Exhibitions in London

Saatchi Gallery · Free · Past

A group show of over 20 artists exploring how glass, metal, textiles and found objects become active participants in artworks, celebrating texture, weight and surface.

Saatchi Gallery · Free · Past

Eleven contemporary artists draw on medieval traditions to examine spiritual uncertainty and political upheaval, reflecting a cultural shift away from the digital and back to the handmade.

Saatchi Gallery · Free · Past

The 167th edition of the world's longest-running photography exhibition, showing 113 prints by 48 photographers on themes of environment, identity, conflict and memory.

Barbican Centre · Free · Past

Interactive public art installation by Finnish artist-designer Päivi Raivio: modular plywood furniture visitors can rearrange to sit, gather, move and play, drawing on Barbican architectural details.

Tower of London · Free · Past

A family experience bringing extraordinary creatures to life through puppetry, music and dance across the Tower.

Saatchi Gallery · Past

New works by contemporary artists previously shown in the 2025 Flowers exhibition, celebrating the beauty and significance of flowers.

Hayward Gallery · Free · Past

The Indian artist's first UK solo show: a film and fire-and-ash paintings on stubble-burning and the link between climate change and agricultural crisis.

Saatchi Gallery · Past

The annual RHS exhibition returns for a sixth year, presenting botanical art and photography from around the world, from wildflowers to fungi, across three galleries.

National Maritime Museum · Past

Over 100 of the world's best space photographs - galaxies, auroras, the Moon and more - shown on glowing lightboxes, from the 17th annual competition.

Tower of London · Free · Past

Queen Anne Boleyn returns to the Tower this summer with two costumed courtiers, meeting visitors on the South Lawn as preparations for her coronation get underway.

Design Museum · Past

The first retrospective of filmmaker Wes Anderson, with over 700 storyboards, sketches, puppets, costumes and props spanning three decades of his films.

National Gallery · Past

The first major UK monographic exhibition devoted to Francisco de Zurbarán, master of the Spanish Golden Age, with visions from Baroque Seville.

Tate Modern · Free · Past

An Infinities Commission installation in the East Tank: handmade sculptures of wood, wire and cardboard, with film and mbira-based sound design, exploring Zimbabwean mythology and ancestral resilience.

Tate Britain · Past

British-Jamaican painter Hurvin Anderson's first major solo show: over 80 colour-drenched landscapes and interiors exploring memory, place and belonging.

Serpentine Gallery · Free · Past

In his first Serpentine exhibition, David Hockney invites viewers to slow down and notice the extraordinary in the everyday, including the 90-metre frieze A Year in Normandy.

Royal Academy of Arts · Past

The 258th annual open-submission show fills the Main Galleries with works in every medium by famous names and unknowns alike, coordinated by Ryan Gander.

British Museum · Free · Past

A masterpiece of early Chinese figure painting, dating from the fifth to seventh century AD, displayed annually for a limited period in Room 91a with free timed-entry booking.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

A participatory exhibition exploring the history of rope making in East London, with hands-on activities in rope making, spinning and knot tying.

Royal Academy of Arts · Free · Past

A free exhibition of work by young artists aged 5 to 19 from across the UK, selected from open submissions and shown in the Weston Studio.

Tate Modern · Past

A major survey of four decades of Tracey Emin's work across painting, video, textiles, neons, sculpture and installation, with works never shown before.

Courtauld Gallery · Past

Masterpieces from Birmingham's Barber Institute, including works by Hals, Rubens, Turner, Rossetti and Degas, on extended loan during its refurbishment.

National Gallery · Free · Past

Children's artworks from across the UK inspired by Canaletto's 'A Regatta on the Grand Canal'. Free to all visitors.

Science Museum · Free · Past

Explore how science could transform the way we grow, cook and eat, from a 3,500-year-old loaf to lab-grown meat, across 100+ objects in this family-friendly exhibition.

RAF Museum · Free · Past

Fifty key works by 20th-century British and European artists, marking the museum's 50th anniversary and exploring flight, conflict and RAF operations through art.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

An eight-week, free summer festival across East London with exhibitions, installations, performances, workshops and residencies celebrating the region's creative communities.

Serpentine Gallery · Free · Past

Cecily Brown presents new paintings inspired by Serpentine's location in Kensington Gardens, a site of personal significance to the artist.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

A free communal space with three interactive displays: the Migration Museum's story-sharing installation, a Material Crimes podcast listening station, and a special edition of Whitechapel Radio Station.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

A daily screening of films spanning five decades by artist John Smith, whose genre-defying work challenges the line between documentary, fiction and abstraction, drawing on East London locations and personal experience.

Barbican Centre · Past

Over 300 works tracing Pan-Africanism's influence on art and culture from the 1920s to today, featuring artists including Chris Ofili, Marlene Dumas and Claudette Johnson.

Courtauld Gallery · Past

The first exhibition exploring Barbara Hepworth's pioneering use of colour, uniting around 20 sculptures and 30 drawings spanning her career.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

Hour-long film blocks showcasing East London communities, drawn from Four Corners, the London Community Video Archive and OITIJ-JO Collective, spanning radical histories, community arts legacies and contemporary womxnhood.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

Argentinian artist Gabriel Chaile's site-specific installation of adobe sculptures holds objects sourced from the East End, evoking an archaeological dig into local memory and identity.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

An interactive installation centred on the Xeedho, a climate-threatened Somali wedding basket, exploring knots as bonds and how memory passes among nomadic women.

Serpentine Gallery · Free · Past

Serpentine's Education Space becomes an open archive of the gallery's work at the intersection of art and advanced technologies — audio recordings, photographs, publications and digital commissions exploring blockchain, AI and game engines.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

Named after the Bangla word for storm, this seven-artist show explores upheaval and renewal through the lens of Begum Rokeya's feminist sci-fi vision.

Whitechapel Gallery · Free · Past

Twelve local, national and international artists respond to East London's historic and cultural identity across painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, organised around migration, city life, and food and heritage.

Barbican Centre · Past

Speculative architect Liam Young's immersive exhibition of films, soundscapes, costumes and installations imagining hopeful future worlds shaped by technology and climate.

National Portrait Gallery · Past

Celebrating the Hollywood icon's 100th birthday through portraits by the greatest photographers and artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Saatchi Gallery · Past

A major exhibition exploring how the sun and moon have inspired creativity and belief across cultures and history, with artworks, monumental sculptures and immersive installations.

The Photographers' Gallery · Free · Past

Luminous handcrafted photogravure prints on washi paper exploring memory, grief and the photographer's relationship with her sister through snowy rural Japan.

Courtauld Gallery · Past

Prints by Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach and Paula Rego from Studio Prints, the legendary London printmaking workshop founded in 1968 by Dorothea Wight.

Serpentine Gallery · Past

A public art mural by David Hockney presented in Serpentine North Garden, shown alongside his Serpentine North exhibition. Free.

Sir John Soane's Museum · Free · Past

A retrospective of the surreal, playful work of 2025 Soane Medal winner Madelon Vriesendorp, with over 50 pieces including her psychoanalytic boardgame, the Mind Game.

National Gallery · Free · Past

The first ever UK exhibition of paintings by Austrian 19th-century artist Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, focusing on his landscapes. Free to all visitors.

Design Museum · Free · Past

Free display of four UK research projects showing how design-led innovation tackles housing, healthcare and resources for a sustainable green transition.

British Museum · Free · Past

Around 120 rare drawings from the 15th and 16th century Low Countries, including Bruegel and van der Weyden, tracing how drawing became an art in its own right.

Design Museum · Free · Past

Free display of new work by the 2025/26 Design Researchers in Residence, responding to the theme of 'mineral'.

National Gallery · Free · Past

Two celebrated paintings from La Grenouillère, made by Monet and Renoir working side by side in 1869, reunited for the first time in nearly twenty years. Free to all visitors.

Victoria and Albert Museum · Free · Past

A free display celebrating the innovative techniques and bold visions of 25 women printmakers working from 1900 to the present day.

Tate Britain · Past

The first major European retrospective in 30 years of the rule-breaking American painter, with celebrated and rarely seen works from his teens to his late self-portraits.

The Photographers' Gallery · Past

Landmark survey of 27 groundbreaking Japanese women photographers from the 1950s to today, with over 200 photographs, videos, installations and rare photobooks.

Design Museum · Past

The first UK retrospective of Japanese creative director NIGO, with over 700 objects spanning fashion, ceramics and vintage Americana from his 30-year career.

British Museum · Free · Past

Marking the 250th anniversary of Constable's birth, this display in Room 90a presents drawings, sketches and mezzotints from his late career, drawn largely from an 1888 donation by his daughter Isabel — showing his lifelong engagement with the landscapes of rural England.

Courtauld Gallery · Past

Paul Laib's evocative early-1930s photographs of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson's shared Hampstead studio at 7 The Mall.

Dulwich Picture Gallery · Past

Urban America through 34 photographers, from Stieglitz and Lange to Arbus and Winogrand, charting the rise of street photography from 1907 to 2012.

National Portrait Gallery · Free · Past

Free annual exhibition celebrating the very best in contemporary portraiture painting, with works selected from this year's open competition.

Jewish Museum London · Free · Past

A display at Bradford Reform Synagogue celebrating Yiddish Theatre in London's East End through two of its stars, Clara Meisels and Anna Tzelniker.

Jewish Museum London · Past

Photographic portraits and personal stories celebrating LGBTQ+ Jewish life, developed by Jewish Museum London and shown at Manchester Jewish Museum.

RAF Museum · Free · Past

Veteran artist David Tovey and LGBT+ military communities create a steel prison-cell installation and soundscape confronting the Armed Forces 'gay ban'.

Hayward Gallery · Past

One of the most influential artists of our time returns to the Hayward, filling the entire building with awe-inspiring sculptures, paintings and immersive installations.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

A sound-system-shaped sculpture of photographs taken across east London, Plymouth and Peterborough, tracing Black British music as connective tissue through which communities gather, remember and move together.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

A commissioned work developed through conversations between artist Tania Bruguera and east London youth, presented as a stained-glass statement of shared principles about what it means for a museum to serve its community.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

Documents 80 businesses relocated from the Lea Valley to make way for the 2012 Olympic Games. Photographers Marion Davies and Debra Rapp systematically recorded these spaces between 2005-2007, preserving a record of East London's industrial heritage before its erasure.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

A new commission for V&A East's New Work programme by Justinien Tribillon, exploring the theme Making East London.

Jewish Museum London · Free · Past

Room Two of the Two Rooms space at JW3 tells the story of the German-Jewish family behind J. Lyons, from Corner Houses and Wimpy to the pioneering LEO computer.

Jewish Museum London · Free · Past

Room One of the museum's new Two Rooms space at JW3: a collection display tracing Jewish life in Britain from the 1656 readmission to today, framed by the Tree of Life.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

A co-curated display exploring photographer Tom Hunter's 40+ year relationship with east London through selections from the V&A's collections and his personal archive, examining the area as a place of radical thinking and resilience.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

Laura Wilson's commissioned sculptures honour East London's workers and makers through a poem inscribed into three pieces, activated with the call "Heads!" and raised/lowered by a fly system echoing dock and theatre shift patterns.

V&A East Museum · Free · Past

The first edition of V&A East's twice-yearly New Work programme, inviting artists to make site-specific works responding to the making of east London.

Royal Academy of Arts

The first major survey in over 50 years of the Victorian painter, who created intricate fairy worlds, including The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke, from within an asylum.

Wallace Collection · Free

A free display on how Hertford House became a stage for Anglo-Soviet cultural diplomacy in wartime Britain, hosting major 1942 exhibitions to aid Russia.

Serpentine Gallery · Free

A 10-metre kinetic sculpture of 4,000 suspended yellow PVC tubes in Kensington Gardens, inviting visitors to walk through and activate the work with their movement.

Dulwich Picture Gallery · Free

A display exploring theatre portraits in the Gallery's Collection — costume, performance, and queerness and gender identity on and off stage — pairing historic works with contemporary artists.

Serpentine Gallery · Free

'a serpentine', the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion by Mexico City studio LANZA atelier, is a brick structure based on the English serpentine (crinkle-crankle) wall.

Horniman Museum · Free

Artwork by Year 9 students from Conisborough College, made with a Goldsmiths graduate, celebrating the museum's 125th anniversary and the Gardens' biodiversity.

Imperial War Museum · Free

As bombs fell on 1940s London, artists responded. Over 45 paintings and drawings, with photographs, film and oral histories, capture a city both familiar and strange.

Museum of Youth Culture · Free

Real confessions of what people lied to their parents about as teenagers, with space to add your own, in the Youth Club Gallery.

Tate Britain · Free

British-Bengali artist Mohammed Z Rahman presents a two-act display exploring home, love and connection through paintings inspired by personal stories and memories, shown alongside works from the Tate collection.

Victoria and Albert Museum

A behind-the-scenes look at Aardman's stop-motion animation, revisiting Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and Morph. At Young V&A.

Victoria and Albert Museum

The UK's first exhibition on Elsa Schiaparelli, tracing the surrealist designer's influence from the 1920s to today and the house's revival under Daniel Roseberry.

Wallace Collection

A major retrospective of over 50 of Sir Winston Churchill's paintings, from wartime scenes and Mediterranean landscapes to intimate views of his home at Chartwell.

Wellcome Collection · Free

Over 150 artworks and objects explore how experiences of ageing across all life stages are shaped by environment, culture and society, and what greater longevity means.

British Museum · Free

Marking 250 years since the Declaration of Independence, this Room 3 display uncovers the Indigenous and global histories behind the founding of the United States through treaties, diplomatic gifts and resistance.

Natural History Museum

Dive back in time to meet the fiercest marine reptiles ever to swim the oceans, from giant ichthyosaurs to plesiosaurs, in this immersive deep-sea exhibition.

Tate Modern

Over 30 iconic works by Frida Kahlo alongside contemporary pieces, exploring her rise into a global cultural and commercial phenomenon.

Natural History Museum · Free

A free display on the life of Sir Richard Owen, the Victorian zoologist and palaeontologist whose vision led to the creation of the Natural History Museum, featuring previously unseen artworks, personal publications, and archival photographs.

V&A East Museum

125 years of Black music-making in Britain. An immersive audio experience spanning four continents, telling a story of excellence, struggle, resilience and joy.

Victoria and Albert Museum

A landmark V&A collaboration with Brisbane's QAGOMA, showcasing over 40 contemporary artists and First Nations perspectives from across Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

Victoria and Albert Museum

An immersive sound exhibition spanning 125 years of Black music-making in Britain, with over 120 tracks tracing excellence, struggle, resilience and joy.

Tate Britain · Free

British-French-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira creates a major site-specific installation for the Duveen Galleries, exploring memory, migration and displacement through photography, performance, video and installation.

Tate Modern

Newly remastered films, early paintings and late sculptures by the Cuban-American artist, including her Silueta series, many never seen in the UK.

Royal Academy of Arts · Free

Diploma Works and treasures from the RA Collection spanning over 300 years, shown free in the historic John Madejski Fine Rooms while the main Collections Gallery is expanded. Closed on select dates (21 Jul, 11 Aug, 4 Sep, 2 Oct, 6 Nov, 4 Dec 2026).

London Museum · Free

A rotating display in the Reflections Room featuring British Romani artists Corrina Eastwood, Delaine Le Bas and Dan Turner, celebrating the livelihoods, creativity and craft of Romani communities alongside a historical timeline from 500 CE to 2022.

Wellcome Collection · Free

Multidisciplinary artworks by Rudy Loewe reimagine mental healthcare, centring the lived experience of Black people whose UK care is shaped by racist discrimination.

Wellcome Collection · Free

The first museum show of Audrey Amiss (1933-2013): drawings, paintings and other works through which she spoke out against harmful treatment within the mental health system.

Horniman Museum · Free

Award-winning British wildlife photography spanning animal behaviour, botanical subjects, urban wildlife and marine life, with captions giving context for each image.

Imperial War Museum · Free

The UK's first exhibition on how war has shaped children's lives from 1914 to today, told through personal objects, immersive set pieces and much-loved children's books.

Tate Modern · Free

A collection display bringing together works by artists including Abbas Akhavan, Abel Rodríguez and Zheng Bo, exploring the connection between environmental and social justice.

Imperial War Museum

A selection of Dame Vera Lynn's personal objects, including letters, correspondence and uniform items from her recently acquired Second World War archive, on display for 12 months near the entrance to the Second World War Galleries.

London Transport Museum

Over 100 original London Transport posters mark the centenary of art deco, with work by design greats like McKnight Kauffer and Jean Dupas, plus Charles Holden's Tube architecture.

Tate Modern

An immersive retrospective of seven decades of kinetic and interactive works, with light sculptures and geometric paintings that turn viewers into participants.

Victoria and Albert Museum · Free

A free display drawn from the V&A's US photography collection, revealing the breadth of the country's photographic traditions from early prints to contemporary work.

Wellcome Collection · Free

A display exploring HIV and AIDS through stories of protest and care, from the UK's 1980s-90s epidemic to global activism today, via photography, film and archives.

The Photographers' Gallery · Free

A free outdoor exhibition of Mika Ninagawa's vibrant, dream-like photographs of blooming flowers and goldfish that dissolve the boundary between real and imagined.