Home to many renowned art institutions and innovative galleries, London sees thousands of art exhibitions each year. Here are the top six anticipated exhibitions opening in 2025, as selected by the MA Contemporary Art faculty at Sotheby's Institute of Art.
Peter Hujar, Eyes Open in the Dark
Raven Row, 30 January – 6 April 2025
Peter Hujar was a remarkable photographer. One of his most well-known pictures depicts the essayist and theorist photography Susan Sontag, laying casually on her back with arms folded behind her head. This image is recognizable from its use as a cover image for various editions of her books.
Today, Hujar’s meditative and poignant portraits from the 1970s and 80s are widely known. However, this is the first exhibition to comprehensively showcase the breadth of his photography. His intimate images frequently complicate notions of masculinity and sexual identity, consistently in black and white. They are uniform in composition yet are somehow strikingly diverse in their reach. This exhibition will prove enlightening even for his greatest admirers.
Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, DISARM
Frith Street Gallery, 21 March – 3 May 2025
Fiona Banner consistently subjects material forms and associated ideas to scrutiny in a way that sometimes draws on notions of the absurd. In the commercial Frith Street Gallery’s space on Golden Square in Soho, Banner will carry on with her long-term concern with conflict and linguistic confusion. A photograph showing a military jet formation in the sky appears to read “DISARM”, contradicting usual associations of warlike strength and nationalistic pride.
Disused mannequin arms similarly fly through the air, inscribed with the terms “disarm” and “obsolete”, leaving viewers uncertain as to whether they are being discarded or staged to appear as exploded human limbs on a film set. Banner is an artist that requires us to think with her work, and frequently about the broader role of images in visual and popular cultural, in both an amusing and troubling way.
Giuseppe Penone, Thoughts in the Roots
Serpentine South Gallery, 3 April – 7 September 2025
Giuseppe Penone’s practice emerged in the 1960s during a moment of renewed conceptual experimentation. He worked with various mediums spanning drawing, sculpture, photography, and installation, and explored their relationship to a wide range of organic materials including wood, wax, human breath, terracotta, and marble.
Penone’s practice is often associated with Italian arte povera—or, poor art—a loose-knit group of artists that reimagined the possibilities of artmaking using materials, forms, and ideas traditionally considered of low cultural value. The Serpentine exhibition will address the artist’s engagement with the concept of nature and potentially reframe his pertinent relationship to nuance, alongside careful and considered attention to environmental conditions for the present moment.
Oceanic Visions / Te Moana Kite
The Showroom, 24 April – 31 May 2025
The Showroom is a vital part of London’s contemporary art ecosystem—together with likeminded small institutions such as Chisenhale Gallery, Studio Voltaire, Cell Project Space, amongst others—it exhibits often lesser-known and emerging artists.
The exhibition Oceanic Visions / Te Moana Kite will feature the practices of Taloi Havini and Michael Toisuta, UK-based Interislandcollective, and Aotearoa NZ-based Mana Moana collective, led by Rachael Rakena, Mike Bridgman, Dr Karlo Mila, and John Pule, who each engaged with the Pacific Ocean.
Taloi Havini and Michael Toisuta’s Hyena Lullaby (2020), for example, is a remarkable moving-image meditation on coral reefs close to the Bougainville and Buka Islands, whilst reflecting on Nakas ancestral heritage. Alongside a series of ancillary events, the exhibition aims to frame and foreground the ocean as source of profound knowledge and beauty, yet paradoxically as an environmentally endangered site.
Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle, A Story of South Asian Art
The Royal Academy of Arts, 24 October 2025 – 24 February 2026
Mrinalini Mukherjee is known for her hemp and jute textile sculptures made between the 1970s until the 2000s. These sculptures are often legible as botanical and floral forms, whilst simultaneously resembling human reproductive organs.
As a graduate of the important Faculty of Fine Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat, Mukherjee is recognized as a key figure in contemporary art for introducing organic materials into sculptural practice whilst working with ideas of weight and gravity, thus defying the more conventional sculptural instinct to resist natural forces. This exhibition will situate her practice amidst the work of her peers—including her artist parents—offering a broader understanding of Mukherjee’s relationship to other artists working closely alongside her.
Nigerian Modernism
Tate Modern, 9 October 2025 – 11 May 2026
Contemporary artists from Nigeria have certainly enjoyed prominence in the global art world over the last twenty years at least. Perhaps the most prominent, El Anatsui, has been featured in several seminal group exhibitions and solo presentations internationally. His large-scale installation, characteristically made of bottle tops and metallic fragments, was installed in London’s Tate Modern Turbine Hall in 2023-24.
However, London is yet to host an extensive institutional exhibition surveying artists and artworks from Nigeria. Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism intends to fill that gap by exploring developments since the mid-20th century to the present. The exhibition is likely to offer valuable insights into the complex histories of modern and contemporary art and probe the way these narratives are currently represented in the museum’s ever-evolving collection.