Best art exhibitions in 2026: London

The British Museum is gathering almost 300 objects — from ceramics to woodblock prints, textiles, arms, photographs and more — to trace the 1,000-year-long evolution of one of Japan’s most fascinating phenomena: the samurai.

Emerging as aristocratic soldiers-for-hire, samurai began to exert their own political dominance from the 12th century onwards. From 1615, peacetime saw many pivot to government roles, or become scholars and patrons of the arts. By the late 19th century, their hereditary status had been abolished.

One cornerstone exhibit is a suit of armour acquired by the museum in 2017 from a private collection in Kyoto. The helmet — traditionally passed down through generations — was constructed from iron, silk, wool, leather, gold and lacquer in 1519 by the prestigious armourer Myōchin Nobuie. The cuirass, which dates from 1696, shows stylistic elements borrowed from Portuguese armour. Another highlight is a portrait by Domenico Tintoretto, the son of Jacopo Tintoretto, depicting Itō Mancio — a 13-year-old samurai who held court at the Vatican during Japan’s first diplomatic mission to Europe in 1582.

Lucian Freud is remembered as one of the great figurative painters of the 20th (and early 21st) century. This new exhibition, however, will turn attention to the importance of drawing in the artist’s oeuvre. He drew obsessively throughout his career, working with pen, pencil, charcoal, Conté crayon and etching needle (he regarded etching as a ‘form of drawing’).

The show will feature 170 works. Some of them are sketches or drawings in their own right, though focus will also be placed on pieces with a direct relationship to specific paintings — in other words, how Freud’s work in one medium (as a draughtsman) connected to his work in another (as a painter).

In the early 1980s, for example, he produced preparatory sketches for the stunning group portrait of his extended family, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau). Interestingly, he also produced several sketches after the painting was completed, as if not quite ready to say goodbye to it.

Owing to his early death — at the age of 31, probably from diphtheria — Georges Seurat left behind a relatively small body of work, and solo exhibitions devoted to him are rare. There’s no denying his importance in the canon of Western art, however: he was, alongside his friend Paul Signac, the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist movement.

Seurat and the Sea will bring together 27 paintings, oil sketches and drawings from private and public collections worldwide. They were all made during a succession of summers the artist enjoyed on the northern coast of France between 1885 and 1890. (He died in March 1891.)

Working in towns along the English Channel, such as Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their scenery and port activity. He lived most of his life in Paris, and said that seaside trips had a liberating effect on him, ‘washing [his] eyes of days spent in the studio’.

In 2020, Tracey Emin was diagnosed with cancer and given life-saving surgery. Post-illness, the artist has shown great courage in adjusting to her ‘second life’ — which is also the working title of this comprehensive retrospective at Tate Modern.

The exhibition features more than 90 artworks, and charts Emin’s career highs. These include such early manifestations as The Shop, the spit-and-sawdust gallery she ran with fellow YBA Sarah Lucas for six months in the early 1990s, where they sold T-shirts with slogans such as ‘I’m So Fucky’. There are also those headline-grabbing installations for which Emin is notorious, such as My Bed, which dominated the discourse at the 1999 Turner Prize. Finally, there are the post-operative abstract paintings which confront her own mortality. For provocative, no-holds-barred confessional art, there really is no one better.

The artist Rose Wylie is about as punk as they come. There is a wonderful, anti-authoritarian intensity to her paintings, a sense that everything is up for grabs. Wylie trawls mainstream British culture for her subject matter, which can range from the latest celebrity marriage to a pair of tights.

Wylie is now in her 92nd year, and this much-anticipated exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrates an artist who has been flying in the face of orthodoxies ever since she picked up a paintbrush in her early fifties. She paints the grotesque and the banal in equal measure and with equal irreverence, resulting in wilfully raw and comic paintings that somehow get to the heart of the matter.

Konrad Mägi might not be well known in the UK, but in his native Estonia he is the country’s most famous modernist painter.

Born in 1878, Mägi moved to St Petersburg to study art in 1903. Following the 1905 revolution, he flitted between Finland, Norway, France, Italy and Belgium, soaking in pointillism, Neo-Impressionism, Cubism and Expressionism, and developing his own experimental style.

He died in 1925, aged just 46, following decades spent battling illness and poor mental health. As much as half of his oeuvre is now considered lost or destroyed.

This is Mägi’s first major UK exhibition, organised between the Art Museum of Estonia and Dulwich Picture Gallery. It brings together more than 60 works — including a number of his most important landscapes and portraits — for a survey show introducing British audiences to his brief but dazzling career.

In 2017, Hurvin Anderson’s colour-drenched landscapes and interiors, which he says evoke a sense of ‘being in one place but thinking about another’, won him a Turner Prize nomination. Four years later, his painting of a swimming pool, titled Audition, sold at Christie’s in London for £7,369,000, setting the artist’s record price. Now Anderson is getting his first major survey show, marking another watershed moment for one of the most important contemporary painters of his generation.

It features some 80 artworks, the earliest from Anderson’s days as a student at London’s Royal College of Art. The most recent is Passenger Opportunity, which is inspired by two murals painted by Carl Abrahams in 1985 for Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport, both portraying the ‘Windrush Generation’ of Jamaicans who moved to Britain following the Second World War. Anderson’s father was one such émigré, and the artist revisited the theme across 16 panels for a 2024-25 show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. For the work’s UK debut, he has added eight more panels.

In the 1930s, few designers could rival Elsa Schiaparelli. The darling of European high society, the Italian couturier instinctively understood the aspirations of the modern woman. She designed clothes to be worn on cruise ships and aeroplanes, regardless of whether her clients had ever set foot on such modes of transport.

She favoured hard-edged silhouettes, strong colours and asymmetrical hats. Her personality was as radical as her creations, and she understood how to bridge the gap between art and commerce, collaborating with some of the most outrageous artists of the day.

Her sexually provocative ‘lobster’ dress — designed with the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí — caused uproar when Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of Windsor, was pictured wearing it. This exhibition celebrates Schiaparelli’s most flamboyant creations, such as her Picasso-inspired suede gloves stitched with red snakeskin fingernails.

Two decades have passed since the National Gallery staged its landmark exhibition of Diego Velázquez, with the so-called Rokeby Venus as the linchpin. Now it is turning to Spain’s other ‘Son of Seville’, Francisco de Zurbarán, for his first major monographic show in the UK.

The pair were friends and early adopters of Caravaggio’s tenebrism, which rippled across Europe at the start of the 17th century. But while Velázquez went on to become the leading portraitist at Philip IV’s Madrid court, Zurbarán devoted himself to Spain’s other great patron: the Catholic church.

The National Gallery holds one of his best-known works, Saint Francis in Meditation — a high point of Zurbarán’s intense spiritualism. It’s joined by around 50 loans, ranging from still lifes to altarpieces. Three of the most important are Agnus Dei, held by Madrid’s Prado; Saint Bonaventure on His Bier, owned by the Louvre; and The Crucifixion, coming from the Art Institute of Chicago. After closing in London, the show travels to these latter two institutions.

This will be the first major European exhibition in 30 years for one of the most colourful characters in 19th-century art. James McNeill Whistler liked to wear a dandyish white feather in his hair, and host breakfasts with an exotic menu every Sunday. In the words of the show’s curators, he was ‘a boldly experimental artist’ too, renowned for works such as his ‘Nocturnes’, a series of hazily evocative night scenes.

Born in the city of Lowell in Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler moved to Europe in his early twenties. He spent much of his career acting as a conduit of artistic ideas between London and Paris.

Tate’s exhibition will feature works from across that career, including a selection of enigmatic late self-portraits, plus the celebrated painting of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Main image, clockwise from left: At the National Portrait Gallery, Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Girl in Bed, 1952. Oil on canvas. Lent by a private collection, courtesy of Ordovas, 2014. © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 / Bridgeman Images. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London. At the Dulwich Picture Gallery, Konrad Mägi (1878-1925), Norwegian Landscape — Bog Landscape, 1908-10. Courtesy of the Art Museum of Estonia. At the British Museum, Domenico Tintoretto (1560-1635), Portrait of Itō Mancio, 1585. Fondazione Trivulzio, Milan. At the Courtauld Gallery, Georges Seurat (1859-1891), Le Bec du Hoc, Grandcamp, 1885 (detail). Tate, London. Photo: Tate Images. At the National Gallery, Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664), Hercules and the Cretan Bull, 1634 (detail). Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photo: © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado