Something unusual happened in London between January and June 2025. The capital’s major art institutions – Tate, the National Gallery, the Barbican, the Royal Academy, the Courtauld – collectively mounted a programme that didn’t play it safe. Instead of chasing guaranteed blockbusters built around household names, these galleries took genuine curatorial risks: foregrounding artists whose names don’t yet trip off the mainstream tongue, resurrecting histories that art-historical canon has sidelined, and asking audiences to sit with work that resists easy consumption. The result was one of the most intellectually demanding and rewarding exhibition seasons London has produced in years – a sequence that built on the capital’s tradition of ambitious programming, as documented in previous round-ups of the best art exhibitions in London and Tate Modern’s silver jubilee celebrations.
This wasn’t coincidence. It reflected a broader shift in how London’s cultural institutions conceive of their public role – less as temples of established taste, more as spaces where art-historical narratives get actively rewritten. The evidence was everywhere, from a medieval painting revolution at the National Gallery to a posthumous celebration of a painter who died at thirty-two, from Brazilian modernism’s cannibalistic energy at the Royal Academy to the radical body politics of a 1980s club icon at Tate Modern.
Siena Before the Renaissance: A City Rewritten
The season’s most scholarly undertaking arrived at the National Gallery in March. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350, organised jointly with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, assembled over a hundred works to argue that the story of Western painting’s rebirth doesn’t begin where most people assume.
The exhibition focused on four Sienese masters – Duccio, Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti – all of whom were dead by 1350, felled by the Black Death. Working in a city that was, at the turn of the fourteenth century, one of Europe’s wealthiest banking centres, these artists developed a mode of painting that predated Florence’s classical Renaissance by nearly a century. Faces showed emotion. Bodies moved through space. Stories unfolded across gilded panels with a dramatic intensity no one had seen before.
The National Gallery’s presentation reunited panels from Duccio’s monumental Maestà altarpiece after centuries of separation, and brought together works from Simone Martini’s Orsini polyptych for the first time in living memory. Alongside the paintings, gilded glass, illuminated manuscripts, ivory Madonnas, and silks demonstrated how Siena’s creative energy spilled beyond easel painting into every branch of decorative art. The New York Times described the Met’s original presentation as “a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty.” London’s version, reviewed in Renaissance Studies, confirmed the show’s scholarly weight.
What made the exhibition more than an exercise in connoisseurship was its implicit argument about art history’s blind spots. As the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue made clear, the focus on Siena – rather than Florence – challenged a narrative that had calcified in art-history classrooms for generations. These artists had been overshadowed not because their work was inferior, but because the story of the Renaissance was written around Florentine priorities.
Noah Davis: Painting as Quiet Revolution
At the Barbican, a different kind of recovery was underway. Noah Davis, which ran from February to May 2025, was the UK’s first institutional retrospective of the Los Angeles painter, who died of cancer in 2015 at the age of thirty-two. The exhibition brought together over fifty works spanning painting, sculpture, and works on paper, tracing Davis’s output from 2007 until his death.
Davis created a body of figurative paintings that explored the emotional and fantastical textures of Black life. His subjects dived into swimming pools, slept, danced, and looked at art in scenes that shifted between the realistic and the dreamlike. Drawing from anonymous vintage photography, personal archives, film, art history, and his own imagination, Davis painted characters – some real, some fictional – with what the Barbican described as “a deep feeling for humanity and the emotional textures of the everyday.”
In 2012, Davis and his wife Karon co-founded the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights, a historically Black and Latinx neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The space converted four storefronts into a free cultural centre, convincing the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles to lend works from its collection in a three-year partnership. “I have a responsibility to represent the people around me,” Davis said in a 2010 interview with Dazed. “Painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It’s visceral and immediate.”
The Barbican show, which toured to DAS MINSK in Potsdam and subsequently to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, presented Davis not merely as a painter of exceptional gifts, but as a figure who understood art’s social function. His Underground Museum – which closed in January 2025, with his widow Karon citing the need to process grief – was as much a part of his legacy as any individual canvas. As the critic Wells-Fray Smith observed in Dazed, Davis’s “biggest impact is that he was able to re-orient the world across compassionate lines.”
Leigh Bowery: The Body as Battleground
If the Siena exhibition and the Davis retrospective dealt in quiet power, Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery! – which opened in February and ran through August 2025 – was anything but quiet. The show celebrated the Australian-born, London-based artist, performer, designer, and club promoter who died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, aged thirty-three. It was the first retrospective to bring together Bowery’s flamboyant costumes alongside painting, photography, and video from across his collaborators.
Born in Melbourne in 1961, Bowery relocated to London in 1980 and immersed himself in the city’s club culture. His larger-than-life persona – extravagant costumes, elaborate makeup, provocative performances – challenged societal norms of fashion, art, and gender identity. Working under the shadow of Thatcher’s Britain, Section 28, and the Aids crisis, Bowery turned the body into a site of radical self-invention. One of his early signature looks involved adorning his face with oil paint, which, as curator Fiontan Moran noted in Dazed, “a lot of people interpreted as a reference to Kaposi sarcoma, which, at the time, was thought to be the first sign that you were HIV positive.”
The Tate exhibition, organised in collaboration with Nicola Rainbird, Director and Owner of the Estate of Leigh Bowery, presented his “Looks” alongside collaborations with Michael Clark, Lucien Freud, Nick Knight, and Baillie Walsh. Freud’s unflinching portraits of Bowery – stripped of embellishment, presented as flesh and vulnerability – offered a counterpoint to the sequinned excess. “I think that Leigh provokes a lot of questions, and he didn’t really like giving clear answers,” Moran told Dazed. The Spectator’s Digby Warde-Aldam described the exhibition design as “borderline-unhinged,” which was presumably the point.
Bowery’s influence extended far beyond his short life. The Tate identified his impact on Alexander McQueen, Jeffrey Gibson, Anohni, and Lady Gaga, among others. A handwritten note found in his archive – a fake letter to a magazine editor defending an Aids benefit performance – contained a line that still resonated in 2025: “In these conservative times, we need people like Leigh Bowery.”
Brazilian Modernism’s Cannibalistic Appetite
The Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism, which ran from January to April 2025, mounted the season’s most ambitious challenge to Eurocentric art history. Featuring over 130 works from the 1910s to the 1970s by ten Brazilian artists, the exhibition was organised by the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern in collaboration with the RA, and drew primarily from rarely seen Brazilian private collections.
The ten artists – Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Alfredo Volpi, Lasar Segall, Candido Portinari, Vicente do Rego Monteiro, Flávio de Carvalho, Djanira, Ruben Valentim, and Geraldo de Barros – represented the diversity of a nation built from Indigenous, Portuguese coloniser, enslaved West African, and immigrant populations. Their work traced a journey from figuration to abstraction over seventy years, rejecting European artistic conventions in favour of forms informed by Brazil’s cultures, identities, and landscapes.
A dedicated section recalled the historic Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, which took place at the Royal Academy in 1944. Initiated by Brazilian statesman Oswaldo Aranha, the original show comprised 168 works by 70 artists, exhibited to raise funds for the RAF Benevolent Fund. Around 23 works were purchased and donated to UK museums. Seven of these, including three by Roberto Burle Marx, were reunited in the same galleries eighty-one years later.
The exhibition’s title referenced antropofagia – the philosophy of cultural cannibalism articulated by Oswald de Andrade – which held that Brazilian art should devour European influences and transform them into something irreducibly local. It was a powerful curatorial statement: modernism, this show argued, didn’t flow in one direction from Paris to the periphery. It erupted everywhere, on its own terms.
The Courtauld’s Swiss Masterworks
At the Courtauld Gallery, Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection offered a different kind of revelation. Running from February to May 2025, it presented the first showing outside Winterthur, Switzerland, of landmark paintings from the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz.”
The exhibition opened with Goya’s Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks (c.1808–12), Géricault’s A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank (c.1819–22), and Courbet’s The Hammock (1844) – works that framed the Impressionists’ revolution in terms of what preceded it. At the heart of the show were Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Clown Cha-U-Kao (1895), Manet’s Au Café (1878), and a pair of Van Gogh paintings – A Ward in the Hospital at Arles and The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles (both 1889) – depicting the hospital where the artist recovered after mutilating his ear. These two canvases, brought together by Reinhart in 1925, hadn’t been shown in the UK before.
The Observer gave the show five stars, calling it “a jewel of an exhibition.” The Evening Standard concurred. What gave the exhibition its curatorial edge was the connection between Reinhart and Samuel Courtauld – direct contemporaries who shared similar tastes and are known to have met in 1932, the year the Courtauld Institute was founded. The exhibition placed two parallel collecting visions in dialogue across ninety years.
Photography’s Class Witness
The Photographers’ Gallery mounted its own act of recovery with Peter Mitchell: Nothing Lasts Forever (March–June 2025). Mitchell, born in Eccles near Manchester in 1943, moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left. Over five decades, he documented the city’s post-industrial transformation with a combination of formal rigour and genuine warmth.
The exhibition included Mitchell’s landmark 1979 show A New Refutation of the Viking 4 Space Mission, restaged in its original bright red frames, which imagined a Martian survey of northern England. It was the first colour photography exhibition in the UK, arriving when colour was still frowned upon in fine art contexts for its association with commercial and snapshot photography. As the curator Val Williams observed, Mitchell was “a narrator of who we were, a chaser of a disappearing world.”
“For me, photography is all about coincidences,” Mitchell said. His images of proud shopkeepers, demolished Quarry Hill flats, and eerie scarecrows were, as Studio International noted, characterised by “a deep empathy for his subjects, whether they be dilapidated buildings, proud shopkeepers, or even raggedy scarecrows.”
Munch Beyond The Scream
The National Portrait Gallery’s Edvard Munch Portraits (March–June 2025) and the NPG’s The Face Magazine: Culture Shift (February–May 2025) rounded out the season with complementary investigations of the portrait form. The Munch show – the first in the UK to focus on this aspect of the Norwegian’s work – assembled around forty portraits spanning family, bohemian friends, collectors, and patrons. The Face exhibition, meanwhile, gathered over two hundred photographs by more than eighty photographers, celebrating the magazine’s role in redefining fashion and portrait photography from 1980 to 2004.
Together, these ten exhibitions constituted more than a season of good shows. They made a collective case for what museums can do when they resist the gravitational pull of brand-name art and instead follow the evidence of quality, originality, and cultural significance wherever it leads. London’s galleries didn’t just display art in spring 2025. They argued for a different way of seeing it.
