HEADER IMAGE Richie Shazam, I Was Never Meant To Survive This
Spring tends to bring some of the biggest exhibitions of the year, as galleries and institutions open their major shows alongside a new wave of smaller gallery exhibitions and artist-led projects. This season, exhibitions span painting, photography, installation and interactive events, from major retrospectives of influential artists to emerging names building new worlds through image-making and installation. Whether you’re planning a day at a museum or drifting between galleries on a Saturday afternoon, these are the exhibitions to see over the coming months.
Young Barbican Takeover Festival
Barbican, London
29th March 2026
£12
The Barbican’s Young Barbican Takeover Festival returns this Sunday, transforming the arts centre into a one-day, youth-led celebration of London’s creative communities. Curated for and by young people, the programme spans workshops, film screenings, live music, poetry, crafting, a makers market and even a roller disco, taking place across the Conservatory, Cinema 1 and foyer spaces. The event brings together collectives and organisations actively shaping the UK’s grassroots arts scene, including Craft Forward, Material Grrrlz, Artizine, Rain Crew, Compass Collective and DIY publishing network ARCCA.
Across the day, visitors can take part in collaborative textile projects, badge and zine-making workshops, dance and drama sessions, and talks on starting independent labels and publishing platforms. Film screenings curated by SplicD Cinema, Ifriqiya Cinema and TAPE Collective spotlight African diaspora cinema and women of colour filmmakers, while Barbican Young Poets host performances in the Conservatory. Elsewhere, a makers market showcases work from London-based artists and designers, and the day ends with a roller disco run by Skate Cabal, soundtracked by Roundhouse’s young DJs.
Carole Gibbons, The Mythological Landscape
Hales, London
Until 11th April 2026
Carole Gibbons’ work has long drawn on mythology, a fascination that began in childhood when, after being evacuated to the Scottish Highlands during the Second World War, her mother sent her books on Greek myths that would go on to shape her imagination and visual language. Mythological references continue to run throughout her practice, appearing in figures, symbols and landscapes that feel both ancient and deeply personal.
The exhibition also highlights the resourcefulness that has defined Gibbons’ practice across decades. Many of the framing devices on display are handmade by the artist, using found materials to construct structures that hold and shape the paintings themselves. These frames are not simply supports but integral parts of the works, reflecting a practice driven by necessity, invention and a determination to keep making under any circumstances.
Luella Bartley, Dressing For Pleasure
Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London
Until April 18th 2026
Free admission
Before turning fully to painting, Luella Bartley was known as a fashion designer, and clothing has gradually returned as a central theme in her work. While her early paintings often stripped subjects bare, Dressing For Pleasure marks a renewed interest in clothing as both self-expression and protection — something that can reveal as much as it conceals.
The exhibition focuses on portraits of friends and family, using clothing to explore how we present ourselves to the world and how identity is performed through dress, gesture and colour. Where Bartley’s earlier works often felt tense and contorted, these paintings carry a new sense of openness and playfulness, reflected in looser poses and a more vibrant palette. Imperfection and vulnerability remain present, but here they are part of something lighter and more experimental, a body of work that ultimately celebrates the pleasure of looking, dressing and being seen.
Rose Wylie, The Picture Comes First
Royal Academy, London
Until 19 April 2026
£21-23
Rose Wylie has become a cultural icon as much as a painter, known for her distinctive visual language and the characters that populate her work. Her influence extends beyond the art world into fashion, most recently appearing in Juergen Teller’s campaign for Loewe, a collaboration that reflects how closely her personal style, painted subjects and public persona are intertwined. Fashion and beauty frequently appear in her paintings, and her self-portraits often feature her signature red lipstick.
The Picture Comes First is the largest exhibition of Wylie’s work to date, bringing together some of her most recognisable paintings alongside new and previously unseen works. Across the exhibition, references to cinema, celebrities, literature and ancient history sit alongside personal memories and everyday observations. Figures such as Elizabeth I, Nicole Kidman, Marilyn Monroe and Serena Williams appear throughout, reflecting Wylie’s interest in cultural mythology and female iconography. Having only begun her painting career in her fifties, Wylie has since built a body of work that is playful, tender and unmistakably her own, finding humour and character in both popular culture and ordinary life.
Beatrice González
Barbican, London
Until 10th May 2026
£19
Bringing together more than 150 works, many of which are being shown in the UK for the first time, this major Barbican exhibition surveys the influential career of Colombian artist Beatriz González from the 1960s to the present. Working across painting, furniture, sculpture and large-scale public installations, González has spent decades exploring how images circulate through society and how art can reflect political power, collective memory and grief.
Using a distinctive graphic style and vivid, often unexpected colour palettes, González frequently reworks images taken from newspapers, magazines and popular culture. Her work playfully challenges ideas of taste and high art while also addressing violence, displacement and political history in Colombia. The result is a body of work that moves between satire and mourning, examining how images shape public memory and how art can act as both witness and critique.
Alyina Zaidi, Rewilding
Pilar Corrias, London
Until 23rd May 2026
Alyina Zaidi’s Rewilding presents a new series of paintings that continue the artist’s practice of building imagined worlds shaped by memory, myth and storytelling. Her works depict surreal, dreamlike landscapes that feel both historical and fictional, combining personal memory with visual references drawn from multiple artistic traditions.
Often resembling intricate textiles or illuminated manuscripts, Zaidi’s paintings draw on Persian and South Asian miniature painting, as well as Byzantine and early Italian painting traditions. Her compositions are dense with detail and colour, referencing folklore, fables and the landscapes of her childhood in Kashmir and Delhi. Together, the works create imagined topographies that sit somewhere between memory and myth, exploring how landscapes can hold personal and cultural histories at the same time.
Sigmar Polke, Moderne Kunst
VeneKlasen, London
Until 1st June 2026
Free admission
Sigmar Polke is widely regarded as one of the most influential and experimental artists of the post-war period, known for constantly pushing the boundaries of painting and materials. Across his career, Polke worked with everything from traditional paint to unconventional substances and photographic processes, often using humour and irony to challenge political systems, art history and ideas of originality.
Moderne Kunst brings together works spanning four decades of Polke’s career, highlighting his restless experimentation and refusal to settle into a single style or medium. The exhibition includes paintings, works on paper and sculpture, including early works such as Attempt at Resuscitation of Bamboo Canes (1967), which demonstrates his early interest in unusual materials and conceptual approaches to making art.
Tracey Emin, A Second Life
Tate Modern, London
Until 31st August 2026
£20 admission, or £5 for 16-25s via Tate Collective
This major Tate Modern exhibition surveys four decades of Dame Tracey Emin’s work, bringing together some of her most recognisable pieces alongside works that have never been exhibited before. Emin rose to prominence in the 1990s as part of the Young British Artists, with works such as My Bed becoming some of the most debated and recognisable artworks in contemporary British art. For many visitors, this exhibition will be the first opportunity to see these works in person alongside her more recent paintings and sculptures.
Working across painting, textiles, neon, video, installation and writing, Emin has built a career defined by autobiographical work and an unapologetically personal approach to art-making. Her work frequently explores love, sex, grief, trauma and healing, using her own life as subject matter while challenging the boundaries between public and private life. A Second Life positions her work not only as confessional, but as part of a wider shift in contemporary art towards emotional honesty, vulnerability and the body as a site of storytelling.
Cecily Brown, Picture Making
The Serpentine, London
From 27th March – 6th September 2026
Free admission
Cecily Brown returns to London with Picture Making, her first major solo exhibition of paintings in a UK institution in two decades. Known for her energetic brushwork, vivid colour and layered compositions, Brown presents new paintings inspired by the Serpentine’s location in Kensington Gardens, a place with personal significance to the artist. Themes of nature, park life and shifting seasons run throughout the exhibition, alongside recurring motifs such as entwined figures, woodland scenes and fleeting, uncanny encounters in nature.
The exhibition brings together new works made specifically for the Serpentine alongside key paintings dating back to 2001, offering a broader view of Brown’s practice across the past two decades. Her large-scale canvases are immersive and constantly shifting, with figures and narratives emerging and disappearing within the paint, inviting viewers to look slowly and closely as images gradually reveal themselves.
Genuine Fake Premium Economy: Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison & Jasmine Gregory
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
From 1st May – 5 July 2026
The ICA’s upcoming exhibition brings together artists Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory in a group show exploring class, wealth and the mythology of economic success. All three artists came of age around the 2008 financial crisis, and their work reflects a generation shaped by economic instability, widening wealth inequality and the growing sense that traditional ideas of progress and fairness under capitalism no longer hold.
Working across moving image, photography, painting and assemblage, the artists use satire, staging and appropriation to examine how wealth and status are performed and maintained, from corporate aesthetics to luxury culture and inherited privilege. Together, the exhibition looks at art as both critique and commodity, asking what it means to make, sell and collect art in an era where culture and capital are increasingly intertwined.
Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now
Photographer’s Gallery, London
From 24th Jun – 27th Sep 2026
This summer, The Photographers’ Gallery presents Japanese Women Photographers: From the 1950s to Now, a major exhibition highlighting the women who have shaped the history of Japanese photography across generations. Bringing together the work of 27 artists from the post-war period to the present day, the exhibition explores how women photographers have documented everyday life, identity, pop culture, fashion and social change in Japan, often from perspectives overlooked in a male-dominated photographic canon.
Featuring more than 130 works, including photographs, video, installations and rare photobooks, the exhibition offers both a historical survey and a contemporary snapshot of Japanese photography. Together, the works form an intimate and expansive portrait of Japan across decades, showing how women artists have continually challenged conventions, documented cultural shifts and redefined the possibilities of the medium.
OUTSIDE OF LONDON
Richie Shazam, I Was Never Meant To Survive This
McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, Austin
Until 19 April 2026
Richie Shazam’s debut solo exhibition presents a new series of self-portraits that explore identity as something constantly shifting, constructed and reclaimed. Across seven characters, Shazam transforms herself through costume, prosthetics, set design and performance, staging each persona within a different domestic interior built inside a wooden box that functioned as both studio and stage. The resulting tableaux feel theatrical and psychological at the same time, each character occupying their own carefully constructed world.
Across the series, the work explores memory, trauma and survival, treating self-portraiture as a way of reclaiming narrative and authorship over one’s own image and story. Objects, flowers, hair and personal artefacts spill beyond the frame, reflecting Shazam’s process of collecting and world-building.
SMUT, Somewhere between a doll and a dog
CRATE, Margate
Until 5th April 2026
Somewhere between a doll and a dog is a diaristic photographic project exploring trans identity, migration and memory through a deeply personal lens. Shot across the UK, Europe, the USA and the Philippines, the work presents transness as something fluid and borderless, moving beyond binaries and Western frameworks of gender. Rooted in the artist’s experience as a first-generation immigrant, the project also traces a return to their country of birth, reconnecting with precolonial understandings of gender fluidity embedded in local culture and mythology.
Originally developed as a photobook, the project is presented here as a spatial exhibition for the first time, transforming the publication into an immersive environment. Archival family photographs, journal fragments, fabrics and objects are displayed alongside intimate portraits and everyday scenes, creating an installation that feels part archive, part diary. Rather than a finished statement, the exhibition reads as an evolving body of work, reflecting on identity, belonging and the emotional textures of trans and queer life.
Ariana Papademetropoulos, Glass Slipper
Thaddeus Ropcac gallery, Paris
Until April 11th
Free admission
Ariana Papademetropoulos’ Glass Slipper presents dreamlike, hyperreal worlds that feel familiar yet impossible to place in reality. The Californian artist’s first solo exhibition in France centres around an immersive installation in which visitors can lie inside a habitable aquarium, listening through seashell-shaped headphones while fish swim around them, turning the gallery into a surreal, underwater environment.
Surrounding the installation are large-scale paintings depicting strange, symbolic landscapes rendered in glowing blues, purples and pinks that feel almost holographic. The scenes appear recognisable, like places half-remembered from dreams, but resist any clear location or narrative. Together, the works create an atmosphere that sits somewhere between fantasy, memory and cinema, inviting viewers to step into a world that feels both artificial and oddly familiar.
Bridget Riley, Learning To See
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Until 4th May 2026
Free admission
Learning To See at Turner Contemporary explores Bridget Riley’s lifelong investigation into colour, perception and the natural world. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition brings together works from the late 1960s to the present, alongside recent wall paintings and preparatory drawings that reveal how central drawing is to her process.
Across more than six decades, Riley has developed a distinctive visual language built from lines, curves, triangles and shifting colour relationships, often inspired by landscape and light. The exhibition traces the evolution of these motifs across her career, showing how her work continues to explore rhythm, movement and the way we physically experience looking, rather than simply what we see.
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