By Sara Noah
London’s galleries in 2025 are staging shows that interrogate identity, history, and the very nature of art-making. The season’s exhibitions are not mere displays; they are arguments, provocations, and invitations to see the world anew. From Tate Britain’s digital humanism to the Barbican’s celebration of a painter who died too young, this is a year of depth, not decoration.
The following ten exhibitions – verified through primary sources, institutional press releases, and critical reviews – offer a roadmap through the capital’s most compelling cultural terrain.
Ed Atkins: Digital Humanism at Tate Britain
Tate Britain’s career survey of Ed Atkins (b. 1982) is the largest UK presentation of his work to date. Running from 2 April to 25 August 2025, the exhibition spans 15 years of computer-generated videos, animations, paintings, embroideries, and drawings. As the Tate’s press release states, Atkins “repurposes contemporary technologies in unexpected ways, tracing the dwindling gap between the digital world and human feeling.”
The show, curated by Polly Staple and Nathan Ladd, features 60 works across eight rooms. It culminates in Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), a two-hour film exploring the death of Atkins’s father. “My life and my work are inextricable,” Atkins says in the exhibition guide. “How do I convey the life-ness that made these works through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations.”
Writing in The Independent, critic Tom Huddleston calls Atkins “the most interesting artist working in Britain today,” noting the exhibition’s “heartfelt and overtly autobiographical” core beneath its conceptual rigour. The New York Times’s Jason Farago praises Atkins’s ability to make CGI avatars that “show what it means to be human,” even as they remain “anxious, lost for words, exhausted.”
Noah Davis: Dreaming in Colour at the Barbican
The Barbican hosts the UK’s first institutional survey of Noah Davis (1983–2015), the Los Angeles painter who co-founded The Underground Museum. Running from 6 February to 11 May 2025, the exhibition presents over 50 works spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper, charting Davis’s output from 2007 to his death from cancer at 32.
Curated by Wells Fray-Smith and Eleanor Nairne, the show includes The Missing Link 4 (2009) and other works that explore Black life through surreal, poetic imagery. Adrian Searle, writing in The Guardian, describes the retrospective as “thrilling strangeness from a painter brimming with ideas and adventure.” Laura Cumming, also in The Guardian, calls Davis’s paintings “silent revolutions, marrying poetic intimacy with unyielding political resonance.”
The exhibition tours to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, in June 2025, cementing Davis’s posthumous reputation as a painter who believed “art was for everyone.”
Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever at the Photographers’ Gallery
Peter Mitchell’s retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery (7 March – 15 June 2025) celebrates one of the pioneering colour photographers of the 1970s and 80s. Curated by gallery director Shoair Mavlian, the show draws from Mitchell’s landmark series A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, which imagines Leeds as seen through an alien’s eyes.
Mitchell, born in Manchester in 1943, moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left. His photographs of shopkeepers, crumbling storefronts, and the demolished Quarry Hill estate are, as David Trigg writes in Studio International, “meditations on the passage of time.” The Time Out reviewer Dave Calhoun notes that “when Mitchell was taking these photos, colour photography was barely respected” – a reminder that his work was once as radical as it is now nostalgic.
Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection at the Courtauld
The Courtauld Gallery presents the first exhibition of the Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘Am Römerholz’ to be staged outside Winterthur, Switzerland. Running from 14 February to 26 May 2025, the show brings together Goya, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Picasso.
Jonathan Jones, in The Guardian, singles out Goya’s Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks (c.1808–12) as “drop-dead brilliant,” noting how the painting’s “thick cuts of salmon touch each other on a grey tablecloth, their pink interiors turned upward with holes where the vertebrae were.” The exhibition includes Van Gogh’s A Ward in the Hospital at Arles and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles (1889), painted four months after the artist mutilated his ear.
The Oskar Reinhart Collection, assembled in the first half of the 20th century, comprises approximately 200 works spanning the 14th to early 20th centuries. Its London presentation offers a rare transhistorical dialogue.
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 at the National Gallery
The National Gallery’s Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 (8 March – 22 June 2025) is organised in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It brings together over 100 objects to argue that Siena’s medieval artists – Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers – were the true pioneers of Western painting.
Jonathan Jones, again in The Guardian, calls it “a heart-stopping show about the moment western art came alive.” The exhibition reunites all eight surviving scenes from the predella of Duccio’s Maestà for the first time since the 18th century, and presents Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych panels together in living memory.
Alastair Sooke, in The Telegraph, highlights the “unprecedented interest in the emotional lives of holy figures” – a medieval innovation that predates the Renaissance.
Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern
Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery! (27 February – 31 August 2025) is the first major UK exhibition dedicated to the Australian performance artist, designer, and club kid. Curated by Fiontán Moran, the show brings together Bowery’s costumes, photographs by Nick Knight and Fergus Greer, and paintings by Lucian Freud.
Bowery (1961–1994) was a central figure in London’s 1980s club scene, founding the Taboo club in 1985. “If you label me, you negate me,” he said in 1993, the year before his death from an Aids-related illness. The New York Times’s Tom Faber notes that Bowery’s “cultural influence is beyond question,” citing his impact on designers like Rick Owens and John Galliano, and his status as a queer icon.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism at the Royal Academy
The Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism (28 January – 21 April 2025) features over 130 works by ten Brazilian artists, organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. The show expands the narrative beyond well-known names like Tarsila do Amaral and Rubem Valentim to include Anita Malfatti, often considered the first Brazilian modernist, and Djanira da Motta e Silva, a self-taught artist of Guaraní descent.
Eddy Frankel, writing in Time Out, praises the exhibition’s “stunning selection of seldom-displayed installations,” noting how the artists “mash together indigenous aesthetics, art history and influences from the new European avant garde.” The Art News review highlights the exhibition’s connection to a 1944 Royal Academy show organised during World War II – this time, without political coercion.
The Face Magazine: Culture Shift at the National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery’s The Face Magazine: Culture Shift (20 February – 18 May 2025) celebrates the trailblazing youth culture magazine that ran from 1980 to 2004. Curated by Sabina Jaskot-Gill with Lee Swillingham and Norbert Schoerner, the exhibition brings together over 200 photographs by 80 photographers, including Corinne Day, Elaine Constantine, and Juergen Teller.
Charlotte Jansen, in The Guardian, describes the show as “rebellious fashion photography with a raucous sense of fun.” The magazine’s influence on fashion photography – its shift to studio shoots and closer photographer-stylist collaborations – remains visible in contemporary image-making.
Anthony McCall: Solid Light at Tate Modern
Anthony McCall’s Solid Light (27 June 2024 – 29 June 2025) at Tate Modern is a focused survey of the British-born, New York-based artist’s immersive light installations. The exhibition includes Line Describing a Cone (1973), a seminal work that redefined the possibilities of sculpture, alongside later works like Doubling Back (2003) and Split-Second Mirror I (2018).
McCall describes his work as “existing in the space where cinema, sculpture and drawing overlap.” The exhibition uses haze machines to make projected light visible as three-dimensional form, inviting visitors to interact with the beams. As the Tate’s press release notes, McCall’s work has influenced generations of artists working with film and installation.
Edvard Munch Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery
The National Portrait Gallery’s Edvard Munch Portraits (13 March – 15 June 2025) is the first UK show to focus on the Norwegian expressionist’s portraiture. Curated by Alison Smith, the exhibition brings together 40 portraits of family, friends, lovers, and patrons.
Munch (1863–1944) once said he could see “behind everyone’s mask” – a quality evident in his 1892 portrait of lawyer Thor Lütken, which features a hidden landscape on the sitter’s sleeve. “He was someone who was part of this wonderful European network,” Smith tells The Art Newspaper. “He was a cosmopolitan.”
The exhibition challenges the perception of Munch as a solitary figure, revealing instead a painter deeply embedded in the social and intellectual currents of his time.
A City of Provocation
London’s 2025 exhibitions share a common thread: they demand more than passive viewing. Each show interrogates something – identity, history, the act of seeing itself. In a city where art is both heritage and harbinger, this season proves that the galleries remain the most audacious cultural stage in the world.
For further reading, explore our guide to the best art exhibitions in London or dive into our Art category for more critical coverage.
