Autumn 2025 in London: Ten exhibitions everyone will be talking about

As autumn settles in, London’s cultural calendar comes back to life after a languid summer. The holiday lull gives way to a season packed with major retrospectives and daring experiments by contemporary artists. The Afisha.London editorial team has selected ten exhibitions that promise to define the season.

 

This article is also available in Russian here. 

Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists at The National Gallery

This autumn, the National Gallery opens a sweeping retrospective of Neo-Impressionism — the painters once accused of heralding the “death of painting”. Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Camille Pissarro, Vincent van Gogh and their peers created canvases from countless dots of pure colour, dissolving up close and vibrating with life at a distance. Behind the elegance of the technique lay radical politics: their works reflected both joy in modern life and anxieties about the industrial age.

 

 

The exhibition draws on the remarkable collection of Helene Kröller-Müller, one of the first great female patrons of the 20th century, who assembled the world’s most significant Neo-Impressionist holdings. This autumn, paintings from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo travel to London for the first time on such a scale.
13 September 2025 – 8 February 2026

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For readers wishing to dive deeper into the context of the show, we recommend Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists — see here. It offers fresh insight into the masterpieces now on view in London. 

 

Théo van Rysselberghe, ‘In July, before Noon’, 1890. Photo: © Collection Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, the Netherlands. Photographer: Rik Klein Gotin

 

David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse

The season’s headline opening is the David Bowie Centre at V&A East Storehouse. More than 90,000 objects from the artist’s archive will be on view for the first time: from Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane costumes to handwritten lyrics, sketches and personal letters. Alongside these iconic items are projects that never saw the light of day — such as Bowie’s unrealised film adaptation of Orwell’s 1984.

 

 

 

For fans eager to bring a piece of Bowie’s world home, there are ways to step inside his universe. The legendary Ziggy Stardust costume is available here — a symbol of Bowie’s fearless reinvention — while the definitive biography Bowie at the Centre of It All can be found here, offering insight into the man behind the myth.

Special focus at the Centre will also be given to Bowie’s collaborations, from the Space Oddity cover designed by Victor Vasarely to costumes for his tours. The first displays are curated by Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party, who have chosen outfits, photographs and letters that reveal Bowie as an artist always in dialogue with others. Read more

 

 

Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern

One hundred years ago, Picasso painted The Three Dancers, a work that crystallised his fascination with theatre, masks and performance. Tate Modern marks the anniversary with Theatre Picasso, transforming gallery spaces into a stage. Curated by artist Wu Tsang and writer Enrique Fuentesblanca, the show presents more than 45 works from Tate and European collections, including rarely seen pieces in the UK.

 

Read also: The love and hate story of artist Pablo Picasso and Ballets Russes dancer Olga Khokhlova

 

The exhibition explores how Picasso fashioned his public persona — as both performer and outsider — and how that sense of theatricality continues to shape cultural ideas of what an artist is. This is less a retrospective than an experiment: a dialogue between past and present.
17 September 2025 – 12 April 2026

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As a companion to Theatre Picasso at Tate Modern, the Taschen volume Picasso: KA — see here — offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of his career, from the Blue and Rose Periods to Cubism, Guernica, and his later political works.

 

 

Marie Antoinette Style at V&A

The V&A presents the UK’s first exhibition devoted to the most fashionable queen in history. Marie Antoinette Style traces the birth and endless reinventions of a look synonymous with extravagance and daring. More than 250 objects will be on show — from rare personal items, including the queen’s silk shoes and jewellery, to costumes from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and gowns by Dior, Chanel and Vivienne Westwood.

 

 

Highlights include artefacts from Versailles that have never before left France: items from the queen’s dressing table, furniture, porcelain, and even her final letter before execution. Theatrical design, immersive installations and scented evocations of court life promise a journey back in time.

20 September 2025 – 22 March 2026

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Costume Couture: Sixty Years of Cosprop at Fashion and Textile Museum

Founded in 1965 by costume designer John Bright, London’s Cosprop studio has dressed film and TV from Pride and Prejudice to The English Patient, Downton Abbey and Pirates of the Caribbean. For the first time in sixty years, its archive opens to the public.

Costume Couture showcases costumes that previously existed only on screen: Helena Bonham Carter’s gown from A Room with a View, Maggie Smith’s dresses from Downton Abbey, Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy ensemble, and Lesley Manville’s costumes from Mrs Harris Goes to Paris. A richly illustrated book, The Costume House: The Inside Story of Cosprop, with a foreword by Dame Judi Dench, accompanies the show.

26 September 2025 – 8 March 2026

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Lee Miller at Tate Britain

This autumn, Tate Britain stages the UK’s largest retrospective of Lee Miller — the model-turned-photographer who swapped the runway for the camera. The exhibition brings together over 230 photographs, from surrealist experiments in Paris with Man Ray to frontline reportage during World War II.

As Vogue’s war correspondent, Miller recorded the liberation of Europe and appeared in the famous images taken in Hitler’s bathtub. The exhibition traces her journey from muse of Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen to photojournalist documenting Blitzed London, Dachau, and portraits of Charlie Chaplin. Unseen images from Egypt, Syria and Romania, along with her Vogue writings, will be shown for the first time.

 

Read also: Anna Wintour: how she became a fashion icon and what her exit from Vogue could mean

 

 

The Tate Britain retrospective of Lee Miller is best accompanied by two essential books.

  • Lee Miller — see here: a comprehensive study of her career, from her Paris years with Man Ray to her wartime reportage, richly illustrated with hundreds of images and essays.
  • The Lives of Lee Miller — see here: written by her son Antony Penrose, this biography inspired the 2024 film Lee starring Kate Winslet. It captures Miller’s many “lives” — model, surrealist, and war correspondent.

 

2 October 2025 — 15 Febuary 2026
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Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures at Hayward Gallery

Britain’s great art provocateurs return. Hayward Gallery presents Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures — more than 60 monumental installations created over the past quarter-century. Newspaper headlines, street signs, fragments of phrases and everyday objects are transformed into vast mosaics exploring sex, religion, nation and mortality.

The exhibition also debuts The Screw Pictures (2025), a series confronting the artists’ own sense of ageing and mortality.

7 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

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Gilbert & George “FATES, 2005” Photo: © Gilbert & George. Courtesy White Cube

 

Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at National Portrait Gallery

The National Portrait Gallery stages the first major exhibition devoted entirely to Cecil Beaton’s contribution to fashion photography. Around 250 works trace his career from early images of the Bright Young Things to iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Francis Bacon and the Royal Family.

Beaton, the “king of Vogue”, fused Edwardian theatricality with European surrealism and American modernism. His lens defined glamour between the wars and set a new canon for fashion imagery. Alongside photographs, the exhibition includes letters, sketches, costumes and culminates with his Oscar-winning work on My Fair Lady.

9 October 2025 – 11 January 2026

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The exhibition Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery is best paired with three books, each revealing a different facet of Beaton.

  • Cecil Beaton’s Cocktail Book — see here: a playful collection of cocktail recipes with Beaton’s witty sketches, inspired by the “Bright Young Things”.
  • Cecil Beaton: The Royal Portraits — see here: a fresh look at his royal portraits and his central role in shaping the image of the House of Windsor.
  • Cecil Beaton at Home: An Interior Life — see here: a lavishly illustrated volume on Beaton’s homes, interiors and private life, intimate and theatrical in equal measure.

Together, these three books reveal not just the photographer, but a man who turned his entire life into art.

 

 

Wes Anderson: The Archives at Design Museum

A pastel façade here, a hand-drawn notebook there, Oscar-winning costumes and handmade puppets — all feature in Wes Anderson: The Archives at the Design Museum, the director’s first major retrospective. More than 600 objects spanning three decades chart the idiosyncratic world of his films.

 

 

Centrepieces include a three-metre model of The Grand Budapest Hotel, costumes worn by Gwyneth Paltrow, Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes, and original puppets from Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs.

As a companion to Wes Anderson: The Archives at the Design Museum, The Worlds of Wes Anderson — see here — offers unique insight into the inspirations behind his films. From Hitchcock and Truffaut to Jacques Cousteau and The New Yorker, the book traces the cultural touchstones that shaped Anderson’s distinctive worlds, from The Grand Budapest Hotel to The French Dispatch.

21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026

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Read also: Gothic Carnival: A Guide to Tim Burton’s Films

 

Photo: Wes Anderson. Searchlight Pictures, by Charlie Gray

 

Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals at Tate Britain

To mark the 250th anniversary of two of Britain’s greatest landscape painters — J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) — Tate Britain mounts its most ambitious exhibition yet on their rivalry and legacy.

Born just a year apart, they led parallel yet contrasting lives: Turner, the ambitious experimenter and traveller; Constable, the self-taught painter devoted to Suffolk’s skies and fields. With over 170 works, the show spans monumental canvases, sketches, studies and personal effects, framing them as “fire and water”: Turner’s Italian sun versus Constable’s English mists.

27 November 2025 — 12 April 2026

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На что ещё обратить внимание:

  • Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern (9 Oct 2025 – 11 May 2026) — a landmark project on Nigerian mid-20th century artists blending tradition with European influences. More here
  • Dirty Looks at Barbican (25 Sept 2025 – 25 Jan 2026) — the aesthetics of dirt and decay in fashion, from Vivienne Westwood to today’s designers. More here
  • Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s at the Design Museum (20 Sept 2025 – 29 Mar 2026) — the story of the London club where Boy George and the Blitz Kids began. More here
  • Egypt: Influencing British Design 1775–2025 at Soane Museum (8 Oct 2025 – 19 Jan 2026) — the influence of Egyptian motifs on British design, from Regency to Art Deco. More here

 

 

  • Wayne Thiebaud: American Still Life / Delights at The Courtauld Gallery (10 Oct 2025 – 18 Jan 2026) — the UK’s first Thiebaud exhibition, from candy-bright still lifes to rare etchings. More here
  • A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle at the Royal Academy (31 Oct 2025 – 24 Feb 2026) — radical experiments by Indian modernists and their followers. More here
  • Wright of Derby: From the Shadows at the National Gallery (7 Nov 2025 – 10 May 2026) — Joseph Wright’s chiaroscuro style, often compared to Caravaggio. More here
  • Anna Ancher: Painting Light at Dulwich Picture Gallery (4 Nov 2025 – 8 Mar 2026) — a retrospective of the Danish master of light and colour. More here

 

Follow Afisha.London on Telegram, Instagram and visit our website for the latest exhibitions, festivals and performances across the city.

 

Cover photo: Film still from Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. I WANT CANDY LLC. and Zoetrope Corp

 

 

 

Read also: 

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