London Art Exhibitions Not To Miss Opening Autumn 2025

Autumn exhibitions at the major museums and galleries in London will feature an array of blockbuster shows, including the Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery, Picasso’s love of theatre at Tate Modern, Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, Peter Doig at the Serpentine and Gilbert & George at the Hayward, plus many more. See Artlyst’s selection below.

Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum

Barbican Level 2

3 Sept 2025 – 11 Jan 2026

Barbican presents a major exhibition of new and existing works by artist Mona Hatoum (b. 1952, Beirut, Lebanon) in dialogue with historic works by Alberto Giacometti (b. 1901-1966, Borgonovo, Switzerland). Encounters: Giacometti x Mona Hatoum is the second in a series of three exhibitions in partnership with the Fondation Giacometti.

Subtitled Divide and staged in the Barbican’s new Level 2 gallery, the exhibition spans nearly a century of artmaking . It includes sculptures made from plaster, bronze, steel, and glass, alongside installations, video, and works on paper. Among the works on display will be iconic pieces by Giacometti such as Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932), The Nose (1947) – recontextualised by Hatoum within one of her own works – and The Cage (1950–51).

Hatoum will present existing works drawn from across her career, including some which have never previously been shown in the UK, alongside several new works created especially for this exhibition. Outside the gallery, the public foyer will feature large-scale sculptures by Hatoum, including Orbital (2018), which is open and hollow, and Inside Out (2019), which is solid and dense.

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Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists National Gallery

13 September 2025 – 8 February 2026

National Gallery

The first-ever exhibition dedicated to the Neo-Impressionist art movement will take place at the National Gallery in the autumn of 2025. Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists will show works primarily drawn from the outstanding collection of the German art collector Helene Kröller-Müller (1869‒1939), at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, in the Netherlands. The exhibition will showcase radical works by French, Belgian, and Dutch artists, created between 1886 and the early 20th century. These include Anna Boch (1848‒1936), Jan Toorop (1858‒1928), Théo van Rysselberghe (1862‒1926), Paul Signac (1863‒1935) and Georges Seurat (1859–1891) himself. One of the first great women art patrons of the 20th century, Kröller-Müller, assembled what is probably the world’s most significant and most comprehensive collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings just two decades after these works were painted.

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Theatre Picasso

17 September 2025 – 12 April 2026

Tate Modern

Pablo Picasso was fascinated by performers and their ability to transform. He was inspired by the dancers, entertainers and bullfighters he painted. He borrowed from them to create his own public persona: Picasso, the Artist.

Marking the centenary of his famous painting The Three Dancers, this exhibition, staged by celebrated contemporary artist Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, sheds new light on Picasso’s work. They will transform the exhibition space into a theatre for displaying over 45 works by Picasso from Tate’s collection, alongside key European loans. This includes paintings, sculpture, textile and works on paper, some never seen in the UK before.

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Kerry James Marshall

20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026

Royal Academy of Arts

In September 2025, the Royal Academy of Arts will mark the 70th birthday year of the celebrated American artist Kerry James Marshall, Hon RA, with a major solo exhibition. The exhibition will explore Marshall’s expansive career to date, marking his first institutional presentation in the UK in nearly 20 years. Kerry James Marshall will feature around 70 works, including a new series of paintings created especially for the show and his commemorative sculpture Wake (2003 – ongoing), which evolves each time it is exhibited.

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Marie Antoinette Style

V&A South Kensington

20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026

Marie Antoinette Style will be the UK’s first exhibition on the French queen Marie Antoinette. The exhibition will explore the origins and countless revivals of the style shaped by the most fashionable queen in history. A fashion icon in her own time, and an early modern ‘celebrity’, the dress and interiors modelled and adopted by the ill-fated Queen of France in the final decades of the eighteenth century have had a lasting influence on over 250 years of design, fashion, film and decorative arts.

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Howard Hodgkin: In A Public Garden

Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery

1 October 2025 – 8 March 2026

Howard Hodgkin: In a Public Garden — is the largest institutional exhibition of original prints by the acclaimed British artist to date. Curated by renowned art historian Richard Calvocoressi, this landmark show features around 60 vibrant, emotionally charged prints that span five decades of Hodgkin’s career, from 1966 to 2016.

Installed throughout Pitzhanger’s contemporary gallery and the atmospheric rooms of the historic Manor itself, this retrospective-in-print immerses visitors in Hodgkin’s world of colour, memory, and abstraction. His bold, gestural works — full of nuance and feeling — transform the building into a living canvas of moments remembered and reimagined.

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Lee Miller

2 Oct 2025 – 15 Feb 2026

Tate Britain

Lee Miller will be given the most extensive retrospective of her photography ever staged in the UK. A trailblazing surrealist and an acclaimed fashion and war photographer, Miller’s extraordinary career will be explored through 250 images, including some that have never been previously displayed.

The exhibition will showcase Miller’s extraordinary career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography. Exploring her artistic collaborations, the exhibition will also shed light on lesser-known sides of her practice, such as her remarkable images of the Egyptian landscape in the 1930s.

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Sean Scully: Mirroring

8 October – 23 November 2025

Estorick Collection

This autumn, the Estorick Collection presents a special intervention by celebrated artist Sean Scully (b. Dublin, 1945), showcasing a body of his work alongside that of Italian master Giorgio Morandi (1890 – 1964). The pairing reflects Scully’s longstanding dialogue with the imagery of Morandi, who, though ostensibly a figurative painter, “learned the lessons of abstraction”, as Scully observes.
Sean Scully: Mirroring features 20 works by Scully which date from 1964 to the present day, shown alongside a dozen Morandi etchings and drawings from Estorick’s permanent collection. Encompassing works on paper, paintings and sculpture, many of these new or rarely seen works trace the arc of Scully’s practice, from early representation to geometric abstraction and eventually back to figuration, a journey that mirrors Morandi’s own evolving trajectory.

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Peter Doig – House of Music.

10 October 2025 to 8 February 2026

Serpentine South Gallery

Presenting Doig’s paintings with sound for the first time, the exhibition will highlight the significance of other disciplines to the artist’s practice, including music and film, alongside the importance of sites of communal gathering and creative exchange.

Doig has amassed a substantial vinyl archive and in-depth knowledge of musical genres over the course of several decades. For House of Music, Doig will bring his archive to life through a sculptural installation of rare, restored analogue speakers. During the exhibition, Doig will invite a roster of musicians and other music enthusiasts to animate this ‘high fidelity’ equipment with their own selection of vinyl through a series of residencies.

Envisaged as a multi-sensory environment, Doig will present new and recent paintings alongside the sound installation, inviting visitors to pause and linger as they listen, transforming the gallery into a place of contemplation, reflection, and conversation.

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Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures

7 October 2025 –  11 January 2026.

Hayward Gallery

A landmark exhibition from the pioneering London-based artists. Set to be their most extensive exhibition to date, this presentation will focus on their new pictures from the start of the millennium as well as pictures that have never been seen in the UK, inviting audiences to embark on a multifaceted exploration of the human experience.

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Nigerian Modernism 

8 Oct 2025 – Spring 2026

Tate Modern

The show will celebrate the artists who revolutionised modern art in Nigeria before and after national independence in 1960, combining African and European traditions to create new, multidisciplinary forms across painting, sculpture, textile, literature and poetry.

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Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World

9 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

National Portrait Gallery

Renowned as a fashion illustrator, Oscar-winning costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Cecil Beaton – ‘The King of Vogue’ – was an extraordinary force in the 20th-century British and American creative scenes. Elevating fashion and portrait photography into an art form, his era-defining photographs captured beauty, glamour, and star power in the interwar and early post-war eras. No previous exhibition has exclusively spotlighted his ground-breaking fashion work, a pivotal aspect of his career that laid the foundation for his later successes. With this in mind, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World will showcase Beaton at his most triumphant – from the Jazz Age and the Bright Young Things, to the high fashion brilliance of the Fifties and the glittering, Oscar-winning success of My Fair Lady. In between, he endured the hardship of war as a photographer of the home front and of the Western Desert campaign and beyond. From 1939, as a royal photographer, by appointment to the House of Windsor, he propelled the monarchy into the modern age.

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Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life

The Courtauld Gallery

10 October 2025 – 18 January 2026

Wayne Thiebaud (1920-2021) is now regarded as one of the greatest and most original American artists of the 20th century. Over the course of his long life, working mainly in Sacramento, California, Thiebaud developed a unique style of painting to express his vision of modern American subjects.

This exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery will be the first ever museum show of his work in the UK. It will present Thiebaud’s remarkable, vibrant, and lushly painted still lifes of quintessentially post-war American subjects, from diner food and deli counters to gumball dispensers and pinball machines. These are the paintings that established Thiebaud’s name in the USA in the early 1960s.

Thiebaud considered the everyday objects of American life to be a vital subject for contemporary art, and he saw his work as continuing the radical legacy of earlier still-life paintings by Chardin, Manet, Cézanne and others. Thiebaud believed in the importance of commonplace objects that might otherwise be overlooked or considered kitsch. His work turns hot dogs, lemon meringue pies and glossy cream cakes into the stuff of profound modern painting.

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Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles

William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow

18 October 2025 – 21 June 2026

This autumn, William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow will present Women in Print: 150 Years of Liberty Textiles. Conceived in partnership with Liberty Fabrics on the occasion of the design house’s 150th anniversary, this major exhibition will highlight the pivotal role and contributions of women textile designers. Tracing the rich history of Liberty fabrics, the exhibition will survey the evolving influence and status of women in textiles over the past 150 years. Women in Print will bring together iconic patterns by designers such as Althea McNish, Collier Campbell, and Lucienne Day, alongside previously overlooked names, celebrating how women have been — and continue to be — at the heart of Liberty’s creative innovations and ongoing relevance today. It will feature over 100 works, spanning garments, fabric, original designs, film and historic photographs.

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A Story of South Asain Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle

24 October 2025 – 25 January 2026

Royal Academy of Arts

This exhibition will present an important network of South Asian artists working alongside the Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949-2015). Featuring drawings, paintings and sculptures by Mukherjee’s peers and teachers, including her parents Benode Behari Mukherjee and Leela Mukherjee who taught at the influential Bhavana art school in Santiniketan; as well as pioneers of modernist art in India such as KG Subramanyan; and prominent artists such as Nilima Sheikh and Jagdish Swamitnathan, the exhibition will also include works from Mukherjee’s prolific 40-year career. Mukherjee’s intricate artworks fuse abstraction with the human form, drawing influence from nature, South Asian traditions of architecture and craft, as well as international modernist art and design.

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Turner & Constable

27 Nov 2025 – 12 Apr 2026

Tate Britain

Turner & Constable will bring together Britain’s most famous artistic rivals, marking the 250th anniversary of their births. These two great artists vied for success through very different but equally bold approaches, transforming landscape painting in the process. This exhibition will be an unmissable chance to directly compare their spectacular works and see how their rivalry changed the course of British art.

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Tags

Barbican Art Gallery, London Art Exhibitions Autumn 2025, National Gallery, Royal Academy Of Arts, Serpentine Galleries, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Courtauld Gallery, V&A