Art exhibitions opening in London in May 2025
London is set to showcase a rich and varied programme of art exhibitions this May. At the Barbican, Feel the Sound will transform the entire centre into a multi-sensory exploration of sound beyond hearing, while Photo London at Somerset House will celebrate a decade of cutting-edge photography. The British Museum offers two major shows — one dedicated to the serene landscapes of Hiroshige, the other exploring the spiritual heritage of Ancient India. Across the city, highlights include Leonardo Drew’s monumental sculptural wave at the South London Gallery and Cecil Beaton’s floral fantasies at the Garden Museum. Here is our guide to the art exhibitions to watch out for in London in May.
Feel the Sound
Temporary Pleasure, Joyride, 2025, concept. Image courtesy of the artist.
#FLODown: Feel the Sound, the Barbican’s headline summer exhibition co-produced with Tokyo’s Museum of Narratives, will span the entire Centre—from The Curve to the underground car parks and the Lakeside. The show explores sound beyond hearing, inviting audiences to experience it through the body, memory, and emotion. Featuring 11 interactive installations, the exhibition includes new commissions by artists such as Miyu Hosoi, TRANS VOICES, and Temporary Pleasure, alongside adapted works by Evan Ifekoya and others. Highlights include a holographic choral experience, a car-park rave homage, AI-generated symphonies based on personal memories, and a poetic tribute to unheard sound through kite sculptures. Feel the Sound blends cutting-edge technology, art, and sensory exploration to shift how we engage with sound and one another.
Date: 22 May – 31 August 2025. Location: Barbican Centre, London, EC2Y 8DS. Price: £20 + BF. Book now.
Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew, Number 341, 2022, Art Basel: Unlimited, Switzerland. © Leonardo Drew, courtesy Galerie Lelong & Co., New York. Photo: Jon Cancro.
#FLODown: Leonardo Drew presents a new site-specific sculpture at the South London Gallery, marking his first solo exhibition in a London institution. Known for his large-scale, explosive works, Drew’s installation will cover the gallery’s walls and floor with fragments of wood, creating a double wave formation that reflects extreme weather events and natural disasters. Drew’s hands-on, meditative process transforms natural materials into abstract compositions, with the work responding to the height and architecture of the SLG’s Main Gallery.
Date: 30 May - 7 September 2025. Location: South London Gallery, 65- 67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH. Price: Free. southlondongallery.org.
Hiroshige: artist of the open road
Hiroshige: artist of the open road. Utagawa Hiroshige (1797-1858), Ferry on the Fuji River. From Famous Places in Japan.Colour-woodblock print, about 1832. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
#FLODown: The British Museum’s exhibition Hiroshige: artist of the open road celebrates the life and work of Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), one of Japan’s most celebrated artists. The exhibition, marking the first on Hiroshige in London for over 25 years, showcases a selection of his prints, paintings, and sketches, including many never seen before. Hiroshige’s work captures the landscapes, nature, and daily life of Japan during the Edo period, reflecting a society in transition. Famous for his serene landscapes and travel series like The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō Highway, he portrayed the bond between people and nature, offering solace through his accessible art. The exhibition also explores his legacy, noting his influence on European artists such as Van Gogh and Whistler, and contemporary artists like Julian Opie.
Date: 1 May - 7 September 2025. Location: British Museum, Great Russell St, London, WC1B 3DG. Price: from £18, Members and under-16s free. Book now.
Caspar Heinemann: Sod All
Caspar Heinemann, Grandfather's Axe, 2023. Courtesy of the Artist, Édouard Montassut, Paris and Cabinet, London.
#FLODown: Caspar Heinemann’s first solo institutional exhibition in the UK, Sod All, opens at Studio Voltaire and explores the intersection of spiritual, political, and sexual countercultures through folk art and vernacular architecture. Known for his speculative fiction and queer narratives, Heinemann will present miniaturised dioramas and a major site-specific installation that suspends sculptures from the ceiling, challenging the audience’s perspective. The exhibition builds on his ongoing exploration of land politics, folk revival, and spiritual histories, following an onsite production residency.
Date: 7 May - 3 August 2025. Location: Studio Voltaire, 1A Nelson’s Row, London SW4 7JR.
Holly Stevenson: Tracing the Irretraceable
Jokes Topple Taboos (2025) Ceramic: Glazed Stoneware Image © Holly Stevenson.
#FLODown: Tracing the Irretraceable explores the impact of Freudian psychoanalysis on the works of contemporary artists Holly Stevenson and the late Jane McAdam Freud. The exhibition celebrates the completion of the first Freud Artist Residency, which Stevenson undertook over eighteen months in Příbor, Czechia, where Freud was born. The show highlights the connection between Stevenson’s and McAdam Freud’s works, drawing on Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Stevenson’s decade-long project In Sigmund Freud’s Ashtray is featured, with her ceramic sculptures reflecting on repression through the symbolic reimagining of an ashtray from Freud’s desk. The exhibition at the Freud Museum London reveals how Freud’s personal collection and psychoanalytic theories continue to influence contemporary art.
Date: 14 May - 29 June 2025. Location: Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London NW3 5SX. Price: £14.50. Concessions available.Book now.
Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party
Cecil Beaton by Cecil Beaton, 1960s © Cecil Beaton Archive, Condé Nast.
#FLODown: Cecil Beaton’s Garden Party at the Garden Museum is the first exhibition to explore the central role that gardens and flowers played across Beaton’s wide-ranging creative career. Best known for his fashion photography, Beaton also worked in theatre, film, and visual art. The show brings together photographs, paintings, drawings, and costume designs to reveal how floral imagery shaped his work — from his elaborate garden party decorations to the iconic flower-filled sets of My Fair Lady.
Date: 14 May - 21 Sep 2025. Location: Garden Museum , 5 Lambeth Palace Rd, London SE1 7LB. Price: from £15. Concessions available. Book now.
Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha
Huma Bhabha, 2022. Image credit: Photo by Daniel Dorsa. Courtesy David Zwirner.
#FLODown: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha, a major new exhibition bringing together works by contemporary artist Huma Bhabha and 20th-century sculptor Alberto Giacometti for the first time, will go on show at the Barbican Centre. Inaugurating a new, intimate gallery space within the Centre, the exhibition spans nearly a century of sculpture, featuring works in plaster, bronze, terracotta, assemblage, and found materials. Bhabha’s haunting, post-apocalyptic figures are presented in dialogue with Giacometti’s iconic postwar forms, with both artists exploring the human body as a vessel for trauma and transformation. Echoing themes of conflict and survival, the exhibition moves fluidly between ancient, modern, and futuristic imagery, and beyond the gallery, four of Bhabha’s monumental sculptures are also on view for free in the Level 2 Foyer.
Date: 8 May - 10 August 2025. Location: Level 2, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London,EC2Y 8DS. Price: £8 + BF. Book now.
Ancient India: Living Traditions
Ardhanarishvara, 'lord who is half woman', Shiva and Parvati combined in one deity, about 1790-1810 © The Trustees of the British Museum.
#FLODown: Ancient India: Living Traditions explores the roots of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism through over 180 objects, from 2,000-year-old sculptures to vibrant manuscripts and paintings. Drawing on the British Museum’s South Asian collection alongside national and international loans, it’s the first exhibition to present early Indian sacred art through a global, pluralistic lens. Co-curated with practising Buddhists, Hindus, and Jains, the show highlights enduring devotional practices, ethical display methods, and the fascinating journeys of each object.
Date: 22 May -19 October 2025. Location: The British Museum, Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DG. Price: from £16. Book now.
Claudio Parmiggiani
Untitled, 2023, Senza titolo, private collection, Switzerland, Courtesy Tornabuoni Art. Photo: Moritz Bernoully - Courtesy Archivio Claudio Parmiggiani.
#FLODown: Claudio Parmiggiani’s exhibition, opening at the Estorick Collection, is the first institutional UK show dedicated to the pioneering Italian artist. Spanning fifty years of his practice, it features his signature Delocazioni works—ghostly images created with smoke and soot that explore themes of memory, absence, and the passage of time. These atmospheric impressions of books, windows, and musical instruments are shown alongside sculptural assemblages and works on paper, offering a poetic reflection on Parmiggiani’s lifelong engagement with the fragility of presence.
Date: 28 May-31 August 2025. Location: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1 2AN. Price: from £9.50. Concessions available. Book now.
Photo London
Photo London will return to Somerset House in 2025 to mark its milestone 10th edition.
#FLODown: Photo London will celebrate its 10th anniversary at Somerset House and will bring together a strong lineup of returning and new international galleries. The fair will feature the return of the Discovery section for emerging galleries and will introduce the new Positions section, spotlighting underrepresented photographers championed by collectors and patrons. A special exhibition, London Lives, will showcase around 30 leading artists, celebrating the extraordinary wealth of London’s photographic talent. Presenting Partner Belmond will host a solo show by photographer Colin Dodgson. The event will also include a new Book Market championing independent publishers, a Talks Programme curated by Thames & Hudson, and awards such as the Photo London x Nikon Emerging Photographer of the Year and the Photo London x Hahnemühle Student Award.
Date: 15 – 18 May 2025 (Preview 14 May). Location: Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA. Price: from £32. Concessions available. Book now.
Cornelia Parker: History Painting
Colour Analysis From I Have a Dream generator design and implementation by Mel Dollison and Liza Daly via colorproblems.art.
#FLODown: Cornelia Parker returns to Frith Street Gallery this summer with History Painting, a new series of abstract oil works and colour plots. Drawing on historic newspaper covers and the colour theories of 19th-century artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel, Parker transforms iconic headlines—from the sinking of the Titanic to the trial of Donald Trump—into vibrant, grid-like compositions. Using handmade pigments ground from materials she’s collected over decades, including lightning-struck church charcoal, fossilised dinosaur bones and hoover dust from Parliament, these works turn the chaos of history into carefully constructed visual archives, exploring the intersection of memory, media and material.
Date: 16 May – 5 July 2025. Location: Frith Street Gallery, 17-18 Golden Square, London, W1F 9JJ. Price: Free. frithstreetgallery.com.
Click here to discover more art exhibitions in London in 2025.
