Artlyst has selected ten exhibitions that will open outside London and throughout the UK in Summer 2025. Pallant House, Chichester and Towner Eastbourne have group shows that blend the historical and contemporary. The Hepworth Wakefield has a major retrospective of work by the avant-garde artist Helen Chadwick, while the Goodwood Art Foundation features Rachel Whiteread as the subject of its inaugural new gallery space. In Scotland, Andy Goldsworthy celebrates 50 years of his career, while in Wales, John Akomfrah starts his UK tour of his film Listening All Night To The Rain, which debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
17 May – 27 October 2025
The Hepworth, Wakefield
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.
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Seeing Each Other: Portraits of Artists
17 May – 2 November 2025
Pallant House Gallery
This major exhibition brings together over 150 works that explore artistic relationships, identity, and mutual influence in modern and contemporary British art. Spanning 125 years, it showcases paintings, prints, drawings, photography, sculpture, and installations that capture the distinctive gaze between creative peers.
Featuring over 80 artists, including Lucian Freud, Lubaina Himid, David Hockney, Lee Miller, Eric Ravilious, Paula Rego, and Hugh Mendes, among many others, the exhibition showcases friendships and emulation, as well as homages to earlier artists, through intimate portrayals.
From rare portraits of celebrated figures to new commissions, discover connections that have shaped British art and new perspectives on artistic circles, from the Bloomsbury Group to the Young British Artists.
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Sussex Modernism
23 May – 28 September 2025
Towner Eastbourne
An exhibition taking place at Towner Eastbourne, from 23 May to 28 September 2025, offers new ways of experiencing both modernism and the region of Sussex and reveals, for the first time, that there are many modernisms, many Sussexes, and many ways of harnessing the landscapes, cultures and histories of a place to reimagine how art should be made and life lived.
Sussex Modernism, curated by Hope Wolf, includes artists influenced by different modernist movements, those who did not embrace modernism, and an array of countercultural artists from the 1960s to the 1980s who flouted established tastes in their attempts to register the ‘new’ and ‘now’. It compares the many, very different ways in which artists harnessed the landscapes, cultures, and histories of their locations to reimagine how art should be made and life lived. Artists include Ivon Hitchens, Jacob Epstein, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Gluck, John Stezaker, Geraldine Swayne, Jennifer Binnie among others.
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John Akomfrah: Listening All Night to the Rain
24 May – 7 September 2025
National Museum Cardiff
Contemporary art and activism become one in noted artist John Akomfrah’s profound piece, Listening All Night To The Rain.
Listening All Night To The Rain at National Museum Cardiff is the first stop on a UK tour following its debut at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
The immersive audio-visual piece is a journey of sights and sounds that draw out specific moments in time, events in our collective histories that have shaped individuals and societies. By listening, watching and engaging with the piece, we are encouraged to listen as a form of activism against historic and enduring injustices.
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Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive
24 May – 2 November 2025
Tate St Ives
In the early 1960s, Liliane Lijn’s kinetic sculptures positioned her at the forefront of artists exploring new ways to utilise technology to “see the world in terms of light and energy.” Over a six-decade career, her work has continued to blaze a trail while defying categorisation.
Fascinated by the idea of visualising the invisible, Lijn draws from Surrealist ideas, ancient mythologies, and feminist, scientific and linguistic thought. Equally important to her experimentation are the materials she uses – such as plastics, prisms, feather dusters and copper wire.
Arise Alive surveys Lijn’s career from the late 1950s to today, spanning installation, sculpture, painting and moving image, and including her ongoing exploration and creation of new feminine forms.
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Rachel Whiteread
31 May – 2 November 2025
Goodwood Art Foundation
The Goodwood Art Foundation, the UK’s new not-for-profit destination for contemporary art, will launch its opening season with an exhibition devoted to Rachel Whiteread, one of the most highly respected sculptors of her generation, presented in partnership with Rolls-Royce Motor Cars. The exhibition will include a major new work never before seen in public, alongside a collection of her photography, a rarely exhibited aspect of her work. Whiteread’s work will be shown across the Foundation’s 70-acre landscape and in the Pavilion Gallery. A major new work, cast in concrete, will be displayed outdoors, along with her cast sculptures Detached II (2012) and Untitled (Pair) (1999). They will form a prominent journey throughout the Foundation’s Schwarzman Gardens, designed by the award-winning landscape designer Dan Pearson.
Also on show in the 70-acre landscape are works by Isamu Noguchi, Hélio Oiticica, Susan Philipsz, Veronica Ryan, Amie Siegel and Rose Wylie.
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Andy Warhol: My True Story
6 June – 14 September 2025
Newlands House & Gallery
This summer, an exciting new exploration of one of the 20th century’s most influential artists will give visitors a unique window into the life and work of Andy Warhol (1928-1987).
Different to other Warhol exhibitions, it offers a ‘behind the scenes’ perspective that may be surprising to those more familiar with the universally recognisable ‘man in a fright wig’ with his Marilyns, soup cans and dollar signs.
The exhibition will feature an incredible array of exhibits, many previously publicly unseen, including drawings, prints, photographs, recordings, films, and archival paraphernalia.
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Cedric Morris: Artist, Plantsman & Traveller
7 June – 12 October 2025
Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed
The first major presentation of Cedric Morris’ work in the North of England opens at the Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, this summer and features more than 20 significant loans from Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Gainsborough’s House, Philip Mould Gallery, plus a number from private collections.
The exhibition explores the artist’s defining passions and represents a landmark opportunity to enjoy a variety of subjects by one of the most talented painters in 20th-century British art.
From playful pencil sketches of customers in Parisian and Algerian cafes during the early 1920s, to vibrant still lifes of eggs and iris seedlings in the 1940’s, landscapes and view paintings he made in later life while travelling in Portugal and Turkey on plant-finding trips, the exhibition shows how, throughout his career, Morris painted a variety of subjects in a very direct and idiosyncratic way, using bold impasto colours.
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William Kentridge: The Pull of Gravity
28 June 2025 – 19 April 2026
Yorkshire Ssculpture Park
This summer, YSP presents a major exhibition by South African artist William Kentridge.
It marks the first museum presentation outside South Africa to focus on his sculpture.
Comprising over 40 works made between 2007 and 2024, this ambitious project will fill the Underground Gallery, with outdoor works presented in the surrounding gardens.
Over the last two decades, sculpture has become an increasingly integral part of Kentridge’s practice, expanding drawing into three dimensions and evolving from puppetry, film, and stage props. This exciting new exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s sculpture from this period across different scales and media, including bronze, steel, paper, cardboard, plaster, wood and found objects.
Several works will be displayed for the first time, including a new commission of six monumental coloured sculptures, Paper Procession, on parade in YSP’s historic landscape.
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Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years
26 July – 2 November 2025
National Galleries Scotland
Royal Scottish Academy building
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years will take over the upper and lower galleries in the Royal Scottish Academy building for the summer. Based in Scotland, Goldsworthy (born 1956) is internationally famous for his extraordinary work with natural materials.
The exhibition will span five decades of creation with over 200 works, including photographs, sculptures, and expansive new installations. Goldsworthy will also create several major new works onsite at the Royal Scottish Academy building, especially for the exhibition
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Lead image: Goodwood Art Foundation, West Sussex Photo: Sara Faith © Artlyst 2025
Tags
Andy Goldsworthy, Andy Warhol, Goodwood ARt Foundation, Helen Chadwick, Hepworth Wakefield, Pallant House, Rachel Whiteread, Towner Eastbourne, William Kentridge, YSP
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