Fashion photography in Milan, figurative art in London and photojournalism in South Africa meet modernism in Australia and African portraiture in New York. These exhibitions are setting 2025 up to be enigmatically art-filled.
The most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s striking photographs, documenting the turbulent life of one of the 20th century’s greatest photojournalists arrives in London this year, accompanied elsewhere in the capital by Jenny Saville’s interrogative figurative art and Cecil Beaton’s trend-changing fashion work. In Provence, Cézanne’s work takes over a beautiful French villa, while British artist Tracey Emin takes over an Italian Palazzo in Florence.
Including global firsts and fashion favourites, these are the 16 exhibitions worth travelling for in 2025.
London
Lee Miller, Tate Modern
Urgent, arresting, and startlingly elegant, once you discover Lee Miller’s photographs they don’t ever escape your mind. Opening this autumn at Tate Modern, this eponymous exhibition is set to be the most extensive retrospective ever of photojournalist Lee Miller’s work, with over 250 vintage and modern prints – including those never displayed before. Kate Winslet’s captivating performance in award-winning 2024 movie Lee helped to reimagine the varied life of a figure who is now one of the influential artists of the early 20th century. It’s now hard to imagine how Miller’s World War II photography lay undiscovered in her attic until after her death, as the photographs inside these boxes would change the course of photojournalism for the remainder of the century. Lee Miller lived a life of dichotomies, a Vogue-model-turned-photographer, Miller swapped posing as the subject of the lens to the author of the photographic gaze, and with her fine-tuned eye and bold demeanour, caught pivotable moments of war – and most importantly, the individuals affected. The Tate Modern will house a range of Miller’s fashion, war, and travel photography, opening this autumn.
Jenny Saville: The Anatomy Of Painting, National Portrait Gallery
Pop art colours, subjects distorted to incur the emotional response of a viewer, and bold brushstrokes: figurative art dominated the styles of leading artists of the early to mid-20th century, including the prestigious canvases of Pablo Picasso and David Hockney. Leading contemporary artist Jenny Saville is revitalising the enigmatic style with her striking portraiture, set to decorate the National Portrait Gallery’s walls this summer with 50 works spanning Saville’s 30-year career to date. Moving between charcoal drawings to large-scale oil paintings, each piece is packed with intrigue and explores the shift in conventional beauty through history, including the controversy of female nudity and the constant interrogation of female subjects, artists, and viewers. Jenny Saville’s work breaks down this intrigue, and incites new conversations around female form and the energy of this pioneering style of art.
Cecil Beaton: A Fashionable World, National Portrait Gallery
Dubiously dubbed ‘The King of Vogue’, it’s difficult to open a vintage copy of the pioneering fashion magazine without stumbling across the enigmatic fashion photography of Cecil Beaton. At once a fashion illustrator, fashion photographer, costume designer, social caricaturist and writer, Beaton’s work took the 20th-century British and American fashion scene by storm, appearing in everything from the cover of Vogue to the Oscar-winning film My Fair Lady. From 1939, Beaton worked as a royal photographer, modernising the way the monarchy was viewed and photographed in a way that would remain for generations.
Brasil! Brasil! The Birth Of Modernism, Royal Academy
Characterised by a turn away from convention in the search for the new, modernism has always felt a nebulous term in the art world. Across Europe, modernism spread like wildfire at the turn of the 20th century thanks to ground-breaking work by the likes of French artist Louise Bourgeois, British writer Virginia Woolf, or Spanish sculptor Julio Gonzalez (among many others) that often spring to mind when the term is mentioned. Yet at the same time, modernism was picking up the pace across Brazil. Now a century on from the start, this month The Royal Academy in London is exhibiting 130 works by ten core Brazilian artists which each creatively question Indigenous identity and Afro-Brazilian experience from the 1910s to the 1970s. This influential lineup includes Tarsila do Amaral, who is now considered a leading female figure of the nation’s modernist movement, and will span performance artists, painters, and more.
Blitz: The Club That Shaped The 80s, Design Museum
It’s the 1980s: New York has the glamorous Studio54, London has the androgynous, underground Blitz Club. Partied at by the Blitz Kids who were at the heart of the city’s punk and soul scenes, amalgamating inspiration from pop artists, cabaret, avant-garde fashion, cinema, and more, the Blitz Club made a lasting impact on London’s underground scene. There’s no doubt that it was a place of artistic creation and intrigue. Wonder what it truly felt like to step through the Covent Garden club doors? London’s Design Museum is revisiting the club’s famous atmosphere with music, flamboyant fashion, art, film, and graphics, each developed in collaboration with leading ‘Blitz Kids’ themselves, including personal items and artist artefacts that have never been displayed before.
Europe
Cézanne, Musée Granet, Provence, France
Cascading bowls of apples and oranges, female painters gathered around a blue lake, water jugs, vases of tulips, ordinary people during different throngs of life – each found themselves the muse of French impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, who helped changed contemporary perceptions of art, life, and transience. Among its lavender rows, and singing cicadas, Provence is home to the globally celebrated and loved French painter, Paul Cézanne, who was born in Aix-en-Provence, and the region’s beautiful museum is housing many of his iconic paintings this year with an extensive exhibition. Over 100 works will be on display ranging from drawings to watercolours, to oils on canvas, with Cézanne’s well-loved Jas de Bouffan’s estate at the heart.
Sam Youkilis: Under The Sun, CO/ Berlin
Content creator, photojournalist, photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist: Sam Youkilis has changed the way we film, digest, and interact with the mundanity and spontaneity of real life via Instagram. Poetic and striking, Youkilis has helped to rewrite the visual language we converse through online, by posting short, unedited video clips of fleeting moments around the world and garnering over 700,000 followers. These flaneur-style vignettes effortlessly capture the beauty in the everyday, from street sellers wheeling fresh fruit through Hanoi to affectionate lovers in the backstreets of Naples. As a rare opportunity, snapshots of Sam Youkilis’ work will be on display to admire off-screen in Berlin this year.
George Hoyningen-Huene, Glamour e Avanguardia, Palazzo Reale, Milan
A fashion photographer and prominent member of the Surrealist circle, rubbing shoulders and exchanging conversation with the likes of Salvador Dali, Lee Miller, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, George Hoyningen-Huene’s visually striking black-and-white photography documented a pivotal era for the arts and fashion world. At Palazzo Reale in Milan this year, over 100 platinum prints will be on display, taken for the likes of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, with subjects ranging from dancer Olga Spessivtzeva and Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.
Anselm Kiefer: Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind, Stedelijk & Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
For the first time ever, the Van Gogh Museum and Stedelijk Museum – both in Amsterdam – are coming together to curate and display an extensive exhibition on the life and work of German painter Anselm Kiefer, presented as a two-part exhibition spread across both venues. Inspired by German Romanticism as well as poetry and the works of Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, Kiefer’s work often foregrounds abstraction – but rationally structured – with layers of the mythic, normally painted across large-scale canvases. This is an unprecedented kind of exhibition that you’re sure to want to bookmark if you find yourself in the Dutch capital this year.
Tracey Emin: Sex and Solitude, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence
We all know her name, and for good reason. British artist Dame Tracey Emin has helped define contemporary British art across her impressive career, with autobiographical and confessional works. The beautiful Palazzo in the heart of Florence, Palazzo Strozzi, is hosting a major exhibition dedicated to the award-winning contemporary British artist. Opening this spring, the exhibition will see Emin’s autobiographical and confessionary work – including painting, sketches, sculptor, video, installations, photography and more – hung across the beautiful space, from the courtyard to gallery spaces. This is a therapeutic – and visually striking – chance to immerse yourself in the vulnerable and physical work of Tracey Emin, amongst a beautiful setting.
America
Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, MoMA, New York City
The concept of a ‘photographic portrait’ and how it has been used to influence conversations around Pan-African identity, subjectivity, and art is at the heart of MoMA New York’s upcoming exhibition. Comprised largely of gifted modern and contemporary African art from art collector Jean Pigozzi, the collection comprises of photographs by Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi, and more. This exhibition is an expansive, transatlantic foray into the politically and culturally charged role of photographic portraiture, and how these canonical works present Africa and Pan-Africanism as ‘a political idea’.
Amy Sherald: American Sublime, SFMoMA, San Francisco
Amy Sherald is a leading American contemporary artist, whose subjects span the likes of Michelle Obama and Breonna Taylor. MoMA in San Francisco are displaying almost 50 of the artist’s large portrait paintings up until this spring, which though enjoyable to gaze at, leave us with lots to think about. Sherald’s modern style bridges the vivid and the almost cartoon-like for captivating, poetic, and politically-charged snapshots of modern American life.
Asia
Yasumasa Morimura and Cindy Sherman: Masquerades, M+, Hong Kong
Modern art gallery M+ in Hong Kong is leading a world’s first with this two person exhibition featuring Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura and American photographer Cindy Sherman. This is the first time that these two conceptual photographers have been examined next to one another in an exhibition of this scale. Despite working across different countries and responding to different cultural references, both photographers have produced work that fuses fine art, film, and photography to create spell-binding conceptual photographs musing identity, culture, and more.
Africa
Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Umkhondo: Going Deeper, Johannesburg Art Gallery
Following his 2023 FNB Art Prize award – part of FNB Art Joburg, Africa’s longest running contemporary art fair – Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg is hosting Lindokuhle Sobekwa’s first solo exhibition at the prestigious museum. The exhibition which opened last year and runs until this spring, showcases Sobekwa’s poignant photographs, which capture powerful moments of stillness amongst everyday South African life. In this exhibition specifically, Sobekwa’s work seeks to critique the social and historical injustices of this region, and the lasting impact of apartheid and colonialism, through those who know and live these effects day on day.
Mous Lamrabat: Homesick, Loft Art Gallery, Marrakech
Mous Lamrabat is a Moroccan-Belgian photographer whose work flits between fine art photography and the striking work of Studio Mousmous. Opening later this month, 20 new pieces of his work will be displayed for the first time in Marrakech. Homesickness is a familiar feeling to many of us, but one that looks and feels different to everyone. For Lamrabat, homesickness is explored through diasporic perspectives in his photography, which through rich symbolism nodding to identity, origins, and belonging, draw him back to his native Morocco.
Australia
Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe, Adelaide
Despite the geographical distance, there has been plenty of artistic chatter between Australia and Europe across the last century. The latest exhibition to celebrate this is the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, which will explore South-Australian female modern artists who helped propel the modernist movement in Europe, and their receptions and perceptions in Australia when they returned. The title ‘Dangerously Modern’ is taken from an article written by Thea Proctor, whose work was labelled as such by Australian media in 1921 upon returning home from London, where modernist art was all the rage. Exploring themes of the public and the private via movement, colour, and light, the exhibitions will highlight the importance of these female artists on both European and Australian modernism.
Lead image: 153974, Lindokuhle Sobekwa Ntabasgogo Qumbu, 2020 Inkjet on Baryta Work: 40 x 50 cm Edition of 7
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