart collection, this exhibition brings together masterpieces by Goya, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Picasso and others, charting the trajectory from Romanticism through Impressionism. Highlights include rare works by Goya alongside landmark canvases by Monet and Renoir, offering a comparative lens on how artists responded to modernity’s shifting light, colour and form.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift
Dates: 20 February - 18 May 2025
Venue: National Portrait Gallery
Charting The Face magazine’s influence from 1980-2004 (and its relaunch in 2019), this show presents over 200 photographs by more than 80 photographers - among them Corinne Day, Stefano Sednaoui and Sheila Rock - that defined youth culture, fashion and music photography in Britain and beyond. The image-rich display underscores The Face’s role in launching careers and shaping a visual language of radical style and subcultural expression.
Edvard Munch Portraits
Dates: 13 March - 15 June 2025
Venue: National Portrait Gallery
Moving beyond The Scream, this is the first UK exhibition devoted exclusively to Edvard Munch’s portraiture, showcasing works ranging from commissioned likenesses to deeply personal studies of family, friends and contemporaries. His portraits capture psychological depth, revealing Munch’s ambition to portray “living, breathing, suffering individuals” rather than idealised figures.
Arpita Singh: Remembering
Dates: 20 March - 27 July 2025
Venue: Serpentine North
The first institutional solo show of Arpita Singh in London surveys six decades of her practice, from large-scale, narrative oil paintings to delicate watercolours and ink drawings. Drawing on Bengali folk art and personal and social histories, Singh’s vibrant, often surreal imagery addresses motherhood, aging, feminine sensuality and the interplay of inner life with external turmoil.
Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
Dates: 21 March - 29 June 2025
Venue: Royal Academy of Arts
This comprehensive survey of Victor Hugo’s rarely exhibited drawings - from early caricatures and travel sketches to dreamlike abstractions - reveals the literary titan’s parallel vocation as a visionary draftsman. His ink and wash visions of castles, monsters and seascapes influenced Romantic, Symbolist and Surrealist artists, embodying Hugo’s poetic imagination beyond the page.
Image © flickr / Lost Horizon I © Antony Gormley 2008WITNESS: Early Lead Works
Dates: 23 April - 8 June 2025
Venue: White Cube Mason’s Yard
Focusing on Antony Gormley’s early lead sculptures (1977–1993), WITNESS traces his shift from found-object cases to body-cast works, exploring themes of embodiment, vulnerability and the interplay of presence and absence. From sealed lead-wrapped stones to intimate body silhouettes pressed in clay, these works materialise Gormley’s pursuit of stillness as a portal to memory and metaphysical reflection.
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House
Dates: 1 May - 19 October 2025
Venue: Tate Modern
Do Ho Suh’s haunting, full-scale reproductions of his former homes - rendered in translucent fabrics, wire and found fixtures - map memory, migration and the lived experience of domestic space. From a traditional Korean hanok to a transparent recreation of his London flat, the installations invite viewers into personal architectures, prompting reflection on how environments shape identity and recollection.
Reopening of the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery
Date: 10 May 2025
Venue: National Gallery
After a two-year closure for refurbishment, the Sainsbury Wing reopens on 10 May with an entirely re-hung display of 1,045 upper-floor paintings representing nearly 40 percent of its collection. Curatorial decisions highlight artistic lineages - Rubens alongside Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat and Dutch seascapes beside Turner’s Dutch Boats in a Gale - as well as expanding the presence of women painters (12 of the Gallery’s 27 works by female artists are now on view). The entrance sequence culminates with the Wilton Diptych and a suite of larger religious altarpieces, while redecorated walls and contemporary wooden benches offer a refreshed visitor experience.
Noah Davis
Dates: Now - 11 May 2025
Venue: Barbican Centre
Noah Davis’ figurative paintings speak directly to Black life’s joys and complexities, drawing on personal archives, photography, film and imagination. His luminous scenes of pool-divers, dancers, sleepers and gallery-goers oscillate between realism and dream, joy and melancholy, rooted in Davis’s commitment “to represent the people around me” and to expand how everyday emotional textures are rendered.
Ed Atkins
Dates: Now - 5 August 2025
Venue: Tate Britain
Ed Atkins’s work resides at the intersection of digital art and human emotion, employing CGI video and animation to question the boundary between virtual and physical experience. Atkins repurposes techniques from literature, cinema, gaming, music and theatre to stage a dialogue between weightless digital forms and the material world of texture and touch. His latest survey brings together moving-image pieces from the past fifteen years alongside paintings, drawings, embroideries and texts that foreground the messy realities of intimacy, love and loss through the lens of technological mediation.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting
Dates: 20 June - 7 September 2025
Venue: National Portrait Gallery
As the largest UK museum exhibition to date on Jenny Saville, this chronological survey of fifty works traces her evolution from 1990s Glasgow School of Art graduate to a leading figure in contemporary figurative painting. Featuring monumental oils and intimate charcoal drawings, the show emphasises Saville’s deep engagement with painting’s history and her restless experimentation with the body’s representation, curated by Sarah Howgate in close collaboration with the artist.
Abstract Erotic
Dates: 20 June - 14 September 2025
Venue: The Courtauld Gallery
Bringing together the seminal works of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse and Alice Adams, this exhibition foregrounds how these women used humour, organic form and unconventional materials to interrogate sexuality, the body and feminist politics. Featuring works in latex, plaster, string and foam suspended and sited throughout the galleries, the show marks the first UK museum context for Adams and a long-overdue group presentation of these three innovators.
