Don’t miss out on the best exhibitions in London. From the latest blockbuster art shows to up and coming artists, find the best exhibitions in London here.
There are some incredible exhibitions in London at the moment. Current highlights include Mushrooms: The Art, Design and Future of Fungi at Somerset House, a major exhibition exploring the non-stop nature of our modern lives; Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Pharaoh at the Saatchi Gallery, the last time these artefacts will tour the world; and the major Steve McQueen retrospective at the Tate Modern.
BAFTA is hosting a major Behind The Screens exhibition where you can take a look at costumes, models, scripts and more from some of your fave TV shows and films, including that pink Molly Goddard dress worn by Villanelle in Killing Eve, hair and make-up design for The Favourite and research and prep that Chiwetel Ejiofor undertook for 12 Years A Slave. The Natural History Museum is home to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year show, with awarded images selected from almost 50,000 entries and it showcases the beauty and diversity of the natural world, with everything from Canadian racoons to Japanese long-tailed tits to African cheetahs depicted in the photographs.
The annual orchid festival is back at Kew and for the first time the theme is Indonesia. As an archipelago of more than 17,504 islands, Indonesia is incredibly biodiverse, with tropical rainforests, active volcanoes and over 4,000 species of orchid and you can get a little taste of this inside the Princess of Wales Conservatory.
And if you’ve not gone on one of the Hidden London tours of abandoned tube stations, you can now experience it above ground at the Hidden London exhibition at the London Transport Museum. The exhibition will feature the largest number of archive photos, film posters, objects, tiles and diagrams from disused stations in one location, and there’ll also be immersive elements like a recreation of Churchill’s dining room at Down Street station and the ticket office from Aldwych station, complete with original 1930s ticket booth and tiles.
Through film and photography this exhibition at the Barbican is exploring the construct and performance of masculinity from the ’60s to the present day. Post #MeToo, masculinity has become an increasingly examined topic and and this show touches on themes including power, hypermasculinity, queer identity, family and patriarchy. Work from over 50 international artists, including Laurie Anderson, Sunil Gupta, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien and Catherine Opie, will be on display.
The six Titian paintings that make up his series based on classical myths are being shown together for the first time in over 400 years at the National Gallery. The exhibition, which features ‘Diana and Actaeon’ and ‘Diana and Callisto’, as well works on loan from Boston and Madrid, showcase his talents as an artist and as a storyteller – we can see his expert use of paint and colour as well as the way he manages to convey emotion and drama.
This major retrospective of Andy Warhol’s work at the Tate Modern is the gallery’s first exhibition on the man who changed modern art for more than 20 years. The show will feature some of his most iconic pieces, including his pop art images of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s soup, as well as works never seen before in this country. Portraits of black and Latinx drag queens and trans women, from his Ladies and Gentlemen series, will be on display as will his interactive Silver Clouds and the multimedia work Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
This exhibition at Tate Britain is the largest show of Aubrey Beardsley’s work for 50 years. Over 200 pieces of his will be on display, showcasing his prolific career as an illustrator despite dying at just 25 years old. His distinctive black and white drawings covered everything from the erotic to the grotesque, making him intensely popular with his late-Victorian audience.
The Royal Academy is exploring Picasso’s use of paper in this exhibition, featuring expressive drawings, collage, sketchbooks, studies and documentary footage. Picasso experimented with many forms of paper, from napkins to wallpaper to antique paper from Japan, and this display shows how he used it as a tool for innovation.
Somerset House is going mushroom mad with an exhibition dedicated to fungi. Works from over 40 artists, including Cy Twombly, Beatrix Potter, John Cage, Perks and Mini, Haroon Mirza, Hannah Collins and more, will be on display, with the show exploring the cultural legacy of mushrooms, the psychedelic feelings they inspire and the groundbreaking ways they can be used in textiles and architecture.
