London art exhibitions to see in January

London art exhibitions: what to see in January 2025

It's the beginning of a new year, and London is abuzz with art exhibitions. From group shows to major career retrospectives plan your next visit with our handy, frequently updated guide to the city's art exhibitions happening in January.

Heading across the pond? Here are the best New York art exhibitions to see this month.

Jennifer Binnie: Forest Visions

Richard Saltoun
Until 1 March

Jennifer Binnie's work reflects her eclectic mix of interests, with references to movements including eco-feminism, ecology and myth. In her new exhibition at Richard Saltoun, she draws on four decades of work, creating a magical world in which boundaries between the human, animal and natural worlds are non-existent.

Writer: Hannah Silver

The 80s: Photographing Britain

Tate Britain
Until 5 May

Set against a backdrop of race riots, strikes, mass unemployment and gentrification, a new show at Tate Britain explores one of the UK’s most colourful eras through the medium of photography. Bringing together nearly 350 images and archive materials, ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ explores how the medium became a tool for social representation, cultural celebration and artistic expression throughout this period.

Writer Anne Soward

tate.org.uk

Kenia Almaraz Murillo: 'Andean Cosmovision’

Waddington Custot
Until 30 January 2025

In her new London art exhibition, Bolivian-born textile artist Kenia Almaraz Murillo adorns her wall hangings with found, urban objects, from car headlights to motorbike headlamps, brilliantly lit up with curves of neon.

The results are striking, juxtaposing traditional Bolivian materials such as sheep’s and llamas’ wool against the more modern, in a bid to find a balance between the natural and the man-made, the technological and the mythical. It is a tension reflected in the materials themselves, with gold threads from France, dating from the 1920s-1940s, woven with alpaca threads from Bolivia in a mish-mash of textural nods.

Writer Hannah Silver

waddingtoncustot.com

'Electric Dreams'

Tate Modern
Until 1 June 2025

Encompassing the period from the 1950s to the beginning of the internet era, and uniting over 70 artists, ‘Electric Dreams’ celebrates vintage tech art in all its mind-bending glory. From US artist Rebecca Allen’s experiments in motion capture and 3D modelling for a Krafwerk music video, to Eduardo Kac’s text poems created with Minitel machines, the exhibition delves into movements including kineticism, cybernetics and abstraction as they began to take shape.

Writer Hannah Silver

tate.org.uk

Anastasia Samoylova: ‘Adaptation’

Saatchi Gallery
Until 20 January 2025

Saatchi Gallery presents a major survey of works by American photographer Anastasia Samoylova. ‘Adaptation’ includes five of Samoylova’s contemporary series ‘Landscape Sublime’, ‘Image Cities’, ‘FloodZone’, ‘Floridas’, and ‘Breakfasts’. With a curious gaze she explores the environment and human intervention, with her work anchored in social and political views towards climate change.

saatchigallery.com

Francis Bacon: Human Presence

The National Portrait Gallery
Until 19 January 2025

Francis Bacon’s distorted forms, caught in hellish moments, are etched into the brain of those with only a passing interest in the art canon, an eerie familiarity that still doesn’t prepare you for the sheer emotionality of his major retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery.

Taking you from Bacon’s early portraits in the 1940s, through self-portraits and portraits of friends in the 1950s, to the personal relationships that defined his work in the 1960s, the exhibition documents Bacon’s relationship with representation in his dismantling of both traditional power structures and tortured memorialisations of departed lovers.

Read our full review of Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery.

Writer: Hannah Silver

www.npg.org.uk

Jameel Prize: Moving Images

V&A
From 30 November to 16 March 2025

Preview the Jameel Prize exhibition which is soon arriving at London's V&A, this year with a focus on moving image and digital media. The winner of the V&A and Art Jameel’s seventh international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic tradition will be showcased alongside shortlisted artists. The exhibition highlights the rich artistic heritage of the Islamic Middle East and South Asia, showcasing the vibrant connection between contemporary creativity and the region's historical legacy.

Writer: Smilian Cibic

www.vam.ac.uk

‘Markus Lüpertz – Pierre Puvis de Chavannes’

Michael Werner Gallery
Until 1 February 2025

The Michael Werner Gallery has brought together the works of two iconic painters in one exhibition. Works from one of the most influential German painters of the post-war period, Markus Lüpertz, have been coupled with paintings and drawings of 19th-century French master Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Lüpertz’ work is inspired by cultural resonance and personal experience. His paintings will be complemented by an array of drawings and paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, including landscapes, preparatory drawings for commissions, scenes and portraiture.

michaelwerner.com

María Berrío: The End of Ritual

Victoria Miro
Until 18 January 2025

Brooklyn-based María Berrío presents ‘The End of Ritual’ at Victoria Miro. Her works are often influenced by aspects of mythology and folklore which reflect contemporary issues women and children face, from identity to survival. The series of new works are somewhat satirical, with crowded interiors with characters’ faces covered in detailed masks and quizzical expressions, whereby others go about regular business unfazed.

victoria-miro.com

The Turner Prize 2024

Tate Britain
Until 16 February 2025

The Turner Prize 2024 shortlisted artists are now able to view. The work of Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur, and Delaine Le Bas will be exhibited, with the winner of the 40th edition of the prize set to be unveiled on 3 December 2024. Turner Prize chair and director of Tate Britain Alex Farquharson leads a jury composed of Rosie Cooper, director of Wysing Arts Centre; Ekow Eshun, writer, broadcaster, curator and a Wallpaper* contributing editor; Sam Thorne, director general and CEO at Japan House London; and Lydia Yee, curator and art historian.

Writer: Hannah Silver

www.tate.org.uk

‘Daffodils baptized in butter’

The Arts Club
Until 19 January 2025

The Arts Club is in full bloom as it uncovers the symbolic, mystical and historical meaning of flowers in its latest exhibition Daffodils Baptized In Butter. Through a contemporary lens, 25 artists present their unique perspective on flowers, which goes against the surface level idea that they are merely pretty, but actually represent the complexities of human life through growth and decay. Participating artists include Alvaro Barrington, Judy Chicago, Don Brown and more.

theartsclub.co.uk

‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’

National Gallery
Until 19 January 2025

The highly anticipated Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is open at the National Gallery this month. A curation of Van Gogh’s most recognised paintings from across the world are united in this exhibition including his ‘Starry Night over the Rhône’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay) and ‘The Yellow House’ (1888, Van Gogh Museum), as well as ‘Sunflowers’ (1888) and ‘Van Gogh's Chair’ (1889), among many other works which are rarely seen in public. The exhibition is romantic and mesmerising, offering much loved insight into his poetic work.

nationalgallery.org.uk

‘Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights’

Until 27 April 2025

Wellcome Collection’s Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights is a thought-provoking exhibition which delves into the complexities of unregulated work practices and how this impacts mental and physical health. The exhibition will consist of historical objects in parallel with contemporary artworks focusing on three places of work: The Plantation, The Street and The Home, each chosen due to the difficult, physical labour, where conditions may be unsafe, and with little to no access to healthcare, a stable income and even basic rights. From sex work, street vending, domestic labour, and prison labor to name a few, Hard Graft: Work, Health and Rights highlights the inequalities people face and how their health, work and rights remain hidden.

wellcomecollection.org

Portrait of America

The Observatory Photography Gallery
Until 25 January 2025

Emerging photographer Katie Edwards captures the vast nation of America through a unique viewpoint- moving trains. Travelling nearly 10,000 miles and enduring 180 hours of train journeys, Edwards has captured glimpses of the country, from Southern deserts and urban dwellings to snow-capped peaks of the Cascade volcanoes. Due to the darkness in the carriage, the windows are lit up in contrast, and the lens captures the moving scenes wrapped in a beautiful frame, she said ‘I was able to see for hundreds of miles on either side of the train, and this created bizarre effects with the light as it hit specific strips of land in the expanse.’

theobservatory.org

Archive of Dissent

The Whitechapel Gallery
Until 19 January 2025

The power of the image has long held a particular resonance for Peter Kennard, artist and Emeritus Professor of Political Art at the Royal College of Art, whose current exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery is both a tribute to and a warning of the influence of information.

Archive of Dissent unites photomontages, installations and the newspapers where his images first appeared, paying tribute to the space’s original purpose, once known as the ‘People’s University of the East End’ and used as both a refuge from poverty and a place to nurture radical philosophies around art and politics.

Writer Hannah Silver

‘Grace’

Tate Britain
Until 26 January 2025

Alvaro Barrington’s latest exhibition Grace is a curation of Black culture and identity drawn from his own experiences and memories growing up in ex-British colony Grenada and New York City. Installed in Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries, the exhibition is built around three key figures in his life; his grandmother Frederica, his close-friend or sister Samantha and his mother Emelda. Grace is also inspired by the hymn Amazing Grace, a piece of music that sits at the heart of Western Black culture.

Writer: Amah-Rose Abrams

'Somnyama Ngonyama'

Tate Modern
Until 26 January 2025

Zanele Muholi, artist and visual activist, celebrates the lives of South Africa’s Black LGBTI communities in a series of arresting portraits that aim to offset the stigma around queer identity in African society. On showcase at Tate Modern, and also The Southern Guild in Los Angeles, Muholi considers their own form in portraits taken all around the world, each with intriguing aspects, from wearing crowns of clothesline pins, bed sheet cloaks or lipstick made from toothpaste and vaseline.
tate.org.uk

Writer: Hannah Silver

'Solid Light'

Tate Modern
Until 27 April 2025

Anthony McCall, a trailblazer within experimental cinema and installation art, presents Solid Light at Tate Modern, an exhibition dedicated to the artists' immersive works. Using beams of light projected through thin mist, resulting in solid light forms, allows visitors to playfully interact. The exhibition will also feature film, photography and archive material.