11 Must-See Exhibitions at London Gallery Weekend 2025
For the London art world, it’s been a turbulent few years. From the impact of Brexit, to the economic uncertainty of tariffs in the last few months, there have been myriad challenges. Nonetheless, smaller spaces are increasingly emerging as engines of innovation and experimentation (as shown in Artsy’s 2025 Art Market Trends report).
Nowhere is this more evident than at London Gallery Weekend 2025, where the city’s creative dynamism is on full display. From June 6–8, over 126 galleries will participate in its fifth edition, including 15 new U.K. and international additions. Out of these, 11 spaces, including Perrotin, William Hine, and Upsilon Gallery, have opened London outposts in the past two years.
Visitor numbers are climbing and galleries are responding with ambitious programming that extends far beyond four walls. Sadie Coles HQ, for instance, will present a live reading by Precious Okoyomon. Meanwhile in Bloomsbury, shows at Canopy Collections, Cob, and Mamoth present some of the finest tastemaking painting shows in the city. Notably, this year also marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of Victoria Miro. The gallery will celebrate with an expansive exhibition of works by its roster of represented artists.
Below, we’ve selected 11 shows not to be missed during London Gallery Weekend 2025.
Despite a career spanning more than six decades and nearly 800 paintings, Peter Saul has always existed on the fringes of an art establishment, which was slow to acknowledge him. In a 2008 interview with Bomb Magazine, he questioned the notion of artistic success: “I live in a one-bedroom apartment…commute an hour to a shared Brooklyn studio… stretch my own canvases. I chose this life, and I’m having fun, but where are the millions I’m supposed to have?” Though skeptical of conventional measures of success, Saul’s bold, confrontational style—an energetic fusion of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism—is now recognised globally, with his work featured in major permanent collections.
Famous for his grotesque distortions and razor-sharp satire, the 90-year-old artist continues to skewer the absurdities of power, politics, and culture. In his solo exhibition at Saatchi Yates, presented in collaboration with Venus Over Manhattan, Saul turns his irreverent gaze inward, taking jabs at the contemporary art market with his usual gusto. In the painting Bad Day at the Gallery (2023), bodies melt, burst, and twist as frantic dealers scramble amid swirling cash and warped canvases. With slapstick energy and acidic humour, Saul critiques the marriage of culture and commerce that he perceives in the art world.
American artist Katelyn Eichwald makes her U.K. debut at Cob this spring with “Like Lovers Do,” an ode to tender, elusive moments of adolescence. The exhibition comprises a series of small paintings on canvas, hessian, and linen, alongside collages on paper—emotional vignettes that read like devotional diary entries. Working in oil on rough, absorbent surfaces, Eichwald scrubs into the fabric as if trying to lift something away. What emerges are hazy, sunken images that mirror the textures of memory and fantasy.
Her visual narration relies on a finely tuned lexicon of girlhood that will feel familiar to Sofia Coppola devotees: butterflies, flowers, lipstick stains, lace-hemmed lingerie, ditsy floral teacups. These motifs are not mere decoration, but talismans—indications of a private world where innocence edges into desire, and fantasy offers both escape and entrapment. Rather than depicting girlhood literally, Eichwald visualizes its psychic theater. Here, personal possessions and obsessions are shrouded in romantic myth.
Discover new artists to follow if you like Sofia Coppola’s distinctive style.
For his first major solo show in London, Berlin-based artist Anselm Reyle presents “Sunrise Mission,” a vivid exploration of modern abstraction. Material experimentation is, without a doubt, the cornerstone of Reyle’s practice, in which he brings together industrial elements like aluminum, mirrors, and neon lights with traditional painterly gestures. His vibrant compositions draw on various movements within 20th-century abstract art, from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism.
Reyle’s presentation at Opera Gallery includes a range of works that reaffirm this experimental spirit, including several stools—never before commercially exhibited—created in collaboration with Austrian artist Franz West before his passing in 2012. Blending functionality with conceptual rigor, these pieces reflect the playful, cerebral ethos shared by both artists. “Sunrise Mission” also debuts the final version of his “Chrome Brushstroke” series of paintings, which he began in 2024. “For quite some time, I have been working with texture pastes that mimic the thick application of oil paint,” he explained in the press release. “This led me to the idea of having brushstrokes chrome-plated and integrating them into the painting.”
Within the rigid structure of the grid, Dotty Attie has found a means to subtly dismantle the fixed narratives of art history. A pioneering figure in New York’s 1970s downtown art scene Attie was the co-founder of the first all-female cooperative art gallery in America, A.I.R. Since then, she has spent over five decades quietly subverting the patriarchal foundations of Western art. Her use of line and repetition imparts a sense of order, which she then unravels by adding fragmentary imagery and disquieting text that challenges what initially appear stable.
“40 Years,” on view at Public Gallery, offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of her practice, from her early graphite renderings to later more textually charged compositions that borrow imagery from pop culture and Hollywood. In one of her final graphic works, In Old Age He Painted (1986), Attie reconfigures Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ canonical images into a visual sliding puzzle. Here, she exposes the arbitrary, constructed nature of the female archetypes that the French neoclassical painter drew on. By the 1990s, she had started drawing on the work of Old Masters. In the painting Mixed Metaphors (1993), for example, astonished faces surround Courbet’s famous painting of female genitalia, L’origine du monde (1866), implicating the viewer’s gaze, too. Attie’s mischievous, sometimes unsettling, reconstructions are all about looking again, encouraging us to pick the piece that best fits our own interpretations.
Richard Hunt
“Metamorphosis – A Retrospective” at White Cube BermondseyThrough June 29
It’s no mean feat to make cold steel pulse with life, yet Hunt’s industrial specimens of the new age undoubtedly do. The forms stretch, pretzel, and reach as if caught mid-transformation, alive with tension and motion. Continuing a London Gallery Weekend of firsts, White Cube’s Bermondsey space presents “Metamorphosis –A Retrospective,” the first major European retrospective of the pioneering American sculptor who died in 2023.
Hunt’s inspirations were incredibly diverse. In the early work Growth Form (1957), the rhythms of the natural world are forged in metal, as abstract, linear gestures that unfurl and surge upwards like a flower’s pistil. These cycles captured the artist’s intention, as he once put it, “to develop the kind of forms Nature might create if only heat and steel were available to her.” Elsewhere, a trio of open line structures—Opposed Linear Forms (1961), Linear Peregrination (1962), and Linear Sequence (1962)—reflect Hunt’s sustained fascination with classical mythology, translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses into strained, primitive forms that evoke movement and change.
Similarly working against the usual connotations of steel is Sunderland-born artist Ro Robertson. Their exhibition, “Holder Up”—their third with Maximillian William—drinks deep from a well of working-class history and how human bodies engage with heavy industry.
The title refers to Robertson’s great-grandfather, a shipyard worker and ‘holder up’ who braced red-hot rivets as they were hammered into steel structures. This inherited legacy runs through Roberton’s new body of work, where welded steel sculptures, drawings, and collages translate industrial labor into rhythmic, abstract forms.
Where there is an awareness of scale and force, Robertson introduces vulnerability as a counterweight. At the heart of the show are Holder Up I and II (2025), two dynamic steel forms that appear to move in tandem—like hands working in sync, or bodies locked in a silent duet. Across the gallery, there are drawings that bear the marks of a steel edge, surface rust, and ink. Elsewhere, sculptural wall hangings—made from painted sheet metal riveted to wood—create a physical presence for this industrial memory.
Emily Kam Kngwarray Alhalker (I), 1992. © Emily Kam Kngwarray/Copyright Agency
Emily Kam Kngwarray, one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, is finally receiving the international recognition she deserves. Coinciding with Tate Modern’s major survey of the Indigenous artist opening in July, Pace Gallery will mount the first ever U.K. exhibition dedicated to her paintings and textile works, in collaboration with D’Lan Contemporary.
Kngwarray was from Utopia, an Aboriginal community 250 kilometers northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s Northern Territory. A senior Anmatyerre woman and custodian of Alhalker Country, she didn’t begin painting in earnest until her seventies, yet she produced more than 3,000 works in just over eight years. Without formal training or exposure to international art movements, she developed a distinct visual language rooted in ceremonial practice and a holistic relationship to her homeland. Using the colors and symbols of Indigenous creation stories, her paintings act somewhat like experiential maps—each gestural brushstroke marking the cyclical rhythms of plants and animals.
At Pace, her bold pointillist color field paintings are shown alongside historical and contemporary batiks by artists influenced by her early textile work, marking a long-overdue reevaluation of her role in global modernism and the broader impact of Indigenous art on 20th-century practice.
The 18 new oil paintings in Florence Houston’s exhibition “Powder Puff” showcase the artist’s growing fascination with food designed to be admired rather than consumed—most notably, jelly. Inspired by Victorian illustrations and childhood nostalgia, she began painting the curious confections in 2021, drawn to their strange duality: beautiful yet grotesque, decorative, yet for the most part, tasteless.
In the paintings Gauloise and Aspic (both 2024), for example, she captures the elaborate forms of molded jellies in vivid hues—arsenic green and deep red—against restrained backgrounds. This choice highlights her subjects’ surreal, slippery charm. Given Houston is a graduate of the Charles H. Cecil Studio in Florence, it is no surprise then that her paintings reveal a classical precision, bringing academic technique to these wobbling forms. Her work is reminiscent of Dutch still lifes, not only through meticulous realism but also in the artist’s acute attention to beauty. These paintings bring an introverted flamboyancy to these overlooked and downright absurd objects that are made to be seen, not savored.
Nearly a decade after her London debut at 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, Nigerian artist Modupeola Fadugba returns on the heels of winning the 2025 Norval Sovereign African Art Prize. Her latest exhibition, “Of Movement, Materials and Methods,” on view at Gallery 1957, marks an exciting evolution in her practice.
She has often been inspired by water, as in her acclaimed series of paintings, “Tagged” (2015–17), depicting solitary swimmers. However, her new canvases explore the vibrant, collective choreography of the Ojude Oba festival—an annual celebration of Yoruba heritage in Ijebu-Ode, Nigeria. She portrays the festival’s patriarchs rich in ceremonial symbolism. Throughout the exhibition, but particularly in The Kiss (2025) and The Coronation (2025), Fadugba uses scratches on her painting and visible pencil marks to convey depth and movement. Elsewhere, The King’s Seat (2025) portrays a beaded saddle set against a burned mosaic canvas of acrylic and graphite mosaic. Collaborating with local artisans, Fadugba transforms material into memory, and tradition into a living, contemporary language.
For the second iteration of its annual exhibition series, “Dialogues,” LAMB pairs works by Colombian painter Valentino Cortázar with those of British painter Daisy Dodd-Noble. Despite being born some 40 years apart, there’s a striking affinity in their Surrealist approaches that reimagine the artistic tradition of landscape painting. Cortázar’s ethereal depictions of Colombia’s lush, variegated terrain draw from both the technical language of European art movements and his understanding of his homeland. In contrast, Dodd-Noble’s vibrant, whimsical landscapes evoke untouched, almost mythical environments, shaped by her travels and rooted in the natural rhythms of distant, sunlit locales.
Through their dialogue that spans time and geography, the pair are unified by their sensitivity to the natural world. Their paintings are timely reflections of our collective yearning for escapism in the face of environmental transformation.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who died earlier this year, was a groundbreaking artist, curator, and activist of Salish and Kootenai descent. Over a career spanning five decades, she became one of the most influential Native American voices in contemporary art, appropriating the iconography of American popular culture and Western art history to center Indigenous experiences. Her impact reached a historic milestone in 2020 when the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired the mixed-media piece I See Red: Target (1992)—a fierce response to the legacy of Christopher Columbus. It marked the first time a Native American artist had entered the museum’s collection.
Stephen Friedman Gallery (which recently announced its representation of the artist) here presents a retrospective that reflects Smith’s ambition. The show is broad: encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, but it also showcases the artist’s tireless advocacy. “Rooted in Memory” opens with a room devoted to the last body of work Smith completed in the months before her death earlier this year, the “Tierra Madre”paintings. These works represent the culmination of Smith’s concern with Indigenous empowerment, land rights, and environmental justice. Each pays homage to a central female figure known for their political activism, such as Wilma Mankiller, the first woman elected to serve as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, and Scottish singer and human rights campaigner Annie Lennox.
