July brings a variety of must-see London art exhibitions across the city. The warmer summer weather and longer evenings are a perfect invitation to peruse London’s art scene. Explore the capsule-like form of the Serpentine Pavilion for 2025, or feast your eyes on Kathleen Ryan’s large-scale ‘mouldy’ food at Gagosian. From group shows to major career retrospectives, plan your next visit with our frequently updated guide to the month’s best offerings.
Heading across the pond? Here are the best New York art exhibitions to see this month.
London art exhibitions: what to see in July 2025
Amanda Moström ‘Douglas’
Rose Easton until 28 June
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
There are only a few days left to see artist Amanda Moström’s new exhibition Douglas. This is her second solo show at the gallery, and showcases new multimedia work exploring the movement of energy, specifically through the body and mind. The works are rooted in eroticism with a humorous touch, inviting visitors to reflect and reconnect to touch, breath and movement.
‘A Capsule in Time’ by Marina Tabassum
Serpentine Pavilion, Serpentine South until 26 October 2025
(Image credit: © Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA), Photo Iwan Baan, Courtesy: Serpentine)
Architect Marina Tabassum designs the Serpentine Pavillion for 2025. Located along the north-south axis of the park, the pavilion features an elongated capsule-like form, with a central court. Tabassum took inspiration from park outings, summer, and green gardens and foliage which filters soft daylight. The design is rooted in her architectural language, something that is contemporary, while also nodding to a specific place, culture and history.
Kathleen Ryan ‘Roman Meal’
Gagosian Davies Street until 15 August
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
‘Roman Meal’ is Ryan’s solo debut at the galley. Here, she explores the ideas around luxury and repulsion, touching on the ruins of capitalism in America where natural beauty turns to decay. This exhibition features two large-scale sculptures, ‘Fender Bender’ and ‘Sliced Bread’, which feature elements of decomposition and mould, both grotesque yet beautiful.
‘It’s A Love Thing: 30 Years of LGBTQIA+ Health Advocacy’
Studio Voltaire until 17 August 2025
(Image credit: Photograph: Suzanne Roden. © North London Line Lesbian and Gay Youth Project. Courtesy of Spectre CIC)
The 1990s, in particular, was a crucial time for the LGBTQIA+ community in Britain, with the reverberations from inequality echoing through sexual, mental, physical and social wellbeing. In response, a host of grassroots movements and campaigns sprang up around the country, in a bid for safer sex and taking pride in identity. Studio Voltaire looks at the period from 1987 to 2015, presenting archival sexual healthcare posters in partnership with London-based sexual healthcare and wellbeing organisation Spectre CIC.
Writer Hannah Silver
Read the full review here
Victoria Miro: 40 Years
Victoria Miro until 1 August
(Image credit: Courtesy of artist and gallery)
To mark the gallery’s 40th anniversary, Miro is hosting an exhibition in her Hoxton space, which, since 2006, has also included an adjoining viewing gallery and waterside sculpture garden. It will showcase work from the gallery’s roster of artists, including Sarah Sze, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Conrad Shawcross, Do Ho Suh and Paula Rego, encompassing a mixture of the new and the historic, from María Berrío’s dreamlike watercolours on linen to Celia Paul’s ghostlike portraits.
Writer Hannah Silver
Read the full story here
Gaaaaaasp
The Perimeter until 25 July
(Image credit: Courtesy of artist)
At The Perimeter, artist Alexandra Metcalf creates an unsettling Victorian world, turning two constructed spaces into a kind of medical facility. We recognise it as such, but the closer we look, the more slippery and strange these spaces become. The waiting room has an observation window looking into a room filled with spotlit sculptures constructed from long wooden walking sticks – a recurring motif in Metcalf’s practice. At their sides, they cradle stained glass orbs depicting silhouettes of trees which appear, in the shadows on the wall behind, cell-like, invoking bodily matter, something growing or spreading, a disease or a life-form.
Writer Millie Walton
Read the full review here
Paul Thek: Seized by Joy
Thomas Dane Gallery until 2 August
(Image credit: Photo: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation)
The sun is beating down outside the window – it’s the kind of heat to bring out shades. It opens out into an overgrown garden where the undergrowth competes for space in hasty brushstrokes of strong emerald and pale purple. Further away from this chaos, the taller trees calmly blend into the white summer sky in blotches of lime green. Beyond waxy meat-filled Brillo boxes, the artist Paul Thek kept returning to looking at the world through windows and illustrate them in quick paintings – this was one he painted the year before he passed away from AIDS. Currently, it hangs in Thomas Dane Gallery in London, as part of an extensive exhibition of his paintings curated by the critic, writer and artist Kenny Schacter with the designer Jonathan Anderson.
Writer Upasana Das
Read the full review here
‘Once Upon a Time in London’
Saatchi Yates until 17 August 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of artist)
What is London art to you? Is it the haunted faces from Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach, ripped from a city at war? Or perhaps a punkish spirit reigns, in Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets and Slawn’s bold streaks of colour and Yinka Shonibare’s playful motif? Or perhaps it’s all of them, in which case Saatchi Yates’ celebration of London is calling your name. Beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War, a new exhibition, ‘Once Upon a Time in London’, gathers established and emerging artists in an eclectic consideration of London’s impact on the cultural landscape.
Writer Hannah Silver
Read the full story here
Megan Rooney, ‘Yellow Yellow Blue’
Thaddaeus Ropac London until 2 August 2025
(Image credit: © Megan Rooney. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul. Photo: Eva Herzog)
The experience of looking at Megan Rooney’s work is full of surprises. Immediately striking is the size – Rooney paints freely in the ‘wingspan’ format, where she paints as far as her arm can reach – and in the glorious gradients of colours. Rooney, who refers to each group of work as a ‘family’, has explored the territory between yellow and blue, stepping into the rich prism of green, for her new body of work at Thaddaeus Ropac London.
Writer Hannah Silver
Read the full review here
‘Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting’
National Portrait Gallery until 7 September 2025
(Image credit: © Jenny Saville, courtesy Gagosian)
The first impression of entering Jenny Saville’s major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery in London is one of raw, ample flesh. Viscerally rendered, luscious expanses of flesh create a vulnerable yet powerful aura around Saville’s women, who fill her vast canvases, unabashedly and gloriously taking up space.
Writer Hannah Silver
Read the full review here
‘Abstract Erotic’
The Courtauld until 14 September 2025
(Image credit: © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2025. Photo: Christopher Burke.)
Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, and Eva Hesse delve into art’s ‘uckiness’ at The Courtauld. This new sees artists experiment with the grotesque. For all the titillating promise of its title, ‘Abstract Erotic’ is not an exhibition explicitly about sexuality. Hesse famously spoke of ‘uckiness’ in her art, and these pieces deliver it in spades. If they verge on the grotesque, even the repellant, that’s precisely the point. Some of the latex here has weathered like rotting flesh. But as Mignon Nixon explains in her accompanying essay, Bourgeois’ Portrait (1963) – a congealed mass of burgundy latex lumps, ‘like some scabrous apron or placental lining’ – shows the medium’s capacity for transformation.
Writer Katie Tobin
Read the full review here
Hypha Studios 100th exhibition
Hypha Gallery Marble Arch until 19 July
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
UK arts charity Hypha Studios opens the 100th exhibition it has facilitated since achieving charity status in 2021. The organisation gives high-street and commercial space to artists and curators free of charge, to mount exhibitions and use as studios. Curators Alex Xiaonan Guo and Serena Xinran Gao were awarded Hypha Studios’ latest space in London’s Marble Arch, where they will present the group exhibition ‘1,2,3, Alt!’, a site-responsive presentation transforming the former café into ‘a liminal space oscillating between the present and speculative futures’. Further exhibitions will be led by Miranda Pissarides (30 May – 21 June) and John Angel Rodriguez (27 June – 19 July).
Yoshitomo Nara
Hayward Gallery until 31 August
(Image credit: Courtesy of Yoshitomo Nara)
Japanese artist Yoshimoto Nara presents his first UK solo exhibition at Hayward Gallery. The travelling exhibiton was seen for the first time at Guggenheim Bliboa ( see the full review here). The retrospective looks at four decades of the artist’s work. Nara’s life experiences are intrinsically linked to his work, which takes the form of child-like figures and animals with large heads and wide eyes. Although primarily a painter, he also works with a variety of materials across collage, sculpture, drawing, and installation to explore ideas of home, isolation, nature, peace, resistance and freedom.
Jennifer Bartlett ‘In the House’
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery until 5 July 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
The second in a trilogy of exhibitions exploring the work of American artist Jennifer Bartlett (1941-2022) marks the first significant exhibition in London since her solo show at Tate in 1982. ‘In the House’ explores her central motifs within her practice. She worked with paint on square steel plates. The unique combination allowed for intriguing compositions which are intimate and abstract.
Ugo Rondinone ‘the rainbow body’
Sadie Coles HQ until 2 August 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
‘The rainbow is a bridge between everyone and everything,’ says Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone on his latest exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ. ‘the rainbow body’ features sculptures with a figurative form, set within a fluorescent context. The gallery space has been installed with rainbow shades that mirror the colour of the sculptures, creating a visually intriguing dynamic between the installation and the layout of the space, and nodding to the larger theme of suspended time.
Do Ho Suh ‘Walk the House’
Tate Modern until 19 October 2025
(Image credit: © Do Ho Suh)
Do Ho Suh’s exhibition, ‘Walk the House’ at Tate Modern, sees the South Korean artist recreate his homes from Seoul, New York, London and Berlin. Upon entering the exhibition the visitor is confronted with a closed door. But it is not one that blocks passage into the exhibition, or stops you immediately reading the range of works filling the wide open Blavatnik Building gallery. The door is part of the meticulously sewn and constructed Nest/s (2024), a series of 1:1 reproductions of thresholds of homes the South Korean artist has lived in
Read the full review here
Writer Will Jennings
Michaela Yearwood-Dan ‘No Time for Despair’
Hauser & Wirth London until 2 August 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth)
The exhibition title, ‘No Time for Despair’ is taken from a 2015 Toni Morrison essay, in which the novelist and editor looks back to a conversation she had with a friend in 2004, the year George W Bush Jr was re-elected into office. In the year of Trump’s re-election and worldwide conflict, it is a prescient nod. For artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan it is a complicated emotional response that comes through in the works themselves. Large-scale and abstract, they are ultimately joyful in their bright colours, swirling patterns and embrace of non-traditional materials, such as glitter, sequins, crystal and gold leaf. Viewed up close, the paintings appear alive and gloriously textural, replete with thickly drawn waves of paint that make bold foils for glistening materials and snippets of song lyrics, poetry or her own writings, which undulate over the works.
Read the full review here
Writer Hannah Silver
In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats
Barbican until 3 August
(Image credit: Courtesy of Barbican)
‘In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats’ is a new immersive virtual reality experience that, with the aid of headphones, goggles and haptic vests, taking users, in groups of four, back to the future. To a time when 1000s of British youngsters were congregating weekly in fields, warehouses and industrial estates to dance till dawn to repetitive beats – a time when these ‘illegal Acid House parties’, and the authorities’ attempts to curb them, were the lead item on the Nine O’Clock News.
Read the full review here
Writer: Craig McLean
Ed Atkins
Tate Britain until 25 August 2025
(Image credit: © Ed Atkins Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery)
In Ed Atkins’ new London exhibition, the artist prods at the limits of existence through digital and physical works, including a film starring Toby Jones. ‘It’s big, oppressive and slightly uncomfortable,’ Atkins says of the show, which surveys 15 years. Alongside the large-screen videos are drawings and text pieces, as well as a pair of eerie, undulating beds. One blood-red drawing features the artist’s head attached to a spider’s body.
Read the full review here
Writer Emily Steer
Giuseppe Penone: Thoughts in the Roots
Serpentine South Gallery until 7 September 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
Italian artist Giuseppe Penone’s latest exhibition is a retrospective looking at the expansive body of work he has created from 1969 to the present. ‘Thoughts in the Roots’ looks at his lifelong exploration of the relationship between humans and nature. The artist is known for his use of wood, iron, wax and terracotta which helps to create a synergy between artistic and natural process. Through a series of sculptures and installations, visitors can explore the way Penone uncovers nature’s intricate structures.
Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha
The Barbican until 10 August 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha is known for her inventive sculptures, drawings, and photographs that reinvent the figure and its expressive possibilities. At The Barbican, her exhibition titled ‘Nothing is Behind Us’, is Bhabha’s first at a London public institution. The exhibition includes four sculptures on show in Europe for the first time. Bhabha’s works are shown alongside iconic pieces by Giacometti such as Walking Woman I (1932) and Walking Man I (1960). This marks the first in a year-long partnership, titled Encounters: Giacometti, between the Barbican and Fondation Giacometti in Paris, which pairs works by Giacometti with those of contemporary sculptors.
www.barbican.org.uk
1880 THAT: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader
Wellcome Collection until 16 November 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of the artist and gallery)
At the Wellcome Collection creative duo Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader have collaborated on their latest exhibition ‘1880 THAT’ which includes film, installation and drawings to explore the communication between signed and spoken languages, and challenge a medical perspective of deafness as something to be cured. The brick motif is a recurring theme in the exhibition symbolising the building blocks of language, as well as the act of throwing bricks as a gesture of protest. The exhibition is a mix of witty design, humour and word play to uncover the complexities of meaning and (mis)understanding.
Leigh Bowery!
Tate Modern until 31 August 2025
(Image credit: Courtesy of Michael Hoppen Gallery)
Tate Modern celebrates the life and career of artist Leigh Bowery. Never limited to convention, Bowery adapted to many roles from artist to performer, model to fashion designer. He saw himself as the canvas and reimagined clothes and makeup as tools for sculpture, using his body as a shapeshifting tool to challenge sexuality and gender. The exhibition is a chance to see his different ‘looks’, and many collaborations.
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