The best exhibitions in London and the UK to book for June 2025
Below is a round-up of the best art our critics have seen in recent months across the UK. From Renaissance chalk sketches to rotting apples, miniatures and Picasso prints, it's a varied list. Which exhibitions have you enjoyed recently? Let us know in the comments.
Resistance — Steve McQueen leads us on a voyage of discovery
Turner Contemporary, Margate
From the militant suffrage movement in 1903 to the anti-Iraq war protests in 2003, when it matters, we march. This Turner Contemporary exhibition, Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, curated by the artist and film director Steve McQueen, is a fascinating, deeply researched, if low-key look at a century of protest in Britain through photography. To Jun 1, turnercontemporary.org
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Edvard Munch Portraits — the Scream painter shows his social side
National Portrait Gallery, London
Edvard Munch's forensic powers are on full display in the first British exhibition to focus solely on his portraits. Known for his 'subject' paintings, which cast friends and family as the dramatis personae in tableaux that communicate a universal emotion (The Scream being the most famous), he was also a prolific portraitist. To Jun 15, npg.org.uk
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Anselm Kiefer: Early Works — an artist under the shadow of the Nazis
Ashmolean, Oxford
It's one hell of a moment for an exhibition of the early works of Anselm Kiefer. It was probably conceived as celebratory — the German artist's 80th birthday lands on March 8; this show at the Ashmolean opens just before an unprecedented presentation across two Amsterdam museums, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk. But with the rise of the AfD in Germany, and a shift to the right across Europe, a return to these works, created between 1969 and 1982, has suddenly become urgent. To Jun 15, ashmolean.org
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COURTESY NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON
Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 — an unmissable National Gallery hit
National Gallery
The show focuses on four painters — Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — to reveal them as pioneers, and uses textiles and finely wrought items such as carved ivories and richly decorated reliquaries to show how these four artists were nurtured by this European centre for trade. It is a stunner.
London, to Jun 22, nationalgallery.org.uk
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Andy Warhol: Portrait of America — depicting a dark side to the USA
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
This exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, put together from the Artist Rooms collection, goes back to basics in an elegant primer showing how Andy Warhol — uniquely and incisively — held up a mirror to postwar consumerist America. It takes a chronological, rather than thematic, approach. Each room represents a decade, from his days as a commercial artist in the 1950s to the 1980s (he died in 1987). To Jun 29, mkgallery.org
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Victor Hugo's The Cheerful Castle, 1847, on show at the Royal Academy
PARIS MUSÉES/MAISONS DE VICTOR HUGO PARIS-GUERNESEY
Astonishing Things: Drawings of Victor Hugo — strange and marvellous
Royal Academy, London
Though many of us won't actually have read either of the 19th-century writer Victor Hugo's most famous novels (Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), there's a chance that we've all seen at least one of them, either on film or on stage. Very few will be familiar with the body of work now on display — his strange and marvellous drawings. To Jun 29, royalacademy.org.uk
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Bob Dylan — the musician is a good painter
Halcyon Gallery, London
There will be people who pooh-pooh yet another exhibition of paintings by Bob Dylan as just another rock star's dabblings. But over the past 20 years (he started exhibiting in 2007 at the Chemnitz art museum in Germany) he has developed into a rather good, interesting painter. To Jul 6, halcyongallery.com
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Leigh Bowery! at Tate Modern is a fascinating homage to an Eighties icon
Tate Modern, London
Through artworks by his friends and peers (including portraits by Lucian Freud), garments (or 'Looks') from his archive, films, postcards, sketches, letters, magazines and what feels like hundreds of photographs, we follow the journey of a suburban Melbourne lad. It's a story that runs from his arrival in London in 1980, fresh out of fashion college, through his entry to the scene, his impact on clubland, his work with the choreographer Michael Clark and his shift into performance. To Aug 31, tate.org.uk
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Hiroshige — an entrancing trip to 19th-century Japan
British Museum, London
Utagawa Hiroshige is among the very most popular — not to mention prolific — artists in Japan. Yet to many of us he may be familiar only through the work of his most famous fan in the West. Vincent van Gogh was a passionate admirer, which is why some of the images that now go on display at the British Museum may start ringing bells. To Sep 7, britishmuseum.org
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Giuseppe Penone — breathe in the scent of nature
Serpentine Gallery, London
The idea of breath as sculpture has always interested Penone, and though he's never quite managed to make that work, he symbolises it here with a set of lungs formed from golden branches. Not every work here speaks clearly, but something about the show as a whole evokes an inexplicable wish to linger, basking in the restfulness that permeates the galleries. And then you realise that, just beyond the doors, there's a whole 275 acres of nature. Time to get into it. To Sep 7, serpentinegalleries.org
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Do Ho Suh — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home
Tate Modern, London
At Tate Modern, the great Korean artist Do Ho Suh has fashioned hundreds from colour-coded fabric according to the places he's inhabited, and installed them on four transparent panels modelled on his present London abode. The effect is at once playful and haunting, a ghostly meeting of places and time zones that poses questions about the meaning of home. To Oct 19, tate.org.uk
Chloe Ashby
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Ancient India: Living Traditions — gods and rituals come to life
British Museum, London
Considering the sheer size of the country, you might expect an exhibition entitled Ancient India: Living Traditions to be a sprawling mess. However, it's surprisingly compact, perhaps because if they were to go big, we'd have to go home well before we got to the end. May 22 to Oct 19, britishmuseum.org
Nancy Durrant
Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur — a mischievous romp
Wallace Collection, London
Grayson Perry does not love the Wallace Collection. The decadence, the grandeur, the conspicuous expense trigger his snobbery. It was a sticking point when he was invited to create an exhibition of new work responding to the collection. So Perry conjured someone to love the Wallace for him: Shirley Smith, a fictional artist, inspired by Madge Gill, a real 'outsider artist'' who exhibited at the Wallace during the Second World War — a woman who suffered traumatic events but found solace (and acclaim) through art. To Oct 26, wallacecollection.org
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Liliane Lijn — first major show for the 85-year-old
Tate St Ives
Now 85, and having lived in London since 1966, it seems bizarre that Liliane Lijn's Arise Alive exhibition at Tate St Ives is the New York-born artist's first major solo survey show in a UK museum. It's not as if she's an unknown. In the late 1950s she knocked about with ageing surrealists Max Ernst and André Breton in Paris, a rare, prominent and much younger woman in that rather bitchy scene (some of her intricate, dreamy Sky Scrolls drawings from this period indicate a fascination with that surrealist staple, the unconscious). Right now, one of her kinetic pieces has its own room in the Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern. This, though, is all her. To Nov 2, tate.org.uk
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Seeing Each Other — Freud, Bacon, Emin and Kahlo all join the party
Pallant House, Chichester
Looking is what artists do. But at what? At each other, endlessly, on the evidence of this new exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, which looks back over 125 years at the ways that artists working in Britain have portrayed each other. To Nov 2, pallant.org.uk
Nancy Durrant
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JMW Turner's Upnor Castle, Kent,1831-2
THE WHITWORTH, THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Turner: In Light and Shade — a gorgeous display of astonishing scenes
Whitworth, Manchester
John Ruskin was a funny old stick, but when it came to his hero JMW Turner, whose 250th birthday falls this year, he really knew what he was talking about. 'He paints in colour, but he thinks in light and shade,' he wrote in 1843, and in this exhibition at the Whitworth in Manchester, which focuses on Turner's prints — in particular the Liber Studiorum series, which, despite the gallery's significant Turner holdings, hasn't been shown here in full since 1922 — this is borne out gloriously. To Nov 2, whitworth.ma nchester.ac.uk
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Making Egypt — much more than mummies
Young V&A, London
For its older or younger visitors, the V&A's remit is not simply the history of the past but also its interaction with the design of the present. So in Making Egypt, alongside old fabrics are new dresses; alongside ancient stone carvings are modern ones made with the same techniques. As much space is given for the practice sketches of an ancient scribe — working out how to depict owls and cats and hieroglyphs — as for the finished result. To Nov 2, vam.ac.uk
Tom Whipple
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Cartier — dazzled by diamonds in a five-star show
V&A, London
Curators have kept it simple for this dazzling show, just a lot of exquisite objects of outstanding beauty, quality and ingenuity alongside occasional drawings from the Cartier archives to illustrate their development, all mostly spotlit against black. To Nov 12, vam.ac.uk
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Pirates — the bloody truth behind Captain Pugwash
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Wimbledon diary: strawberry sandwiches, pricey rackets and Oliver Tarvet's expenses
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The Guardian
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Shakespeare in war: Ukraine festival explores intersection to bard's world
The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life. This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity. A couple of women in the crowd, holding a flag showing the face of their beloved, wiped away tears. A small girl in a blue cotton dress held up a sign: 'Be their voice.' Another: 'Without you I am nothing.' A few hours later, audiences gathered for a spectacular promenade production of Romeo and Juliet, staged in an abandoned factory and the theatre's crypt-like basement, watching young lives torn apart by a malign fate. The festival had not been undertaken lightly, said the festival programme director, Iryna Chuzhynova, in a speech at its opening reception. The organisers had asked themselves whether holding a festival was the right thing to do while Ukraine was struggling against the Russian invaders. In the end, she said, 'we agreed that art is not in fact entertainment today'. 'It's true that in the theatre we create an illusion of peaceful life, but it's not peaceful life,' Chuzhynova said later. 'We need to be together. When you're in grief you need others' support. That's why we have these ceremonies, these rituals of theatre.' She said Ukraine was living in 'a moment of concentrated simultaneity' in which normal life and the catastrophe of war were experienced in disturbing proximity. One of the cast of Romeo and Juliet was not in the play that day, she added: he had recently signed a military contract and was already at the front. This year's Shakespeare festival is the city's second, after the organisers decided to forge ahead with 2024's inaugural edition. And, unlikely as it may seem, Shakespeare is booming across Ukraine. A King Lear and two Othellos are in repertoire in major Kyiv theatres; there is also an A Midsummer Night's Dream in the capital, a Hamlet, a Macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet. 'You can always find an intersection to Shakespeare's world in such situations as we have,' said the celebrated poet and translator Yuri Andrukhovych, who has made Ukrainian translations of four Shakespeare plays, including the festival's Romeo and Juliet. 'There is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems: fear, hate, passion, betrayal, the human soul.' There were Shakespeare comedies at the Ivano-Frankivsk festival – The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing – but the programme skewed towards tragedy, with, aside from Romeo and Juliet, two productions of King Lear plus a Richard III and a Macbeth. 'It's important to have a place for tears,' Chuzhynova said. Ivano-Frankivsk is in Ukraine's south-west, hundreds of miles from the frontline in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. But in the third year of Russia's invasion of the country, war hangs everywhere in the air. The pleasant pedestrianised streets of the small city are lined with more than 500 official memorials to the town's fallen, with flags fluttering above their portraits and flowers laid beneath them. The most popular Shakespeare play in Ukrainian theatres since the full-scale invasion has been Macbeth, Chuzhynova said. Its tale of the rise and fall of a tyrant speaks to the moment – most obviously calling to mind Vladimir Putin, but plenty of other authoritarian leaders around the globe. Andrukhovych is about to start work on a new translation with a view to a fresh production. Chuzhynova said Shakespeare had a way of speaking to Ukraine's political upheavals. In the wake of the Orange Revolution of 2004, when Russian-influenced political rhetoric pushed the narrative of 'two Ukraines', east and west, it was Romeo and Juliet, with its warring families, that became popular. After the Maidan protests, instigated in 2013 by students angry with the pro-Russian turn of their then president, Viktor Yanukovych, it was Hamlet that attracted directors: the story of a young man working out his identity while, in the background, a powerful neighbour arms for war. Macbeth had also been important in Ukraine a century ago, said Rostyslav Derzhypilskiy, the director of the Romeo and Juliet production. It was in 1920 in the central Ukrainian village of Bila Tserkva that the visionary director Les Kurbas – later killed in Stalin's purges – staged the first production of the play (and of any Shakespeare play) in the Ukrainian language. This was during the war that ripped through Ukraine after the October revolution of 1917. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion It is the imagined aftermath of one of those performances that provides the setting for a new play at the festival, When the Hurlyburly's Done, by the American playwright Richard Nelson and performed in Ukrainian translation. The all-female cast, from the Theatre on Podil in Kyiv, take on the roles of the women of Kurbas's company who cook, talk and eat together one evening. The characters include Bronislawa Nijinksa, who would later choreograph the radical Stravinsky ballet Les Noces. Nelson said the play was 'about a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of the war to be performed by a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war'. Uncertainty, violence and fear haunt the characters – who nevertheless find solace in each other's company. 'Almost everything in the play is very similar to events happening now,' said one cast member, Yulia Brusentseva. Maria Demenko, another actor, said: 'War is part of our lives and can't be separated from it. It's hard to live with that. Like our characters, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know what decisions we will need to make.' At the end of each festival performance, the actors asked the audience to keep a minute's silence. The devastating news that a member of their company, a popular young actor called Yuriy Felipenko, had been killed at the front had arrived the previous day. 'When people are on the verge of tears anyway, tragedy goes to a different level,' said Prof Michael Dobson, the head of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, who was attending the festival. The contrast between seeing stuff here and back home was 'almost embarrassing', he added. 'In Ukraine the work really means something to the actors and the audience. It's not some routine exercise.' Dobson said Shakespeare was an important figure in Britain during the second world war. John Gielgud toured his famous Hamlet. The film of Henry V starring Laurence Olivier, released in 1944, was a national morale booster. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, the young Denholm Elliott starred as Viola in Twelfth Night. The magical atmosphere of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is intensified by the fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream is being rehearsed while the events of the film play out. Dobson recalled how his own father saw Donald Wolfit as Lear while London was being bombed. His father never saw it again, believing that 'to experience that play's desolating vision of humanity during peacetime would be at best an anticlimax, at worst a sort of profanation'. The Nazis also enjoyed Shakespeare, Dobson pointed out. The celebrated actor Werner Krauss faced a denazification tribunal for, among other offensive depictions, his antisemitic portrayal of Shylock in a 1943 production of the Merchant of Venice in Vienna. He was cleared.
The Guardian
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Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers review – finally, Netflix makes a great, serious documentary
Netflix is not always known for its restraint in the documentary genre, but with its outstanding recent film Grenfell: Uncovered, and now Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers, it appears to be finding a new maturity and seriousness in the field. There have been plenty of recent documentaries on the subject of the attacks and the sprawling investigation that followed – no surprise, given that it is the 20th anniversary this week – but there is still real depth to be found here. Over four parts, this thorough series unravels the initial attacks on the London transport system, which killed 52 people and injured more than 700, then follows that febrile month into the failed bombings of 21 July, and then the police shooting of the innocent Jean Charles de Menezes, a day later. The first 25 minutes or so simply recount those first attacks, compiling the story using phone pictures, news footage, occasional reconstructions, the infamous photographs of the injured pouring out of tube stations and accounts from survivors and the families of victims. Though it is by now a familiar story, this evokes the fear, confusion and panic of that day in heart-racing detail. In those details, it is unsparing and frequently horrifying. Daniel Biddle lost his legs in the explosion at Edgware Road. His memory of locking eyes with the man who would shortly detonate the bomb in his bag is chilling, and his account of his fight to survive is as gripping as it is brutal. Others talk about the chaos, the noise, the screaming. One woman, who had managed to jump on the 30 bus near Tavistock Square in all of the transport disarray, recounts getting a text from her boyfriend at the time, saying: 'You were right, they were bombs.' She had just put her phone back in her pocket after reading it, she says, when the bus exploded. Those attacks led to the largest criminal investigation ever seen in the UK, which is the primary focus of all four episodes. These were the first suicide bombings to take place on British soil, and police did not know, immediately, that the bombers had also blown themselves up. The revelation about how they came to suspect this – from evidence gathered in one of the tube carriages – is gruesome and fascinating. Explosives expert Cliff Todd talks of material and techniques he had never seen before, and the work that went into tracking down those responsible – and attempting to prevent further attacks – is astonishing in its scale and reach. This is not simply a police procedural – and that strengthens it greatly. It is impressively comprehensive, taking in the political and media climate of the time. There are interviews with Eliza Manningham-Buller, then director general of MI5, as well as the former prime minister Tony Blair. It even puts the crucial question to Blair: did the invasion of Iraq in 2003 lead directly to these attacks in Britain? His answer is politician-like and broad, but at least it asks the question, and offers context to attacks that did not happen in a vacuum. Another survivor, Mustafa Kurtuldu, recalls his experience of being on the tube near Aldgate when his train was blown up. When he was finally removed from the carriage and taken out of the station, police searched his bag. There is footage of an appearance on GMTV, just days later, when the presenter asks him how he feels about the attacks, 'as a Muslim'. When the investigation moves to Beeston, in Leeds – where two of the four attackers were from – a youth worker in the Muslim community talks about the realisation that, as after 9/11, he would be asked, once more, to apologise for the actions of extremists. The third episode deals with the failed attacks on 21 July. There are eyewitness accounts of the explosions that went wrong – chilling and eerie, in their own way – the subsequent hunt for the four men who escaped is, again, astonishing in its scope. The next day, the 27-year-old Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes was on his way to work when he was described as behaving in an 'edgy' manner by police who had mistakenly identified him as a suspect. He was shot dead. One of the officers who pulled the trigger speaks here, his identity disguised. Again, the strength of Attack on London is in the details. When officers finally caught up with Yassin Omar – who had attempted to blow up Warren Street and had fled to Birmingham disguised in a burqa – he was standing in a bath with a backpack on. Fittingly, though, this does not end with the attackers, but with the survivors and their relatives. It strikes a careful balance throughout. Attack on London: Hunting the 7/7 Bombers is on Netflix now.
