HEADER IMAGE Installation view of Yoshitomo Nara. Photography by Mark Blower courtesy of the Hayward Gallery.
If you’re looking for some inspiration within the coming months, here are some of our most anticipated exhibitions during the summer season. From design and digital art to more traditional works, we have picked out the ones we’re most excited to see ourselves across London this summer.
PROJECT LOOP, 16 Orsman Road
Open Wednesdays 12-6pm | Free entry
A new project space that redefines the London gallery format, PROJECT LOOP is a POC and owned gallery and open-studio residency space that champions emerging artists and fosters critical dialogue in visual arts. The debut exhibition will showcase the work of Emmanuel Awuni and Fungai Benhura. Awuni is a multidisciplinary artist of Ghanaian-British heritage who works across painting, sculpture, and performance art. His work draws inspiration from African traditions, delving into the expressive and political power of diasporic soundscapes such as hip-hop, jazz, reggae, and Afrobeats.
Zimbabwean artist Benhura crafts paintings from a wide array of often discarded materials to create pieces that blend abstraction with figuration. His creative process involves repeated cycles of layering, concealing, blending and rediscovering resulting in heavily textured pieces that carry material memory and show transformation.
Joanne Leonard: Vintage Photographs and Early Collages at HackelBury Fine Art
29th May – 8th July | Free entry
HackelBury Fine Art presents Vintage Photographs and Early Collages, a focused exhibition of works by pioneering American artist Joanne Leonard. Spanning the 1960s through the 1980s, the exhibition highlights Leonard’s unique approach to photo-collage, a practice through which she intertwines personal thoughts, feminist narrative and documentary realism.
Her work uses a mix of found imagery, personal snapshots, handwritten notes and layered textures, her works create visual journals that are simultaneously personal and political. Her collages and vintage photographs offer a deeply intimate perspective on themes such as motherhood, illness, loss, and resilience, challenging the boundaries between public and private life.
This exhibition coincides with the recent acquisition of Leonard’s seminal work Journal of a Miscarriage by the Victoria and Albert Museum. This piece, emblematic of her practice, underscores her commitment to exploring subjects often left unspoken, presenting them with both vulnerability and strength.
London Design Biennale at Somerset House
6th – 29th June | General admission from £27
The 2025 edition of the London Design Biennale will be held at Somerset House from the 5th-9th of June. There are up to 50 participants that will each present design lead responses to contemporary challengers. This year’s theme is ‘Surface Reflections’ which interrogates the interplay between internal subjectivity and external conditions in shaping creative practice. By foregrounding the influence of personal memory, social history, and environmental context, the Biennale positions design as both a reflective and generative force.
Through a constellation of installations, performances, discussions, and workshops, the event offers a critical platform for exploring design’s capacity to mediate between the individual and the collective, the aesthetic and the political, the material and the conceptual. The Biennale is a great way to discover new artists that are pioneering the future of design.
Arpita Singh: Remembering at Serpentine Galleries
20th March – 27th July | Free entry
Remembering is the first solo institutional exhibition of Arpita Singh outside of their home home country of India, featuring key works selected in close collaboration with the artist from her prolific career spanning more than six decades. Singh’s paintings centre on her emotional and psychological state, drawing from traditional Bengali folk art and Indian stories, interwoven with experiences of social issues and global conflict.
Ed Atkins at Tate Britain
2nd April – 25th August | £18, or free for members
Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain presents the first major UK survey of his groundbreaking work, inviting viewers into hauntingly vivid digital landscapes where technology meets raw human emotion. Known for his striking computer-generated videos and animations, Atkins explores themes of intimacy, loss, and identity through a rich blend of moving images, writing, paintings, embroideries, and drawings spanning the last 15 years.
Using his own image and experiences as material, Atkins bridges the digital and the personal, crafting ghostly self-portraits that evoke vulnerability and estrangement simultaneously. The exhibition’s carefully layered structure mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and emotion, oscillating between moments of beauty, absurdity, and discomfort.
Through this immersive experience, Atkins redefines digital media as an extension of the human body- imperfect, expressive, and deeply emotive- challenging us to reconsider how tenderness and connection survive in an increasingly artificial world.
Design & Disability at the V&A
7th June – 15th February | £16 entry
Both a celebration and a call to action, the Design & Disability exhibition showcases the contributions of disabled, deaf and neurodivergent people to contemporary culture and the history of design from the 1940’s to present day.
The exhibition reveals how disabled people have adapted design into every aspect of life through lived experience and expertise. Featuring 170 objects across three main themes- visibility, tools & living, this exhibition spans disciplines including art, design, architecture, photography and fashion. It also delves into the history of disabled designers who have challenged ableism within the design industry and how society views disabled people as passive users of design.
Yoshitomo Nara at Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
10th June – 31st August | £20 entry, or free for members
Yoshitomo Nara stands as a trailblazer in contemporary art, renowned for his playful depictions of children that capture childhood and a feeling of nostalgia. His work celebrates the inner world of imagination and the freedom of expression. Nara’s paintings evoke a transient presence between figure and background, created through multiple layers of subtly shifting, muted pigments applied over time. This process allows his figures to either emerge from or hover within a space that feels liminal.
This exhibition at The Hayward Gallery features more than 150 works in drawing, painting, sculpture, installation and ceramics, this comprehensive exhibition offers audiences the opportunity to immerse themselves in Nara’s personal and creative worlds. You are welcomed into his world as soon as you enter the exhibition space, with a shed-like replica of his studio with wooden floors covered in sprawled out drawings and doodles.
The same room features an extensive wall of record sleeves that displays the music Nara is inspired by. As you walk through the exhibition you are greeted with many drawings that lead to large scale paintings and sculptures including a tranquil water fountain in the upstairs section. This showcase is not only inspiring but humorous, heartwarming and connects you with your inner child with its playfulness.
Our story with David Attenborough at The Natural History Museum
Opens 19th June | From £20
Produced by the award-winning filmmakers behind many of David’s documentaries, this new 50 minute experience blends footage of the natural world with animation to create something special and transcendent from the documentaries you see at home.
The experience reflects his lifetime exploring our planet and sharing the same wonders with the world, this personal message from David leaves us hopeful with the next chapter of the universe’s story. With the current climate crisis we are facing, David’s main mission with his work is to bring attention to the issues and what we can do to help preserve our planet.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting at National Portrait Gallery
20th June – 7th September | £21 entry
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is the largest major museum exhibition in the UK dedicated to one of the world’s foremost contemporary painters. Jenny Saville creates visceral portraits using thick, heavy layers of oil paint. Ordered in a chronological display, the exhibition takes viewers through Saville’s process, from charcoal drawings to the monumental paintings that capture the human form and question historical notions of beauty. The size of these pieces alone is enough to captivate you as you’re surrounded by brush marks.
Dennis Morris: Music + Life, The Photographer’s Gallery
27th June – 28th September | £10 entry
The Photographers’ Gallery introduces Dennis Morris: Music + life, a major retrospective celebrating the work of British-Jamaican photographer Dennis Morris. Known for his intimate portraits of cultural icons such as Bob Marley & The Sex Pistols, Morris’s work explores the life and soul behind the music through his own lens. Morris’s images explore the soulful energy of reggae and the often misunderstood anarchy of the punk scene.
There is a certain openness and trust forged between Dennis and his subjects in order to capture these personal moments that allow spectators to feel a step closer to the origin and inner workings of the music we all know and adore.
His long term collaboration with Bob Marley began when Morris was just 14 and decided to skip school to photograph Marley. Since that day they began a lifelong partnership which became a soul connection and strong friendship. As well as documenting the lives of individuals, Morris’s earlier documentary work reflects on ordinary life in multicultural neighbourhoods of post war London, showcasing black British culture and communities that are often overlooked.
Dirty Looks at The Barbican
25th September – 26th January | Tickets TBC
The Barbican’s adventurous, upcoming exhibition Dirty Looks will explore fashion’s interest in ‘dirt and decay’ over the past 50 years. The exhibition explores Vivienne Westwood’s ‘The Nostalgia of Mud’ and brings together over 60 pieces featuring the likes of Margiela, Dilara Findikoglu and Robert Wun. Designers techniques are also explored such as burning and trompe l’oeil embroidery which mimics stains and is used to convey distress and decay.
It will also feature new commissions and installations by designers including Alice Potts who has pioneered a new technique of crystal embellishment using sweat. This showcase explores the interplay between destruction and luxury and how fashion romanticises the grit and reality of life.
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