12 Transportive Design and Art Exhibitions in London to See Right Now — Or Save for Later This Year

With over 200 museums and countless commercial and independent galleries to choose from, making the most of the Big Smoke's cultural offering requires equal amounts of discerning, open-mindedness, and dedication. That's understandable: even as a culture editor, I am the first to feel overwhelmed by the ever-expanding density of its year-round artistic program, and often find myself missing out on the best London exhibitions as a result. To prevent the number of initiatives organized in the city from pushing you away from — rather than bringing you closer to — the workshop of innovation that is its artistic community, every season I am narrowing down all local creative happenings to the 12 best exhibitions to visit in London.

How do I pick the best cultural events in the British capital? In short, with an eye toward meaning. In a historical moment where multiple global challenges seem to converge, from climate change and migration to the resurgence of conflicts, I want my selection of the best London exhibitions to hold a mirror up to the complexity of our times — engaging viewers through both skillfully crafted artworks and complex conversations that can favor new ways of being together, conceiving our time on Earth, and preserving the planet for generations to come.

Gathering the most thought-provoking showcases in town in one place, this interdisciplinary roundup of design and art shows in London will help you put the right names on the map. From the latest outsprings of burgeoning young galleries to anticipated solo presentations by some of the world's leading creative talents and must-visit collectible fairs, these are the only London exhibitions you should be queuing up for right now.

1. Grace Atkinson: all in each. Spazio Leone

Be it because of the inherently comforting, cocooning role they play in our lives or how they marry aesthetics with function, I have always found myself drawn toward textiles. In all in each, New Zealand-born, Paris-based artist and designer Grace Atkinson's ongoing solo presentation at Hackney design showroom Spazio Leone, she takes fabrics' potential for storytelling to the forefront in a collection of existing and newly commissioned blankets, rugs, tapestries, and a modular chair and footstool set imbued with a mysteriously entrancing essence. The exhibition, which borrows its title from psychologist R.D. Laing's Knots, a study on the countless entanglements that characterize human relationships, sees her implement a 14th-century hand-weaving technique from today's Ukraine in a radically different setting across fuzzy, kaleidoscopic virgin wool creations conceived as a vibrant addition for the home. Juxtaposed with timeless furniture designs from Spazio Leone's 20th-century curation, these earthy swathes of color are as reminiscent of American painter Mark Rothko's enigmatic abstract canvases as they are of the elements that have contributed to their creation. Every piece is obtained from mountain sheep's wool that's woven on wooden looms before being "washed in the river, sun-dried, and hand-brushed," explained Atkinson. As such, they are all unique, and act as a bridge between nature and the viewer.

To May 18. Spazio Leone, Lower Clapton, Hackney Downs Studios, 17 Amhurst Terrace, Lower Clapton, London E8 2BT. Plan your visit

2. Photo London. Somerset House

Like every year, Photo London, the international festival, stages its comeback at Somerset House with a four-day curated program dedicated to exploring "the past, present, and future" of the artistic medium. For its tenth edition, the UK's leading photography fair, which is projected to gather over 120 exhibitors from across the globe and thousands of visitors to into one of the most anticipated art exhibitions in London, is giving greater resonance to the work of rising and underrepresented artists with initiatives like the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer Award 2025, which will recognize the talent of a burgeoning image-maker with a solo show unveiled during the event, the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant, which this year rewards the efforts of Iva Sidash and Ximena Borrazas, two witnesses and storytellers of the conflicts of our times, and the Discovery section, curated for the second time by author Charlotte Jansen and championing more abstract, experimental uses of the photographic language through the eyes of a new vantgarde of creatives, and Positions, a concept debutting at Photo London 2025 under the curatorship of Lebanese collector Maria Sukkar, set to introduce visitors to the production of thought-provoking photographers like Adam Rouhana, Giulia Mangione, Bibi Setareh Manavi, Kalpesh Lathigra, and Aikaterini Gegisian.

May 15-18 (preview May 14). Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA. Book your tickets

3. Rubber Rocks by Study O Portable. Gallery FUMI

Study O Portable's Bernadette Deddens and Tetsuo Mukai don't simply make objects. Instead, their research-based practice seeks to understand how specific creations relate to the designed environment and "our relationship to the cultural landscape that enables it". In their debut solo exhibition with Gallery FUMI, titled Rubber Rocks, the duo challenges the normative, static, and immutable understanding of granite architecture by crafting a whole new series of work from rubber eraser in a project that, the artists explained, explores "the tension between permanence and impermanence; transformation and erosion." Through never-seen-before, rock-like stools, armchairs, coffee tables, consoles, and planters, Study O Portable thus invites us to reconsider our interaction with seemingly 'eternal' landmarks, sparking reflection on notions of heritage, consumption, erasure, and preservation. At once uncanny, playful, and masterfully handmade, these soft furniture items rework silicone rubber, marble dust, and pigment into textural terrazzo pieces that stimulate our imagination while fostering a deeper awareness of the elements that compose the spaces around us.

May 15-June 28. Gallery FUMI, 2-3 Hay Hill, London W1J 6AS. Plan your visit

4. Ragna Blay: Move Baby, Move

A visceral, unfiltered energy pervades the canvases of Swedish-born, Oslo-based painter Ragna Bley, whose second solo exhibition with Pilar Corrias takes on an introspective note. Using her craft as a means of exploring "the unseen forces that influence us, shaping our focus and sense of self", the artist absorbs viewers in energetically drafted masterpieces that strive to portray our, and nature's, state of ever-becoming. This dialogue between the human and the natural world is particularly tangible in her work, where snow previously fallen outside her studio in Norway is incorporated into the wet paint in an action that's crucial to her process. Through choosing spatulas and custom-made tools over traditional brushes, Bley introduces some distance between her gestures and the result, allowing the environment around her and the objects that make it to influence her paintings, just like external factors continuously determine our emotional, psychological, and physical place in the world.

May 16-June 28. Pilar Corrias, 2 Savile Row, London W1S 3PA. Plan your visit

5. Leonardo Drew: Ubiquity II. South London Gallery

It won't take you more than a rapid glance at American artist Leonardo Drew's Ubiquity II large-scale installation to understand the extent to which raw materials embody multiple lives. Born in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1961, but raised in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Drew had his artistic awakening already at an early age. He was browsing the discarded items amassed in the dump that surrounded his home when he naturally began to combine them into something else, applying force on them and, later, subjecting them to multiple states of erosion to unlock their unexpressed potential. He has since made of his ability to "become the weather", distressing the items he works with as if he were water, fire, earth, or wind, his signature trademark. At South London Gallery, his Ubiquity II sculptural piece faces visitors with an imposing debris explosion that investigates the balance between order and chaos, nature and the human. Whether for scope or message, it is one of the must-see art exhibitions in London in 2025.

May 30-September 7. South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Rd, London SE5 8UH. Plan your visit

6. Marcin Rusak: Vas Florum: Resina Botanica. Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Flowers and plants seem to be having a moment in art, but Marcin Rusak's Vas Florum: Resina Botanica, a new solo presentation coming to Carpenters Workshop Gallery this spring, embraces their beauty in a more conceptual, lingeringly fascinating sense. Using organic matter to evoke memories from the past, the Polish multidisciplinary artist and designer puts us in front of a series of translucent floral installations that act as a window into his experiences while simultaneously inviting an interaction between nature and us all. Composed of multiple matte vessels that have flowers embedded in their structural composition, the works on display stand out as "time capsules", where the flow of life has been paused, allowing everyone a moment of wonder, quiet, and introspection. To create these sculptural pieces, Rusak blended a mix of artificially bred plant and floral types used for commercial, aesthetics-led purposes and repurposed by the artist with wild-growing ones as well as unwanted weeds. The result is a presentation that, interspersing the chiaroscuro of his vases with softly glimmering editions of his Resina Botanica cast bronze coffee tables, informed by the dramatic bodies of water of his homeland, transports visitors to a fantastical, human-made landscape that has no beginning or end.

May 22-July 12. Carpenters Workshop Gallery, 79 Barlby Rd, London W10 6AZ. Plan your visit

7. Arpita Singh: Remembering. Serpentine Galleries

Serpentine Galleries have welcomed the return of the good season with Remembering, legendary Indian artist Arpita Singh's debut solo institutional show outside of her homeland, which is enough to make it one of the best London exhibitions to visit right now. An intimate, immersive retelling of her six-decade-spanning career, the show guides visitors along a painting trail that, dense with Bengali folk art references and personal stories, heartfeltly recounts a world grappling with social uprising and global conflict. Curated by Tamsin Hong and Liz Stumpf, the presentation traces the evolution of Singh's emotional and psychological use of color through spirited vignettes of life that blur the lines between traditional Indian iconography and the artist's own imagination. Themes of spirituality, womanhood, violence, and motherhood are equally present in the work,and are treated with the same uplifting intensity despite differing on subject matter. What stays with you after leaving the show is Singh's ability to simultaneously speak of herself and the world as a whole.

To July 27. Serpentine Gallery, London W2 3XA. Plan your visit

8. Michaela Yearwood-Dan: No Time for Despair. Hauser & Wirth

Spring in bloom is the first thought that comes to mind when I see emerging London artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan's latest body of work, No Time for Despair, which opens at Hauser & Wirth in the capital on May 13. Characterized by a vibrant, warm palette and decisive brushstrokes, her paintings and earthenware creations might be abstract at heart, but only an inattentive observer will fail to recognize the natural references that cover her canvases, or vessels, in their entirety. Still, her production moves beyond the aesthetically pleasing to act as an opportunity for redemption from the struggles that define our world. In a 2015 article for The Nation from which the event gets its title, novelist Toni Morrison wrote that, "in times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent". Yearwood-Dan's mesmerizing, explosive artistry relies on the power of visuals to speak, and does so eloquently, albeit silently. Her drenched-in-color pieces represent an attempt at capturing the joy that stems from embracing one's femininity and queerness. Through her craft, she embraces her truest self, rejecting preconceived notions of womanhood to express her dynamic vision of the world.

May 13-August 2. Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET. Plan your visit

9. Hamad Butt: Apprehensions

This is the first time I come across the work of Hamad Butt (b. 1962, Lahore, Pakistan; d. 1994, London, UK), and yet, even before the unveiling of Apprehensions, his forthcoming solo show at London's Whitechapel Gallery, I was immediately hooked up. Looking at the pictures available about the retrospective so far, it seems impossible to pin the artist down to one specific genre or medium. Instead, he seems to straddle the continuum between sciency experiments-like, large-scale installations, sculptural cut-out works, and painted ones, all of which are brought together by a tangible sensibility. Described by early art critics as the epitome of the new 'hazardism' in the 1990s, Butt's experimentation was known for having physical risk or endangerment as its core part, yet in his oeuvre I find a softness and radiancy that draws you toward it, rather than away from it. As if it were trying to warn viewers about something.

In Apprehensions, which marks the first major survey of the artist's work following his untimely departure from AIDS-related complications, visitors will have a chance to experience many of his most radical pieces, including the electricity and crystals-heated Familiars 1: Substance Sublimation Unit, part of the namesake, three-part series, and the UV rays-litTransmission, under the same roof, alongside never-shown-before drawings and canvases. Dealing with the antithesis between "science and art, faith and danger and, ultimately, life and death", Butt posthumously invites to consider the threats and joys that come with being alive, and the risks we face along the ride.

June 4-September 7. Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High St, London E1 7QX. Plan your visit

10. The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Tate Modern

The more I familiarize myself with the work of contemporary and legendary Korean artists, the more I realize many of them have embraced the space of the home as their leitmotif. Born in Seoul in 1962 and now based in London, Do Ho Suh is no exception, though this doesn't make his immersive, textile-based architectural installations in any way less exceptional themselves. In The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House, the boundary-pushing multidisciplinary talent brings some of his most spectacular three-dimensional creations to Tate Modern along with equally captivating sculptures, videos, and drawings. Through his see-through domestic spaces, Do Ho Suh creates an opportunity for everyone to ponder what it actually means to exist and move through a physical environment, infusing the gallery rooms with a slightly nostalgic, technocolored aura. Since leaving his homeland to pursue his studies in the US, the artist has put roots down anywhere from New York and Provience to Berlin before taking permanent residence in London. Here, his places of affection are either revived or invented from scratch in a maze-like exploration of identity, belonging, and what it means to inhabit.

To October 19. Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Book your tickets

11. Encounters: Giacometti. Barbican Centre

A great win for contemporary women creatives, Encounters: Giacometti, the Barbican Centre's new ongoing group exhibition, puts the haunting sculptural oeuvre of the legendary 20th-century Swiss sculptor, painter, draftsman, and printmaker in dialogue with that of Pakistani-American artist Huma Bhabha (May), Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum (Septemer), and American artist Lynda Benglis (February 2026) in one of 2025's top art exhibitions in London. Uniting these seemingly unrelated talents is the skillfulness with which they charge their chosen mediums with an essence of their own, molding them into shape to give life to figures, objects, and environments that feel at once familiar and alienating, comforting and deeply disturbing. Informed by Giacometti's fragilely beautiful production, which echoed the horror and humour, the hopelessness and faith at the heart of both world wars, their contributions to Encounters lift the veil on issues surrounding our right to exist, the consequences of global conflicts, and the relief we can find in artistic expression.

To May 24, 2026. Barbican Centre, Silk St, Barbican, London EC2Y 8DS. Plan your visit

12. PLATFORM: Bethan Laura Wood. Design Museum

Unveiled as part of PLATFORM, a new exhibition series presented by the Design Museum, Bethan Laura Wood steps inside the richly layered, saturated world of the multidisciplinary artist and designer, absorbing visitors in a trail of some 70 maximalist sculptures, textiles, and furniture creations. A living example of how art and functional design are growing more intertwined than ever, Wood's creature-like homeware shows there are no rules that can't be broken in today's world, and that quirkiness and craftmanship can be a winning binomial. Mesmerizing, provocative, and amusing, this ongoing presentation invites us to ponder the meaning of objects in an increasingly digital society, disrupting our view of femininity, ornamentation, and reality as a whole by encouraging us to "look beyond the surface".

To January 2026. Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG. Plan your visit

FAQs

How Do We Pick the Best Design and Art Exhibitions in London?

I have said it before and I say it again: our curation of the best design and art exhibitions in London wants to engage viewers through all senses while simultaneously stimulating their intellect. Each of the entries listed above stood out to me for its protagonists' masterful use of mediums as varied as photography, painting, installation, and video as well as public art, but that wasn't enough for them to be included in it. Instead, this edit of the best London exhibitions presents you with some of the most provocative creatives of our times, inviting reflection on themes as radically different as womanhood, conflict, migration, belonging, climate change, and the home.

What is the Coolest Museum in London?

Taking turns as the hosts of some of the best art exhibitions in London are world-leading institutions like Tate, which has two different location, one focused on modern and contemporary art (Tate Modern), and one platforming more ancient artistic investigations (Tate Britain), the Victoria & Albert Museum, your go-to destination for all things crafts and design, the Design Museum, which competes with the latter on furniture, product, and interiors authority, and the National Gallery, housing works from evergreen masters like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Titian, and Vincent van Gogh.

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