Skip to main content

What's On in 2025

What will be the exhibition highlights of 2025 around Britain and Europe? At the end of the year, Tate Britain will be marking 250 years since the birth of JMW Turner and John Constable with a potential blockbuster. Meanwhile, the Swiss are  making a big thing  of the 100th anniversary of the death of Félix Vallotton  (a real favourite of ours). Among women artists in the spotlight will be Anna Ancher, Ithell Colquhoun, Artemisia Gentileschi and Suzanne Valadon. Here's a selection of what's coming up, in more or less chronological order; as ever, we make no claim to comprehensiveness, and our choice very much reflects our personal taste. And in our search for the most interesting shows, we're visiting Ascona, Baden-Baden, Chemnitz and Winterthur, among other places.  January  We start off in Paris, at the Pompidou Centre; the 1970s inside-out building is showing its age and it'll be shut in the summer for a renovation programme scheduled to last until 2030. Bef...

Subscribe to updates

Opening and Closing in October

There are an awful lot of new shows to talk about this month, particularly in London, and one that looks set to be a crowd-puller is Gauguin Portraits at the National Gallery. It's the first ever exhibition devoted to the portraits of Paul Gauguin and aims to demonstrate how he revolutionised the genre. There are more than 50 works, including high-profile loans from around Europe and North America, but ticket prices (£24 on the door at weekends) are £6 higher than for the recent Sorolla show and £2 up on last year's Monet blockbuster. October 7 to January 26.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is marking the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt's death with Rembrandt's Light, an exhibition designed to showcase the artist's mastery of light and shadow and focusing on his middle period. It will have around 35 works, including some never seen in the UK before, and runs from October 4 to February 2.
The recent show at the Foundling Museum showed just how much meaning William Hogarth could pack into a single picture. From October 9, Hogarth: Place and Progress at Sir John Soane's Museum will provide a unique chance to see and appreciate in one place all of his series of paintings and engravings -- some of the most enduring images in British art. Astonishingly, entry is free, though you will need to book a timeslot in advance. Until January 5.

One of the best shows we've seen this year was the Bridget Riley retrospective in Edinburgh, and now it's heading south to the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank. It's a fantastic overview of an artist whose stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines and dots seem to move on the canvas or wall in front of you, altering your perceptions. Not to be missed, even by those who normally find abstract painting a turn-off. October 23 to January 26.

The Royal Academy promises a world first in the shape of Lucian Freud: The Self-Portraits, with more than 50 works tracing the development of his style over the course of seven decades. Freud was one of the few 20th-century artists to depict himself so consistently. On from October 27 until January 26.
We've seen a couple of intriguing shows about Orientalism recently (in Paris and at the Watts Gallery in Surrey), so we're looking forward to Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art at the British Museum, which starts on October 10. Eugène Delacroix and John Frederick Lewis (the subject of the Watts exhibition) are among the artists featured. Until January 26.

A different form of exoticism at the Barbican: Into the Night will take visitors on a journey through the cabarets and clubs that inspired modern art from the 1880s to the 1960s. Think Weimar Berlin, jazz in Harlem.... Over 200 works, many rarely seen in Britain, will be on show from October 4 to January 19.

Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery aims to tell the story of the overlooked contribution of a dozen women to the Pre-Raph movement, including Evelyn de Morgan, Effie Millais and Elizabeth Siddal, through new discoveries and unseen works. The show runs from October 17 to January 26. Ticket prices have been creeping up at the Portrait Gallery, as elsewhere, and entry to this exhibition at the weekends is £22 including a Gift Aid donation. But there's also a free show starting at the gallery on October 3. Elizabeth Peyton: Aire and Angels explores the work of the contemporary American painter whose subjects include celebrities and the monarchy. Until January 5.

One more show in the capital to tell you about: Pioneers at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow looks at the connections between the Arts and Crafts movement around William Morris and the ground-breaking work of the Bauhaus, founded in Weimar a century ago this year. There are more than 60 objects on display, entry is free, and the exhibition runs from October 19 to January 26.

There's a big exhibition coming to Milton Keynes, featuring one of the greatest British artists of the 18th century, and of course, the painter of horses par excellence. George Stubbs: 'All Done from Nature' brings together 80 works, among them life-size portrait of Whistlejacket. This, the first major Stubbs show for three decades, includes pieces not seen in public before. It's on at the MK Gallery from October 12 to January 26.
It is, of course, the 500th anniversary of the death of the ultimate Renaissance man, and the location for the ultimate Leonardo da Vinci exhibition has to be the Louvre. The museum, which has the world's largest collection of Leonardo paintings, has attempted to assemble as many of his pictures as possible for the show, though the Mona Lisa will stay in its normal gallery. The exhibition runs from October 24 to February 24, and, as you might expect, it's going to be incredibly busy, so you have to book a timeslot in advance here, even if you're entitled to free admission. 

Elsewhere in Paris, there are two big names at the Grand Palais: Starting on October 9, it's Toulouse-Lautrec. The exhibition, on until January 27, aims to show the artist as an important innovator at the end of the 19th century, not just a chronicler of Parisian nightlife. Opening on October 16 is the first major show in France dedicated to El Greco. The retrospective, featuring more than 60 works including loans from North America, continues until February 10.

The Dutch Golden Age produced many great artists, and it's astounding to find that Pieter de Hooch, Johannes Vermeer's contemporary in Delft, has never been the subject of a retrospective in the Netherlands before. Pieter de Hooch in Delft: From the Shadow of Vermeer opens at the Prinsenhof in Delft on October 11 and features 29 works from the master of courtyard and interior views. It's on until February 16. 

A painter whose often witty genre scenes inspired both de Hooch and Vermeer was Nicolaes Maes, and he gets his own retrospective at the Mauritshuis in The Hague from October 17 to January 19. Nicolaes Maes -- Rembrandt's Versatile Pupil is the title of this show, which will also be coming to the National Gallery in London in February.
At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, you can see Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch and Spanish Masters starting on October 11, with pairs of paintings by 17th-century artists from both countries hung alongside each other to compare and contrast. We saw the Spanish version of this show at the Prado in Madrid over the summer; there's some great art on display and some of it worked brilliantly, but bits of the show simply didn't gel. The Rijksmuseum exhibition goes on until January 19.

Next door, at the Van Gogh Museum, Jean-François Millet: Sowing the Seeds of Modern Art starts on October 4. Best known for his depictions of rural life, Millet (1814-1875) inspired not only van Gogh, but many other painters, from Monet to Munch to Dalí, and work by these and other artists will be on display in this show, which finishes on January 12.

And some more Monet at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague from October 12 to February 2. Monet -- The Garden Paintings focuses on the period from 1900 to 1926, when the artist was painting his garden at Giverny in an increasingly abstract style.

Surrealism's two greatest exponents come together in Brussels starting on October 11. Dalí & Magritte: Two Surrealist Icons in Dialogue at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts looks back to 1929, when the two met in Paris and Magritte then travelled to see Dalí in Spain. With loans from more than 40 museums and private collections, the show continues until February 9. 

To Madrid now, and the new show at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum is The Impressionists and Photography. Featuring more than 60 oils and works on paper, the show illustrates how the new technology changed the way painters viewed the world. October 15 to January 26.

And just down the road at the Prado, it's A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, who achieved artistic fame in the very male-dominated world of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There are 60 works in this exhibition, which runs from October 22 to February 2.

If you haven't seen the Pierre Bonnard exhibition, with its sun-drenched exteriors or intimate bathroom scenes, in London or Copenhagen, it opens in Vienna on October 10. The show at the Kunstforum continues until January 12. 

Over at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, meanwhile, it's a chance to overdose on Baroque drama and passion in Caravaggio & Bernini from October 15 to January 19. With loans from around the world, the show moves on to the Rijksmuseum in February.

We saw at Tate Britain earlier this year how Vincent van Gogh was influenced by Britain and influenced British art in return. Now for the German version: Making Van Gogh: A German Love Story at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt looks at how the Dutchman's work became especially popular in Germany in the years leading up to World War I. With 50 works by van Gogh and another 70 by German artists, the exhibition is on from October 23 to February 16. 
And finally, one more van Gogh exhibition starting in Germany: Still-life paintings accounted for about a fifth of his output, and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam, just outside Berlin, is assembling 27 of them for a show simply entitled Van Gogh: Still Lifes. October 26 to February 2. 

Last chance to see....

Closing on October 13 is the excellent and comprehensive Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing at the Queen's Gallery in London. That's also the last day for the vibrant abstracted Sussex landscapes in Ivon Hitchens: Space through Colour at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and for the rather snowier Scottish landscapes of Victoria Crowe at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh.
Four shows finish on October 27, including, set among the planting and glasshouses of Kew Gardens in south-west London, the spectacular glass sculptures of Dale Chihuly. In central London, it's the final day at the Royal Academy for Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, in a show that we found didn't really match the hype. Closing at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh is the really engrossing look back at 400 Years of Collage, and in Saffron Walden in Essex the curtain falls on Mr & Mrs Ravilious, which revealed the witty drawings and engravings of Eric's wife Tirzah Garwood.

Images

Paul Gauguin, Portrait of Madame Roulin, 1888, Saint Louis Art Museum. Image courtesy Saint Louis Art Museum
Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait, 1642, Royal Collection Trust. © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019
Lucian Freud, Reflection with Two Children (Self-Portrait), 1965, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. © The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images
George Stubbs, Whistlejacket, c. 1762, National Gallery, London. © National Gallery
Nicolaes Maes, Two Women in Conversation at a Window, c. 1655-1660, Dordrechts Museum
Vincent van Gogh, The Poplars at Saint-Rémy, 1889, The Cleveland Museum of Art. Photo courtesy The Cleveland Museum of Art
Victoria Crowe, Blue Snow, Fiery Trees, 2011, Private collection. © Victoria Crowe

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Opening and Closing in October

There's been a spate of exhibitions over the past few years aimed at redressing centuries of neglect of the work of women artists, and the Italian Baroque painter  Artemisia Gentileschi is the latest to come into focus, at the National Gallery in London, starting on October 3. Most of the works have never been seen in Britain before, and they cover a lengthy career that features strong female figures in Biblical and classical scenes, as well as self-portraits. Until January 24.  Also starting at the National on October 7 is a free exhibition that looks at Sin , as depicted by artists from Diego Velázquez and William Hogarth through to Tracey Emin, blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. This one runs until January 3.   Tate Britain shows this winter how JMW Turner embraced the rapid industrial and technological advances at the start of the 19th century and recorded them in his work. Turner's Modern World , starting on October 28, will inclu...

The Thrill of Pleasure: Bridget Riley

Prepare yourself for some sensory overload. Curves, stripes, zig-zags, wavy lines, dots, in black and white or colour. Look at many of the paintings of Bridget Riley and you're unable to escape the eerie sensation that the picture in front of you is in motion, has its own inner three-dimensional life, is not just inert paint on flat canvas, panel or plaster. It's by no means unusual to see selections of Riley's paintings on display, but a blockbuster exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh brings together 70 years of her pictures in a dazzling extravaganza of abstraction, including a recreation of her only actual 3D work, which you walk into for a perspectival sensurround experience. It's "that thrill of pleasure which sight itself reveals," as Riley once said. It's a really terrific show, and the thrill of pleasure in the Scottish capital was enhanced by the unexpected lack of visitors on the day we went to see it, with huge empty sp...

Angelica Kauffman: Breaking Through the 18th-Century Glass Ceiling

In the late 18th century, Angelica Kauffman was famous throughout Europe, one of the leading international painters of the day. A success in London, Venice and Rome, she attracted commissions from Catherine the Great, the Emperor of Austria and the Pope. She was a close friend of Goethe, a founding member of Britain's Royal Academy. When she died in 1807, her lavish funeral in Rome drew enormous crowds. A far from ordinary life, then. And for an 18th-century woman in the male-dominated world of art, an utterly extraordinary one. She achieved equal pay, got women wearing trousers, drew male nudes and even had a pre-nup. It's a story that's arrestingly told in  Angelica Kauffman: Artist, Superwoman, Influencer , a fine exhibition now on at the Kunstpalast in Dusseldorf that will be heading to London, and naturally the  Royal Academy , this summer. Kauffman was born in Chur in eastern Switzerland in 1741 and was a child prodigy, not just as a painter but also as a singer...