London Art Guide: May 2025
- Eleni Doulgeraki
- May 7
- 5 min read
As spring draws to a close and the air begins to hum with summer’s promise, art, like the seasons, blooms without pause — ever unfolding, ever becoming.
It’s a beautiful moment to gift yourself an exhibition visit — to wander among the vibrant palettes of life, and to reconnect with the quiet longing to nourish both soul and mind.
That’s why we’re continuing, for yet another month, to bring you a handpicked selection — our selection — of must-see exhibitions across London. Follow along with our art guide, and let’s step together into the vibrant, ever-shifting world of art, where inspiration waits around every corner.
The solo exhibition by Camilla Perkins '' Following the Path of the Sun'' is a sun-drenched escape into the heart of Mediterranean life. Drawing from her travels through Italy, the South of France, and Mallorca, Perkins paints moments of warmth, leisure, and quiet wonder. Her vibrant compositions — rich with pattern, texture, and bold colour — evoke the joy of summer and the intimacy of memory.
Rooted in the decorative traditions of the Bloomsbury Group and inspired by folk art and textiles, her work is both nostalgic and fresh. This exhibition is a celebration of rhythm, sunlight, and the beauty in everyday scenes — an invitation to step into a world where colour tells the story.
Opening Days/Hours: Tues - Fri 11am - 6pm, Sat 12pm - 6pm
Cristea Roberts Gallery presents Were you dreaming? — a hauntingly beautiful collection of graphite drawings by Marie Harnett, where time stills and myth stirs beneath the surface. Inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Harnett weaves together fragments from contemporary film, classical painting, and ancient tragedy, creating a dreamlike world suspended between eras.
Each drawing is a fleeting moment — a woman behind glass, a coin poised mid-thought, a statue’s broken gaze — echoing loss, desire, and the fragile grip we hold on memory. Blending the old and the new, Harnett transforms cinematic stills into classical tableaux, where light and shadow sculpt emotion and the viewer becomes both witness and participant in this shadowed, spellbound realm.
Opening Days/ Hours: Tues - Fri 11am - 5.30pm, Sat 11am - 2pm
As part of ASC’s 30th Anniversary, Wild Uploaded, Prequel unfolds at ASC Gallery — a multi-sensory journey into the entangled roots of nature, technology, and thought. Curated by Ilsa Brittain and PAI_32, the exhibition draws inspiration from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, exploring the idea that intelligence, whether organic or artificial, blooms through relationship and reciprocity. From the mycelial to the digital, this multimedia collection reflects on evolution as dialogue — between forms, species, and systems. Through sculpture, drawing, sound, and screen, the exhibition becomes a living network of perspectives, tracing how consciousness weaves its way through culture and code alike.
Featuring the evocative works of: Abi Freckleton, Andrita Yuniza, Cristiano Di Martino, George Stuart, Ilsa Brittain, Isabella Atkinson-Bradbury, Juliet Ferguson Rose, Masha Ivanova, Eveleigh Evans, Minye Yue, Phoebe Corker-Marin, Qibai, Wu Yijia, and Yu Pan.
Your last chance to visit is here - From the shimmer of Op Art to the static hum of early code, Electric Dreams traces the pulse of a time when artists dared to rewire the senses. In this luminous journey through the 1950s to the 1980s, visionaries bent light, motion, and machine logic to their will — crafting worlds that blinked, spun, and shimmered with possibility.
These were the alchemists of the analogue and digital age, forging art from circuitry, algorithms, and industrial invention. Their creations — kinetic illusions, optical mazes, programmed patterns — awaken the eyes and disorient the mind, inviting us to experience perception itself as playground and puzzle. In one of Tate Modern’s most expansive exhibitions to date, Electric Dreams resurrects the glow of a bygone future: a moment when art dreamed in pixels and pulses, and imagined a world not just to look at, but to be inside.
Within the Barbican’s newly unveiled gallery, time fractures. Monumental sculptures by Huma Bhabha stand in charged conversation with the spectral forms of Alberto Giacometti, forging a dialogue across generations, wars, and worlds.
Spanning nearly a century of sculptural inquiry, the works on view traverse plaster, bronze, terracotta, and found materials — surfaces shaped by both history and hand. Bhabha’s raw, fragmented figures echo the existential stillness of Giacometti’s post-war silhouettes, each body bearing the imprint of conflict, displacement, and endurance. Together, they transform the gallery into a haunted terrain — a liminal space where ancient myth meets sci-fi ruin, and the human form becomes a site of both memory and mutation.
Opening Days/ Hours: Tue–Sun 12-8pm
Eli Ping’s Hard Goods pulses with quiet power—a meditation in form where sculpture hovers between earth and air, motion and stillness. Forgoing tradition, Ping slashes, burns, and casts bronze in gestures both brutal and refined, conjuring silhouettes that feel calligraphic, even sacred. Across resin reliefs, oil paintings, and elemental sculptures, materials speak in whispers—cotton, wax, bronze, and paint drawn into delicate tension. Inspired by Chamberlain, Gilliam, and Brancusi, Ping weaves a language of opposites: rough and smooth, heavy and weightless, violent and tender.
In this debut UK solo show, beauty is stripped bare. What remains is essential—sculpture not just seen, but sensed.
Homes are built from more than wood and wage—they live in the in-betweens: the kettle’s hiss, the scuff on the skirting board, the stories passed down with the washing up. Home Is Where The Art Is gathers sixteen voices from Grafters Collective, each one tracing a thread of working-class experience, each one carving space for memory, resilience, and care.
These artists—Antonia Del Ens, Beth Seeboo, Edie Samuels, Elleanna Chapman, Emma Ogawa Todd, Gabby Pavek, Gem Bryant, Jennifer Jones, Karl Murphy, Lily Donaldson, Melissa Newbery Welcome, Mia Harwood, Millie Noble, Savanna Achampong, Thomas Holland, and Vernetta Chukwu—don’t just show us home, they re-member it. Piece by piece, object by object, they hold up the quiet textures of domestic life: the soft weight of family, the beauty in repetition, the grit beneath nostalgia.
Opening Days/Hours Mon, Fri, Sat & Sun 12 - 6.
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So, as the sun lingers longer and the city hums with colour, let art be your compass. Wander through dreamscapes, mythologies, electric futures and sculpted echoes of the past.
Whether you seek stillness or spectacle, London’s galleries are bursting with stories waiting to unfold.
Follow the thread, feed your senses, and lose yourself — again and again — in the wild, wondrous world of art. Your next favourite work is only a doorway away.
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