ART
Peter Hujar: Eyes Open in the Dark
Queer life in New York in the 70s and 80s. Abandoned buildings, street scenes and intimate portraits of writers, artists, musicians and drag queens. The great American photographer Peter Hujar captured them all in his ravishing, unflinching black-and-white images. This is the first posthumous exhibition to have access to the complete span of Hujar’s work. Adrian Searle
Raven Row, London, 29 January to 6 April
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds
Surreal name, surreal artist, but Ithell Colquhoun had real talent. This lifelong occult believer and practitioner had a haunting ability to dredge sensual, confounding images from her unconscious. Those were pearls that were her eyes, seeing magic in the rock pools of the British shoreline. A genius of seaside surrealism. Jonathan Jones
Tate St Ives, 1 February to 5 May
Linder: Danger Came Smiling
Ever since she revived the cut-up montage methods of Dada to create punk art for Buzzcocks in 1970s Manchester, Linder has been investigating and upending mass imagery, with a feminist perspective and acute intelligence. This is a well-deserved retrospective of a subversive and unrelenting British art hero. JJ
Hayward Gallery, London, 11 February to 5 May
Resistance
This compendious exhibition charts a history of protests across the UK, and looks at how photography has documented and driven change. Conceived by Steve McQueen, Resistance takes us from the 1903 suffragette movement to anti-Iraq war protests, from the 1920 Blind March to the Black People’s Day of Action on 2 March 1981 and beyond. AS
Turner Contemporary, Margate, 22 February to 1 June
Leigh Bowery!
From performing raucously in nightclubs to posing naked for Lucian Freud, Bowery brought a spirit of avant garde defiance to late-20th-century London, proving that punk wasn’t dead and neither was Weimar. How will this exhibition bring his colossal presence to life? RuPaul, Sue Tilley and Boy George lend their assistance. JJ
Tate Modern, London, 27 February to 31 August
Solange Pessoa
Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa’s sculptures, and her sinuous drawings of serpents, plants and humans, all in a state of metamorphosis, are filled with surprise and mystery. Her gatherings of bulging burlap sacks, works incorporating feathers, hair, wool and skin, her carved rocks and arrangements of real grapes and bronze stones teeter between the natural and the fabricated. AS
Tramway, Glasgow, April to September (exact dates TBC)
Ed Atkins
The real and the not exactly real, the literary and the poetic come together in Atkins’ work. Using motion-capture technology and computer-generated avatars, and riven with life’s sadness and technology’s glitches, Atkins’ art is deeply complex and rewarding. It is not so much haunting as haunted, with Atkins as the ghost in the machine. AS
Tate Britain, London, 2 April to 25 August
Richard Wright
Retina-jangling, space-mangling, eye-boggling and mind-tricking, the site-specific ephemeral wall-drawings of the 2009 Turner Prize-winner Richard Wright usually get painted over when his shows close. See it and its gone. He has extended his range to sculpture and glass, and from the optical to the metaphysical and beyond in his biggest UK solo show in two decades. AS
Camden Art Centre, London, 11 April to 22 June
Encounters: Giacometti
In a new space in the Barbican Centre, the sculptors Huma Bhabha, Mona Hatoum and Lynda Benglis will have consecutive exhibitions showing their work alongside that of the pioneering sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was making some of his most attenuated figures at the same time the brutalist Barbican was being built. Each artist will respond to different bodies of work, delving into eroticism, death, trauma … and even humour. Alex Needham
Barbican, London, 8 May 2025 to 1 May 2026
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
Helen Chadwick was a force of nature – outspoken, inventive and full of ideas. Her death in 1996 at 42 curtailed a career marked by its adventurousness and use of a startling range of materials. Her body, meat, flowers and even piss-holes in the snow feature in the British artist’s first retrospective. AS
Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October
Donald Locke
Enormously prolific and fizzing with ideas, the Guyanese artist Donald Locke studied and worked in the UK and Guyana before finally settling in Atlanta in the US, where he died in 2010 aged 80. Hybrid and heterodox, working between ceramics, sculpture, printmaking and painting, he encompassed minimalism and figuration, assemblage and vernacular art. His art played on black culture and modernism, history and colonialism. AS
Spike Island, Bristol, 31 May to 7 September, then Ikon, Birmingham, 1 October 2025 to 11 January 2026
Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams
Humour and abstraction, bodies and abjection all played their part in the work of the only three female artists selected by critic Lucy Lippard for her groundbreaking group show Eccentric Abstraction in New York in 1966. Now seen as pioneers of feminist art, their work is playful, sometimes threatening, and erotic in intent. It is accompanied at the Courtauld by a parallel show of Bourgeois’ drawings from the 1960s. AS
Courtauld Gallery, London, 20 June to 14 September
Kiefer/Van Gogh
Anselm Kiefer, greatest artist alive, is 80 next year and will mark it with multiple exhibitions of his brooding, tumultuous creativity, including this blockbuster that sets his encrusted, flower-sprouting homages to Vincent van Gogh beside the original paintings of Provence that inspired him. JJ
Royal Academy, London, 28 June to 26 October; Kiefer will also show at the Ashmolean, Oxford, 14 February to 15 June.
Emily Kam Kngwarray
A senior Anmatyerre woman from the Utopia region of Australia’s central desert, Emily Kam Kngwarray (1910-96) only began painting in earnest in her late 70s, going on to produce thousands of paintings and batiks, many on a very large scale. They may resemble western abstraction, but her painting, made largely in isolation, has far older roots. AS
Tate Modern, London, 10 July 2025 to 11 January 2026
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Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years
The sculptor of sheepfolds, cairns and radiant circles of autumn leaves was practising sustainable art long before today’s belated recognition of climate crisis. This retrospective brings together five decades of Goldsworthy’s technically modest, yet visually spectacular land art. It should be a moving encounter with a modern Romantic. JJ
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November
Millet: Life on the Land
We dote on British landscape painters (Constable and Turner get another Tate show next year), but it was this eerie French artist of rural life who inspired and obsessed modern artists. Van Gogh identified with his compassion for country folk, Salvador Dalí parodied his masterpiece L’Angelus. See why he fascinated them. JJ
National Gallery, London, 7 August to 19 October
Marie Antoinette Style
They do know she was brutally excuted, right? This may sound like an ungainly attempt to give France’s doomed 18th-century queen the Kylie treatment but then again why not, with the V&A’s fantastic collections powering a fresh way of seeing European history and reassessing an unjustly hated figure. JJ
V&A South Kensington, London, 20 September 2025 to 22 March 2026
Picasso: The Three Dancers
Next year marks 100 years since Picasso painted the finest work in Tate’s collections, his surrealistic, autobiographical, savage 1925 masterpiece in which dancers cavort ecstatically in a narrow room, their naked bodies unravelling to reveal images of death against a hard blue window. This exhibition dives into its creation and meanings. JJ
Tate Modern, London, 25 September to spring 2026
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
The much lauded 69-year-old painter celebrates and interrogates the Black experience in America. In paintings filled with allegory and symbolism, his large-scale narratives and smaller portraits include wide-ranging references, from art history to everyday life, encapsulating social injustice and aspiration. This long-overdue show includes 70 works, some made for the exhibition. AS
Royal Academy, London, 20 September 2025 to 18 January 2026
Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures
There is no stopping the veteran double act who have created new art as energetically this century as they did in the last, including their remarkable Corpsing Pictures in which they play with bones with the accepting humour of a modern danse macabre. Celebrate the vitality of their anger and wit. JJ
Hayward Gallery, London, 7 October 2025 to 4 January 2026
ARCHITECTURE
Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style
From 1920s onesies to today’s streamlined Speedos, a century of swimming will splash into the Design Museum in spring. Charting the birth of public lidos, seaside resorts, beach holidays, record-breaking women and wild swimming culture, the exhibition will explore how swimming has influenced and subverted our ideas of autonomy and agency, and sport and style over the last 100 years, across architecture, fashion and athletic performance. Oliver Wainwright
Design Museum, London, from 28 March to 17 August
V&A East Storehouse
Ever wanted to rifle through the V&A’s dressing up box? Joining the recent trend of museums opening up their archives to the public, the illustrious South Kensington repository will launch the first part of its new east London home in May with the Storehouse – the former Olympic media centre reborn, by US design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, as an immersive world of half a million objects, spanning every discipline, from Biba and Balenciaga to the Sex Pistols and samurai swords. OW
V&A East Storehouse, London, from 31 May
Fenix, Rotterdam
Rotterdam will add yet another novelty architectural flourish to its skyline of giant pencils, topsy-turvy cubes and huge mirrored bowls next year. The Chinese architect Ma Yansong – an energetic protege of Zaha Hadid – will grace the former docklands HQ of the Holland America Line with a swooshing polished spiral lookout, forming a jazzy crown for Fenix, a new international art museum devoted to the theme of migration. It is hoped the project will help to revive this former red-light district, home to the oldest Chinatown in continental Europe. OW
Fenix, Rotterdam, opens 16 May
Calder Gardens, Philadelphia
The abstract mobiles of the American kinetic sculptor Alexander Calder will receive a dedicated new home next year, in the form of a magical new museum and garden designed by Herzog & de Meuron, working with the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf. Sunken into the landscape, it promises to create a mysterious subterranean world of niches, nooks, and courtyards engulfed with greenery. Jacques Herzog has paid particular personal attention to this one, so it should be a good ’un. OW
Calder Gardens, Philadelphia, is due to open in September 2025
