The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for June 2025

Times

2 days ago

Below is a round-up of the best art our critics have seen in recent months across the UK. From Renaissance chalk sketches to rotting apples, miniatures and Picasso prints, it's a varied list. Which exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments.
Resistance — Steve McQueen leads us on a voyage of discovery
Turner Contemporary, Margate
From the militant suffrage movement in 1903 to the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003, when it matters, we march. This Turner Contemporary exhibition, Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, curated by the artist and film director Steve McQueen, is a fascinating, deeply researched, if low-key look at a century of protest in Britain through photography. To Jun 1, turnercontemporary.org
ND
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Edvard Munch Portraits — the Scream painter shows his social side
National Portrait Gallery, London
Edvard Munch's forensic powers are on full display in the first British exhibition to focus solely on his portraits. Known for his 'subject' paintings, which cast friends and family as the dramatis personae in tableaux that communicate a universal emotion (The Scream being the most famous), he was also a prolific portraitist. To Jun 15, npg.org.uk
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Anselm Kiefer: Early Works — an artist under the shadow of the Nazis
Ashmolean, Oxford
It's one hell of a moment for an exhibition of the early works of Anselm Kiefer. It was probably conceived as celebratory — the German artist's 80th birthday lands on March 8; this show at the Ashmolean opens just before an unprecedented presentation across two Amsterdam museums, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk. But with the rise of the AfD in Germany, and a shift to the right across Europe, a return to these works, created between 1969 and 1982, has suddenly become urgent. To Jun 15, ashmolean.org
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COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON
Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 — an unmissable National Gallery hit
National Gallery
The show focuses on four painters — Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — to reveal them as pioneers, and uses textiles and finely wrought items such as carved ivories and richly decorated reliquaries to show how these four artists were nurtured by this European centre for trade. It is a stunner.
London, to Jun 22, nationalgallery.org.uk
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Andy Warhol: Portrait of America — depicting a dark side to the USA
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
This exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, put together from the Artist Rooms collection, goes back to basics in an elegant primer showing how Andy Warhol — uniquely and incisively — held up a mirror to postwar consumerist America. It takes a chronological, rather than thematic, approach. Each room represents a decade, from his days as a commercial artist in the 1950s to the 1980s (he died in 1987). To Jun 29, mkgallery.org
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Victor Hugo's The Cheerful Castle, 1847, on show at the Royal Academy
PARIS MUSÉES/MAISONS DE VICTOR HUGO PARIS-GUERNESEY
Astonishing Things: Drawings of Victor Hugo — strange and marvellous
Royal Academy, London
Though many of us won't actually have read either of the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo's most famous novels (Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), there's a chance that we've all seen at least one of them, either on film or on stage. Very few will be familiar with the body of work now on display — his strange and marvellous drawings. To Jun 29, royalacademy.org.uk
ND
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Bob Dylan — the musician is a good painter
Halcyon Gallery, London
There will be people who pooh-pooh yet another exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan as just another rock star's dabblings. But over the past 20 years (he started exhibiting in 2007 at the Chemnitz art museum in Germany) he has developed into a rather good, interesting painter. To Jul 6, halcyongallery.com
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Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a fascinating homage to an Eighties icon
Tate Modern, London
Through artworks by his friends and peers (including portraits by Lucian Freud), garments (or 'Looks') from his archive, films, postcards, sketches, letters, magazines and what feels like hundreds of photographs, we follow the journey of a suburban Melbourne lad. It's a story that runs from his arrival in London in 1980, fresh out of fashion college, through his entry to the scene, his impact on clubland, his work with the choreographer Michael Clark and his shift into performance. To Aug 31, tate.org.uk
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Hiroshige — an entrancing trip to 19th-century Japan
British Museum, London
Utagawa Hiroshige is among the very most popular — not to mention prolific — artists in Japan. Yet to many of us he may be familiar only through the work of his most famous fan in the West. Vincent van Gogh was a passionate admirer, which is why some of the images that now go on display at the British Museum may start ringing bells. To Sep 7, britishmuseum.org
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Giuseppe Penone — breathe in the scent of nature
Serpentine Gallery, London
The idea of breath as sculpture has always interested Penone, and though he's never quite managed to make that work, he symbolises it here with a set of lungs formed from golden branches. Not every work here speaks clearly, but something about the show as a whole evokes an inexplicable wish to linger, basking in the restfulness that permeates the galleries. And then you realise that, just beyond the doors, there's a whole 275 acres of nature. Time to get into it. To Sep 7, serpentinegalleries.org
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Do Ho Suh — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home
Tate Modern, London
At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist Do Ho Suh has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home. To Oct 19, tate.org.uk
Chloe Ashby
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Ancient India: Living Traditions — gods and rituals come to life
British Museum, London
Considering the sheer size of the country, you might expect an exhibition entitled Ancient India: Living Traditions to be a sprawling mess. However, it's surprisingly compact, perhaps because if they were to go big, we'd have to go home well before we got to the end. May 22 to Oct 19, britishmuseum.org
Nancy Durrant
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur — a mischievous romp
Wallace Collection, London
Grayson Perry does not love the Wallace Collection. The decadence, the grandeur, the conspicuous expense trigger his snobbery. It was a sticking point when he was invited to create an exhibition of new work responding to the collection. So Perry conjured someone to love the Wallace for him: Shirley Smith, a fictional artist, inspired by Madge Gill, a real 'outsider artist'' who exhibited at the Wallace during the Second World War — a woman who suffered traumatic events but found solace (and acclaim) through art. To Oct 26, wallacecollection.org
ND
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Liliane Lijn — first major show for the 85-year-old
Tate St Ives
Now 85, and having lived in London since 1966, it seems bizarre that Liliane Lijn's Arise Alive exhibition at Tate St Ives is the New York-born artist's first major solo survey show in a UK museum. It's not as if she's an unknown. In the late 1950s she knocked about with ageing surrealists Max Ernst and André Breton in Paris, a rare, prominent and much younger woman in that rather bitchy scene (some of her intricate, dreamy Sky Scrolls drawings from this period indicate a fascination with that surrealist staple, the unconscious). Right now, one of her kinetic pieces has its own room in the Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern. This, though, is all her. To Nov 2, tate.org.uk
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Seeing Each Other — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party
Pallant House, Chichester
Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. To Nov 2, pallant.org.uk
Nancy Durrant
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JMW Turner's Upnor Castle, Kent,1831-2
THE WHITWORTH, THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Turner: In Light and Shade — a gorgeous display of astonishing scenes
Whitworth, Manchester
John Ruskin was a funny old stick, but when it came to his hero JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday falls this year, he really knew what he was talking about. 'He paints in colour, but he thinks in light and shade,' he wrote in 1843, and in this exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester, which focuses on Turner's prints — in particular the Liber Studiorum series, which, despite the gallery's significant Turner holdings, hasn't been shown here in full since 1922 — this is borne out gloriously. To Nov 2, whitworth.ma nchester.ac.uk
ND
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Making Egypt — much more than mummies
Young V&A, London
For its older or younger visitors, the V&A's remit is not simply the history of the past but also its interaction with the design of the present. So in Making Egypt, alongside old fabrics are new dresses; alongside ancient stone carvings are modern ones made with the same techniques. As much space is given for the practice sketches of an ancient scribe — working out how to depict owls and cats and hieroglyphs — as for the finished result. To Nov 2, vam.ac.uk
Tom Whipple
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Cartier — dazzled by diamonds in a five-star show
V&A, London
Curators have kept it simple for this dazzling show, just a lot of exquisite objects of outstanding beauty, quality and ingenuity alongside occasional drawings from the Cartier archives to illustrate their development, all mostly spotlit against black. To Nov 12, vam.ac.uk
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Pirates — the bloody truth behind Captain Pugwash