Busy days shopping followed by long festive evenings spent with friends often overwrite plans in December, but it’s worth making time for these London exhibitions this December.
Rare, never-displayed-before Picasso artworks are exhibited at The British Museum, while the popular winter exhibitions at Chelsea’s Saatchi Gallery offer photographs from private collections in Canada. London’s exhibition lineup is nothing short of spectacular this month.
These are the best exhibitions in London to visit this December.
The Taylor Wessing Photography Prize, The National Portrait Gallery
The Taylor Wessing prize is the annual photography prize awarded by The National Portrait Gallery, and the winner of the 2024 award is British photographer Steph Wilson, who has worked for Mugler, Simone Rocha, Nike, as well as publications including Dazed, i-D, and more, for their project titled Ideal Mother. Wilson explores unconventional images and models of ‘motherhood’, a term that is still widely associated with dated and heteronormative ideals. Awarded as runners up are Australian photographer Adam Ferguson and Dutch photographer Tjitske Sluis. If you’d like to experience the avant-garde work of modern day photographers and perhaps add a few new favourites to your list, then this is the exhibition to help you do so.
VOGUE: Inventing The Runway, The Lightroom
The runway is at the centre of the fashion industry. The collections that debut on the runway across fashion months, twice a year, set the tone for the season ahead. And, just as spring/summer 2025 runways are quietening down following a busy fashion month, VOGUE: Inventing The Runway is celebrating the power of the catwalk in a new way, with an immersive installation this autumn. You’ll be placed in front row and behind the scenes – all at once – at some of fashion’s most celebrated catwalk collections. Using a mix of mediums from clothes to art and lights, this is all about how clothes move on the body, whether within the intimate couture salons of the early 20th century or the dramatic pop-culture fashion events that attract thousands of eyes on social media. Separated by themes, moving through this exhibition will feel like an immersive biopic of fashion’s euphoric moments.
Picasso: Print Maker, The British Museum
Hear ‘Picasso’ and it may be the famous oil painting, Guernica, or the large canvas of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon that spring to mind. But this winter, The British Museum is celebrating a lesser known medium in Picasso’s extensive body of work: printmaking. Across Picasso’s career, the artist worked with professional printers to experiment with lithographs, linocuts, and intaglio prints to master techniques that allowed him to experiment in unique ways that are characteristic of his work. It is thought Picasso produced a staggering 2,400 prints over his life, 100 of which are on display in this exhibition, some for the first time ever; this is an opportunity to see a rare selection of Picasso’s work. While the artist is believed to have had an episodic relationship with print, the highlight of the exhibition is the finale, 347 Suite, a series of etchings dedicated to the artist’s friend Jamie Sabartes and completed within a few months in 1968 – globally considered to be the biggest printmaking achievement of Picasso’s final years.
Jeff Wall: Life In Pictures, White Cube, Bermondsey
To commemorate White Cube’s 30 year relationship with Canadian photographer Jeff Wall, White Cube Bermondsey is hosting 40 of the artist’s key works in this major solo exhibition. Moving from the 1980s to the present day, Jeff Wall’s photographs tiptoe the fine line between documentary realism and a composed image, where subjects avoid the camera lens for vignette-style effect. The content of his photographs spans a multitude of themes too, from social-realism comments on everyday life to complex and busy tableaux-style images. These different ideas culminate in a riveting exhibition that is worth stopping by before an afternoon spent shopping in Bermondsey Street’s boutique stores.
Lygia Clark: The I And The You, The Whitechapel Gallery
The Whitechapel Gallery is hosting the first major UK public gallery presentation of influential Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark, this winter. The Brazilian multi-medium artist produced the main body of her work between the 1950s to 1970s, a volatile time in Brazil’s history. Finding that the ‘concrete art’ of abstract and often subject-less work that was sweeping across the industry at the time failed to both fully express these political and social conflicts, as well as failed to engage or converse with the viewer, Lygia Clark – alongside her contemporaries – developed Neo-Concrete art that used colour, poetry, and freedom of expression to transcend traditional art forms. The I and the You opens with a series of paintings and studies on paper that show Clark’s early experimentation with shape and form, before moving to works made from plastic bags, paper, glue, stones, and more. From painting to installation art, Lygia Clark sought to provide a therapeutic impact on her viewer by focussing on lived experience and feeling rather than symbolism – and the result is a unique style of art that deserves attention.
Still showing …
As We Rise: Photography From The Black Atlantic, Saatchi Gallery
As We Rise: Photography From The Black Atlantic is placing incredible photographs from The Wedge Collection, Canada’s largest privately-owned collection of art by Black artists, into public view this winter. Curated by Elliott Ramsey – assistant curator at The Polygon Gallery – who describes the collection as celebrating “the nuanced approaches of Black photographers in representing these scenes of love, leisure, and resistance,” the exhibition celebrates community, identity and power, while also grappling with themes of inclusion and exclusion in both art and culture. The exhibition spans work by Black artists from Canada, the United States, Great Britain, the Caribbean and Africa, boasting an expansive array of civil rights documentary, fashion photography, and self-portraiture.
Anastasia Samoylova: Adaptation, Saatchi Gallery, London
Also on at the Saatchi Gallery this winter is Anastasia Samoylova: Adaption, the first major survey of the contemporary American photographer, Anastasia Samoylova. The American visual artist, who works predominantly through photography, is known for both her documentary and studio photography styles that capture current environmental concerns and their impacts on local communities. Recently, this includes documenting the rising sea levels in South Florida. Adaptation is curated by art historian Taous Dahmani and presents a selection of Samoylova’s work from five of her recent series: Floridas, FloodZone, Landscape Sublime, Image Cities, and Breakfasts. Named a modern-day Flâneuse, Samoylova travels around these shifting landscapes – whether urban or rural – to capture the underlying socio-political geographies that are interwoven into tumultuous locales. The result is a quirky examination of fleeting moments from real lives in the world’s ever-changing spaces.
The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain
Britian’s years under Thatcher rule in the 1980s were known to be turbulent. And this exhibition forms a body of photographs that documents the social and cultural impact of the shifting political legislation. From the miners’ strikes to gentrification and the AIDS pandemic, protest defined the voice of the British public facing this strife. The 80s: Photographing Britain highlights how photography gave voice to social change led by the people, and consequently became a tool for loudening marginalised voices.
Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage, The Photographers' Gallery, London
“Fashion takes itself more seriously than I do. I’m not really a fashion photographer.” – Deborah Turbeville in The New Yorker, 2011. Five women stand in a bathhouse, idly and elegantly poised, with only one looking at the camera. We know this photograph is staged, but it feels like we’ve walked straight into the women’s locker room. No-one can quite manage to capture the transient richness of a passing moment like Deborah Turbeville. This image, taken for Vogue in 1975, controversially shifted the standards of fashion photography: Deborah Turberville’s style was a far from the clean-cut, sharp editorial that graced glossy magazine pages in the late 20th century. In her shots, clothes take a backseat and a whimsical, wintry atmosphere comes first. There’s an element of the female psyche that rings through her atmospheric compositions – something that until then had been altogether excluded from fashion editorial. The Photographers’ Gallery is revisiting the impact of Turberville’s work with this retrospective exhibition featuring some of her most iconic editorial and advertorial work. To accompany it, lots of Turberville’s personal, vintage photocollages will be on display; the artist was known to experiment – just like she did with her composition, colour and lighting – in the darkroom, ripping up sketchbooks and photographic novels, and collaging them with her own images for striking results.
A Group Exhibition, Cadogan Gallery
Founded in 1980, Cadogan Gallery has brought contemporary artists to the forefront of London’s Belgravia, as well as Milan, for the past forty years. Cadogan have opened their new flagship gallery on Harriet Street in South Kensington, inaugurating the space with an impressive group exhibition featuring 21 artists defining current art trends. The focus of Cadogan Gallery: A Group Exhibition is on the rich materiality of abstraction in contemporary art, meaning the variety of ways in which artists express non-representational – or abstract – forms. From surreal landscape paintings to sculptures fashioned from marble, the exhibition spotlights the innovative creativity of the artists of our time.
The Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London, Fashion And Textile Museum
It’s 1985 and Taboo nightclub has just opened in London’s Leicester Square. The venue by designer and performance artist Leigh Bowery, known for their flamboyant costumes and conceptual art, was nothing short of a scene in London’s nightlife – a work of art itself. The ‘dress as though your life depends on it’ dress code drew the city’s avant-garde, sartorial crowds from far-flung boroughs – and now the evidence is strung on the gallery walls of Bermondsey’s Fashion and Textile Museum. Rare pieces from John Galliano, John Fleet, Stephen Lenard and more are on show, displayed next to the music scene that helped bring the clothes to life.
The Imaginary Institution Of India, Barbican, London
The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975- 1998 at London’s Barbican is the first exhibition in the world to chart the growth of Indian art across this significant period of cultural change. Tracing two historic movements – the declaration of the State of Emergency by Indira Gandhi in 1975, and the Pokhran Nuclear Tests in 1998 – the art on display explores themes of rapid urbanisation and social instability. Across the exhibition, paintings, photographs and installations both directly chart these political shifts as well as document their human impacts – from religion to family to love and loss – in order to navigate the disintegrating boundaries between politics and home life.
Making A Ruckus! Black Queer Histories Through Love And Resistance, Somerset House
Filmmaker, writer and artist Topher Campbell, know for his exploration of sexuality, masculinity, race, the city, and more, is bringing these rich themes to Somerset House with Making A Rukus! Black Queer Histories Through Love And Resistance. Two hundred archive materials and contemporary artworks – including some commissioned just for the exhibition – will walk through the jubilant, complicated, and deeply personal experiences of Black Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans activism and creativity. The multi-disciplinary installation displays a celebratory snapshot of queer history and contemporary art, moving from film to artist; collaborations to community; then to club scenes and music culture, and back to film and video.
Lead image: Slo, Mzwandile and Andile opening the trunk of the BMW, Kloof Nek Road, 2024 from the series It was never meant to be easy (2024) – A Broke Boys story by Nick van Tiem © Nick van Tiem
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