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 find myself feeling overwhelmed by the ever-expanding density of its year-round artistic program, and often end up missing out on many great exhibitions in London as a result. To ensure the number of creative showcases on view in the city doesn't push you away, but, rather, brings you closer to the pioneering workshop of innovation that is its community, every season I am narrowing down all local happenings to the 12 best exhibitions in London across art, architecture, public installations, and design.
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 curation of the best exhibitions in London 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.
As temperatures lower and we prepare to face the return of the colder months after the summer, making time to experience rising and established talents' exhibitions in London firsthand can imbue you with the dose of creativity, inspiration, and escapism you need to get in the right mindset and move ahead. 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. Don't waste your time complaining about the weather: from the latest outsprings of burgeoning young galleries to anticipated solo presentations by some of the world's leading creative talents, these are the great exhibitions in London you should be queuing up for as the creative scene awakens right now.
Kavitha Balasingham: Love Island. ALICE BLACK
A quirky look into the logics of communcation in the contemporary era, Kavitha Balasingham's "Love Island" promises to be as irreverent, entertaining, and thought-provoking as it sounds.
A Goldsmiths graduate, Kavitha Balasingham is making herself a name through whimsical, colorful installations that examine the intersection (and contradictions) of the human and the technological worlds. Following recent group presentations at Turner Contemporary, Palmer Gallery, and Bow Arts, the London-based artist lands at ALICE BLACK with Love Island, a slightly humorous, quirky study into "communication across time and space — through cartoon physics, science fiction, and everyday digital exchanges". Though not much information is currently available on the artworks set to be in the show, based on Balasingham's previous exhibitions, we can expect shape-shifting creatures, Y2K aesthetics aplenty, and room for awe. The result of a research trip to Sri Lanka, where she delved into themes such as "telecommunication, diaspora, and the strange intimacy of a place once imagined but unknown", the creations gathered in Love Island capture the dualistic essence of the digital realm — this mixture of hyperconnectedness and alienation — through transforming shapes informed by our in-between state.
September 10-October 18. ALICE BLACK, 7 Windmill St, London W1T 2JD. Plan your visit
The Genesis Exhibition: Do Ho Suh: Walk the House. Tate Modern
Tapping into the sculptural power of fabric, Do Ho Suh immerses visitors in the homes of his present and his past, as well as manifesting those only present in his imagination.
The more I familiarize myself with 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 multidisciplinary talent brings some of his most spectacular three-dimensional creations to Tate Modern, and 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 down roots anywhere from New York and Providence to Berlin before taking permanent residence in London. Here, his places of affection are either revived or invented from scratch in a mazy exploration of identity, belonging, and what it means to inhabit.
To October 19. Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Book your tickets
Don't Look Back. UNIT
"Balconies at Night" by Thomas Cameron (2024), as featured in UNIT's autumn 2025 group shop "Don't Look Back", one of the best art exhibitions in London to visit this season.
There is something to UNIT's latest group exhibition, Don't Look Back, that instantly reminds me of my childhood and early teens. And no, it is not just that it borrows from the irreverent creative scene of the 1990s and first Noughties. It is the prevailing of substance (read: almost deliberately unpolished looks) over form (read: divulgation of filler and Instagram filter culture) that, imbuing each of the painting, sculpture, performance, and installation pieces brought together under this forthcoming showcase, allows its artworks to break through the noise. In it, we find the sweat building up over a late night out at a crowded club, the advent of the internet and the digitalization of porn, and more conceptual, abstract contributions dissecting the meaning of identity, domesticity, consumer culture, and more. Curated by Beth Greenacre and Sigrid Kirk, Don't Look Back isn't about merely reminiscing. Instead, the two spotlighted the queer and female voices who, back in those decades, were often overlooked alongside "broader expressions of individuality" into a multi-room, gig-inspired concept that pays homage to the daring creative investigations of those years and their enduring legacy on the present day.
September 24-October 26. UNIT, 23-24 Margaret St, London W1W 8RU. Plan your visit
Lawrence Lek: Life Before Automation. Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art
"Game Society" by Lawrence Lek, as seen as the MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul in 2023.
September 26-December 14. Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, St James's, London SE14 6AD. Plan your visit
Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, the university's multi-story exhibition space, is ready to transform into a futuristic utopia on the occasion of German-born, London-based artist Lawrence Lek's largest UK institutional show, Life Before Automation. Through his chosen mediums of film, installation, video games, and sound, and their interaction, Lek has given life to immersive dimensions where today's race for AI and global anxieties have collided into a reality of their own, as haunting as visually spectacular. The artist, who describes his practice as "worldbuilding for non-humans", seeks to expose the paradoxes of machine learning and the inverted power dynamics that, today, shape the relationship between humans and the algorithm. The traditionally heartfelt concept of coming-of-age cinema is reinvented in the film Geomancer (2017), which narrates a "superintelligent satellite's aspiration to become an artist". His ongoing collaboration with writer and musician Kode9, titled Nøtel (2018–), dives into the potential of "fully automated luxury" by allowing visitors to step into VR hotel rooms conceived by world-leading architects. While in NOX (2023), the attention turns to disobeying machines, or what happens when human prompts are no longer enough to control AI.
Yto Barrada: Thrill, Fill and Spill. South London Gallery
"Untitled (Sunrise/Highway X)" (2025) by Yto Barrada.
Taken at face value, Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada's multidisciplinary oeuvre, encompassing photography, film, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and publishing, may catch your attention for its vibrant, intricately patterned essence — the lines and hues of her creations an ode to the heritage of her native land. Still, it is not as easy as it seems. In Thrill, Fill and Spill, her new solo exhibition, which opens at South London Gallery on September 26, like in the rest of her work, Barrada embraces abstraction and color as a way of relating to the spaces, stories, and boundaries around her, keeping Tangier, the city where she grew up, at the heart of it all. Inspired by the world of gardening and a gardener's mnemonic, which, she explains, describes "a focal plant (thriller), companions (fillers), and those that overflow (spillers)," with this presentation, the artist invites us to reflect on colonial connotations of dyeing and plant cultivation; their ties to commerce, women's labor, ecological fragility, and oral transmission. She does so through towering, nature-inspired sculptures like Tangier Island Wall, a perforated architectural surface cast from interwoven crab traps, the animated Acrobatic Formations, or totemic creations molded in response to Moroccan human pyramids, and the mesmerizing, pastel-hued grids, Land of Black Gold.
September 26-January 11, 2026. South London Gallery, 65 Peckham Rd, London SE5 8UH. Plan your visit
Sonia Gomes: É preciso não ter medo de criar. Pace
It isn't a coincidence that many of the most evocative artworks I have come across recently at Art Basel 2025, Frieze, and beyond are made of intricately woven cuts of cloth, often displayed as an aperture on canvas. There is something rather primordial about textile art, its origins stretching back to the dawn of civilization. And it is the mysteriousness trapped in these fabric creations that makes São Paulo-based artist Sonia Gomes's own textile experimentation so absorbing when observed up close. Still, her practice, which also spans painting, sculpture, and video, entails so much more. Standing out for their twisting, shape-shifting forms, each of the artist's creations embodies a desire to test the limits of her chosen mediums; to have them morph, find new shapes, and evolve. Drawing from her upbringing in the textile hub of Caetanópolis, southeastern Brazil, Gomes taps into natural fibers and second-hand textiles to simultaneously connect with her roots and engage with the visual heritage of the Afro-diasporic experience. Recasting discarded or humble materials into floating sculptures that appear imbued with a life of their own, she reminds us of the power of objects to carry stories, to act as a window into distant, often forgotten, worlds.
October 14-November 15. Pace, 5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ. Plan your visit
Cristina Iglesias: The Shore. Hauser & Wirth
Artist Cristina Iglesias, photographed as she examines "Hondalea (Marine Abyss)" (2021), one of her colossal, alternate environment installations.
Recently, I have grown more and more fascinated with the work of Es Devlin, Lita Albuquerque, and Louise Bourgeois — artists whose practice captures the (colossal) scope of women's art, its ability to exemplify a connection to the land, and render the nuances and contradictions of everyday life through performance, sound, and a (sometimes, quite literally) boundary-pushing approach to art. That's what made me curious about Cristina Iglesias's forthcoming show at Hauser & Wirth, The Shore, her debut exhibition with the gallery since joining its stellar roster of talents. The Spanish artist, who spent nearly half a century perfecting the textural, immersive essence of her large-scale environments, is expected to bring three new bronze sculptures to Savile Row. Informed by her interest in architecture, literature, psychology, and mechanics, Iglesias's site-specific works straddle the continuum between the natural and the artificial, incorporating glass, steel, and bronze, as well as water and sound, into absorbing installations that raise questions about the places we inhabit, their primordial state, and where we belong.
October 14-December 20. Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, London W1S 2ET. Plan your visit
Val Lee: The Presence of Solitude. Southbank Centre
"Valley of the Minibus" (2025) by Val Lee.
Taiwanese artist Val Lee (李奧森)'s The Presence of Solitude is an enigmatic retelling of isolation, intimacy, and hope. Through a blend of costume design, film, and photography, the exhibition, marking her first solo show in the UK, presents the audience with multiple masked-up characters whose concealed sight or state of alienation serves as a metaphor for Taiwan's political repression and her fascination with 'non-places' respectively. Both in Valley in the Minibus (2024) and The Sorrowful Football Team (2025), two of the audiovisual works that will be on display, it is a sense of ambiguity to prevail; as if, even more than what's being narrated in the film, it were what she is not telling us that she'd like us to see. Here, personal and collective memory morph and become one, as Val Lee's anonymous figure comes to embody everyone and, at the same time, no one. As she puts it, in The Presence of Solitude, "form, time, and relation can stay in flux", and so stay viewers, too.
October 7-January 11, 2026. Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX. Plan your visit
PLATFORM: Bethan Laura Wood. Design Museum
A new solo presentation dedicated to the work of multidisciplinary artist Bethan Laura Wood inaugurates the Design Museum's PLATFORM, a series of exhibitions exploring contemporary design practices
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 25, 2026. Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG. Plan your visit
Design and Disability. Victoria & Albert Museum
"Jewellery Becomes Law" by Ntiense Eno-Amooquaye (2024), one of the artworks presented in the V&A's Design and Disability group presentation, one of this season's best exhibitions in London.
Traditionally, the design industry isn't famed for its hugely diverse pool of talents, nor is it known for ensuring that individuals with disabilities can benefit as much from the scene's careful mix of aesthetics and functionality as everyone else (though collaborations like last year's Michael Graves Design x Pottery Barn collection are a welcome exception to the rule). In Design and Disability, an ongoing group showcase on view at London's Victoria & Albert Museum through February 15, this premise is turned on its head. Reuniting some 170 creations across fashion, art, photography, architecture, and technology from disabled, deaf, and neurodivergent artists and communities, the exhibition celebrates their unique contribution to design history and wider contemporary culture. Vibrant, immersive, and highly interactive, the installation of Design and Disability is, in itself, thoroughly inclusive, while the show's three thematic sections — Visibility, Tools, and Living — offer insights into both the everyday routine of its protagonists as they provide a glimpse into their artistic minds.
To February 15, 2026. Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Rd, London SW7 2RL. Book your tickets
Encounters: Giacometti. Barbican Centre
Pakistani-American sculptor Huma Bhabha, whose practice will serve as the co-protagonist of Encounters: Giacometti alongside Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum's, American sculptor Lynda Benglis', and the Swiss artist's own, photographed in her studio in 2022.
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
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, and its recently unveiled sibling institution and collection facility, the V&A East Storehouse; 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.
Taken note of the best design and art exhibitions in London to visit this autumn and beyond yet? Great, because we've just got started. Whether you're looking for the top eateries fusing a love of food with an eye for dazzling decor or searching for the latest interiors and hospitality openings to bookmark ahead of your forthcoming escapes, our lifestyle section will fill you in on the hippest culture, restaurant, and travel destinations — and all in one click. Look out for our guide to London Design Festival 2025, too, as that's incoming.
Still after travel tips, even now that summer gives way to the colder part of the year? Trust our community of tastemakers from across the globe to point you in the right direction in our recurring insider guide series, Hidden Trails.
