London is always a good idea, but amid the city’s frequent spring showers, a weekend gallery crawl is a must—especially given the world-beating contemporary art that’s available to see in the UK in the coming months. Browse just some of the highlights below.
Institutions
There really wasn’t any other place to start. Easily the most buzzed-about show of the season, Tracey Emin’s monolithic “A Second Life” at Tate Modern (until August 31) offers the most expansive, all-encompassing survey to date of Britain’s most celebrated living woman artist. A chronicle of her unflinching approach, it’s a testament to how, over four decades, Emin has taken the most raw experiences of her body, mind, and soul as source material for her art; she has martyred herself, almost, in the name of making the reality of her lived experience as a woman felt—in all of its brutality, beauty, and candor. No matter your relationship to, or perspective on, Emin and her work, it’s a landmark show that vindicates her reputation as one of Britain’s great artists.
Upriver at Tate Britain, another major survey show, this time of British painter Hurvin Anderson (March 26 to August 23). Across more than 80 vibrant paintings and through a personal prism, the show paints a contemporary history of movement between the UK and the Caribbean, contemplating notions of belonging and diaspora—a particularly salient work being a 24-panel mural-style piece, reworked for its presentation here.
Close by, at Hayward Gallery, Chiharu Shiota’s “Threads of Life” (February 17 to May 30)—a mycelial web of scarlet yarn—continues its sell-out streak. Meanwhile, next door, “Skate 50” (April 30 to June 21) commemorates the 50 years since London’s skateboarders first took up informal residency beneath the Southbank Centre’s QEII Hall, featuring photographic and video documentation from across the years, with contributions from the likes of Beatrice Dillon and Palace co-founder Lev Tanju.
Across the river, a fleeting show of musical visionary Arca’s paintings (April 6 to 17) is among the highlights of the ICA’s spring program, alongside “Genuine Fake Premium Economy” (May 1 to 5 July), a mixed-media triple headliner featuring American artists Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison, and Jasmine Gregory, exploring themes of class and inheritance through an expectedly sardonic lens. At the Royal Academy, a similar wry wit echoes across Rose Wylie’s vast canvases (until April 19); read more about the rebellious painter and the show of her lifetime here.
At Serpentine, more celebrations of great British painting. Serpentine North hosts David Hockney’s first exhibition at the Hyde Park space (March 12 to August 23), comprising a series of new paintings alongside the artist’s 90 metre-long frieze, “A Year in Normandie”—a monumental work inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry (which, incidentally, will be passing through the British Museum this year). And at Serpentine South is a show spotlighting new and recent paintings by Cecily Brown (March 27 to September 6), marking something of a homecoming for the British-born, New York-based artist; it’s her first major UK institutional solo show since 2005.
While you’re out west, a visit to the Cosmic House—the postmodern architectural marvel in Holland Park—is a must, as much for the house itself as for the single-screen iteration of Isaac Julien’s “All That Changes You. Metamorphosis” (April 22 to December 18), a poetic exploration of the existential importance of transformation that will shortly be on show in the home’s gallery space.
In Chelsea is more work that interacts with fabulous architecture at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, where “Meow Meow Real Estate” (March 14 to May 23), a show by Berlin-based Nancy Lupo, takes the exhibition space’s bourgeois Victorian features as a point of narrative fixation. Later in the spring (May 13 to 17), the 11th edition of Photo London—the UK’s foremost photography fair—will move into fresh digs at the newly renovated Olympia in Kensington.
While we’re on photography, the National Portrait Gallery houses the first major UK exhibition to date of the work of one of the medium’s modern greats, Catherine Opie (March 5 to May 31). The show includes her seminal, Holbein-style portraits of queer friends and contemporaries, as well as images installed in conversation with the gallery’s permanent collection.
Over at the Barbican, the season’s string of landmark solo shows from agenda-setting female artists continues. There, you’ll find an exhibition of monumental paintings and installations by the late Colombian artist Beatriz González, whose reflections on the role of circulated imagery and media culture in the propagation of violence take on an eerie resonance against the backdrop of current headlines.
In Bloomsbury, Prem Sahib’s installation at the Perimeter’s new site (until April 1)—a former pub next to its main space—prompts reflections on the queer subtexts of common material associations. Close by at Ibraaz, you’ll find Joe Namy’s “Cosmic Breath” (until August 30), a sound installation composed of recordings of the Islamic adhan, or call to prayer, arranged in the exciting new institution’s central space.
Heading east, explore punchy shows from progressive institutions like Whitechapel Gallery, whose program spans exhibitions of the rich, textural vocabulary of Veronica Ryan and rare photographs and recordings of Senga Nengudi’s radical, sculpture-centered performances from across the ’70s (both April 1 to June 14). Chisenhale Gallery presents Racheal Crowther’s first UK institutional solo show (April 17 to June 14), centered on an installation of repurposed technical apparatus that explores how scent is (or can be) deployed as a tool of influence and social control and, more broadly, fragrance’s capacity as a sculptural material.
Close by at Cell Project Space, artist and musician LA Timpa contemplates the traces that sound leaves on physical matter (until May 3), while at Nunnery Gallery in Bow, you’ll find a poignant installation by the young British-Bengali artist Laisul Hoque, who has recreated his bedroom from a period spent in Bangladesh tending to his father’s poor health.
Galleries
One of Mayfair’s standouts is Hauser Wirth’s presentation of late Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo’s ingeniously wacky caged ecologies (until April 18), many of which reflect on humanity’s inevitable surrendering of agency to technology. Over at David Zwirner is a rather more sober affair, in the form of a show of multimedia works by Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, John McCracken, Robert Ryman, and Fred Sandback—pioneers of American minimalism across the ’60s and ’70s (March 24 to May 22). And on Cork Street, Lehmann Maupin takes up residency at Frieze’s bricks-and-mortar address to stage an exhibition of Freya Douglas-Morris’s sublime landscapes (until March 28).
Elsewhere in town, Arcadia Missa presents two standout shows—one, an exhibition of new sculptures by Morag Keil that reflects on the rousing, anthropocentric narratives of world fairs; the other, the first exhibition by Nnena Kalu since she won the 2025 Turner Prize (both March 5 to April 25). Champ Lacombe also unveils new works by SAGG Napoli (March 28 to May 16), a sculpture and video installation contemplating the relationship between fireworks and volcanic eruptions—two constants in Naples, the artist’s soccer-mad hometown in the shadow of Vesuvius.
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Fashion—or at least artists with ties to fashion—emerges as something of a theme this season. Napoli, for one, is a collaborator and muse of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s and Matthieu Blazy’s. Style—and even the tactility of fabric—serves as the aesthetic bedrock of Hannah Murray’s lush, sensually ripe portraits, on show at Ginny on Frederick (March 6 to April 10); and at Cob Gallery is an exhibition of one of British Vogue’s regular contributors, Jack Davison (who most recently shot Oscar frontrunner Jessie Buckley for the March cover). Rather than focusing on style, the photographer presents a series of 90 portraits shot late last year over a three-day period in London, each one a testament to his enduring fascination with the human face.
Traveling east, Megan Plunkett’s exhibition at Emalin’s the Clerk’s House space (March 7 to May 9)—an uncanny exposé of the staging and circulation of reality through photography—is among the season’s must-sees. At Rose Easton (March 7 to April 25), Manon Wertenbroek’s visceral, wall-based, glycerin-fed leather sculptures conjure a sticky corporeality—a sensibility broached by way of subtext in Dean Sameshima’s photographs of the facades of queer bathhouses and sex clubs in LA, captured during their daytime down hours, on show at Soft Opening (March 20 to May 9).
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Beyond London
As the weather makes venturing further afield that bit more appealing, let art be your guiding light. Within day-tripping distance of the big smoke, there’s a quadruple billing of shows across the Lewis and Firle sites at Charleston in East Sussex, one highlight being an exhibition of the radical graphics of the anonymous feminist collective Guerilla Girls (April 1 to September 6). In Hove, Maureen Paley will show site-specific works by buzzy London-based sculptor Jack O’Brien at Morena di Luna (April 11 to July 20), his first UK solo show since his Camden Art Centre breakthrough last year. And in Margate, Turner Contemporary will stage a survey of the lush tropical landscapes of Dominican painter Hulda Guzmán (May 23 to September 13).
In Cambridge is a veritable bounty, with a retrospective of Frank Bowling’s vivid tonal compositions at the Fitzwilliam Museum (March 27 to January 17, 2027) and Artists for Kettle’s Yard (March 14 to April 12), a fundraising show staged in the run-up to the university gallery’s 70th anniversary, featuring works by Rana Begum, Antony Gormley, and Veronica Ryan. Over in Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum plays host to the first solo exhibition by a Bangladesh-based artist in a UK museum, Soma Surovi Jannat’s “Climate Culture Care” (March 28 to November 1), a show exploring the human impact of climate change on the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest, and the 13 million people that call that fragile ecosystem home.
Heading west, Hauser Wirth’s country pile in Bruton hosts a solo show by New York-based Puerto Rican artist Angel Otero (May 2 to October 18), featuring large-scale paintings and sculptures produced over the course of a month-long studio residency in Somerset. And looking north, the highlights include a survey of Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas at the Whitworth in Manchester (until May 31), not to mention a feast for fashion fans opening at the Bowes Museum near Durham (March 28 to September 6): an exploration of the legacy of Vivienne Westwood, incorporating pieces from never previously exhibited collections.