Best art exhibitions of 2026 in London: summer and beyond

On 9 July 2026, the 70-metre-long Bayeux Tapestry was transported under the cover of darkness, with a police escort, from its home in northern France back to the shores where it was created — most likely in or near Canterbury — for the first time in almost 1,000 years. It arrived at the British Museum at 3am the following morning and was greeted with a round of applause.

From 10 September, this wonder of the medieval world — depicting events leading up to the Battle of Hastings and the Norman conquest of England in 1066 — is going on show for 10 months. The landmark loan has been a headache for both diplomats and conservators, but early ticket sales indicate that it could finally break the institution’s longstanding record for the number of visitors to an exhibition — set back in 1972, when 1.69 million queued for The Treasures of Tutankhamun.

This exhibition explores radical new approaches to painting in the first half of the 20th century, from Post-Impressionism and Cubism to Surrealism, through a selection of seminal works by the likes of Paul Cezanne, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte.

Shown alongside masterpieces from the Courtauld’s own holdings will be significant loans from the Reuben Collection, which have been made available to the public thanks to the Courtauld’s partnership with the Reuben Foundation.

The show begins with key early-20th-century paintings from the Courtauld, including Cezanne’s Turning Road (circa 1905), a landscape conjured through near-abstract patches of colour. Also on display will be Man Ray’s monumental Black Widow (Nativity), which was painted in New York in 1915 and last exhibited in the UK more than 50 years ago.

These set the stage for works from the Reuben Collection by painters who built on earlier innovations to explore new artistic directions. Among them are three paintings by Picasso, including two portraits of his lovers — one showing Marie-Thérèse Walter (1937), the other Dora Maar (1939) — which have never been exhibited in the UK before. These are exhibited alongside some of Magritte’s most celebrated compositions, including The Dominion of Light and The Intimate Friend, which both date from the 1950s.

Shown together, they reveal how successive generations of artists redefined the possibilities of painting during the first half of the 20th century.

The Indian filmmaker Amar Kanwar once remarked that he had been making the same work for three decades. Not because his films repeat themselves, but because they return, again and again, to the same questions. Throughout his career, the New Delhi-based artist has mapped the contested political and emotional landscapes of South Asia, tracing the afterlives of conflict, displacement and state violence across generations.

Fractured histories recur in his visual essays, which move fluidly across time and space, from the Partition of 1947 to the present day, exploring the way humans respond to injustice. ‘I need to look back and look forward,’ he has said about his fragmented narratives. This major solo exhibition at Serpentine North brings together new and existing films to reveal one of the most distinctive voices of the past 30 years.

Following the death of the Samsung Group chairman, Lee Kun-Hee, in 2020, his art collection was bequeathed to the South Korean state. It comprised 23,000 works, most of which found a home in the National Museum of Korea or the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Items from the collection now form the core of a major exhibition in London.

It explores more than two millennia of Korean visual and material culture — through works made from around 300 B.C. to the present day. These include gilt-bronze Buddhist icons, celadon ware ceramics, ink landscape paintings and contemporary video art.

The curators of this touring exhibition — which has already been seen in Washington, D.C. and Chicago — aim to offer ‘a panoramic story of the history of Korea’, while at the same time providing some historical context to the immense global popularity of Korean cultural output today, notably K-pop music.

Organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where the exhibition was shown earlier this year, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Renoir and Love traces the evolution of the imagery of love, desire, flirtation, friendship and family bonds in Renoir’s art. In various luminous scenes of conviviality, Renoir’s protagonists share tender moments of joy and happiness, often in Paris’s new public spaces such as theatres, restaurants, boulevards and gardens, revealing the increased freedom of relationships in 19th-century Paris.

London’s first major Renoir exhibition in 20 years, it will feature 45 works, including intimate paintings and large-scale multi-figure compositions, on loan from private collections and museums around the world. Notable highlights include The Promenade (1870), Luncheon of the Boating Party (1880-81) and Bal du Moulin de la Galette (1876), which has not been shown in the UK since 1985.

For a while in the mid-1990s, you couldn’t walk through east London without seeing at least one young person wearing a Vivienne Westwood T-shirt with its signature orb. The designer’s outfits gained cult status when the artist Tracey Emin became her muse, marrying art and high-end fashion with a déshabillé energy that riffed on female emancipation and transgression. It was one of many cultural convergences between art and fashion, a phenomenon that found its most sublime expression in Mark Leckey’s 1999 ode to dance culture, Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore.

This new exhibition at Tate Britain revisits a decade in which distinctions between art, fashion, photography and design were broken down. Bringing together figures including Wolfgang Tillmans, Juergen Teller, Steve McQueen and Sarah Lucas, it traces how a generation of artists dismantled old cultural hierarchies and reimagined what contemporary art could be.

In 1952, in his early twenties, Robert Ryman moved from his home town of Nashville, Tennessee, to New York City, with dreams of becoming a jazz musician. He supported himself financially by taking up work as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a job he held for seven years.

In that time, he became acquainted with — and fond of — works in the museum’s collection, and one day felt inspired to create some pictures of his own. There began a fruitful six-decade career, associated above all with paintings that were monochrome, white and square. That career is being celebrated in an exhibition of more than 60 works at the Barbican, the American’s first major show in the UK this century.

Despite the apparent narrowness of his practice, Ryman achieved remarkable variety by using an array of pigments, supports, brushes and brushstrokes. ‘There is never any question of what to paint, but only how to paint,’ he said.

Until the late 19th century, photography was largely regarded as a scientific and commercial medium rather than an artistic one. There were notable exceptions, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Dodgson, who hinted at photography’s expressive possibilities, but it was not until the emergence of Pictorialism, a movement that sought to make photographs resemble paintings, that the medium's status was transformed.

Light and Magic at Tate Modern brings together 50 pioneering photographers from across the world, including the American Alfred Stieglitz and the Chinese modernist Long Chin-San, who helped establish the medium as an art form.

Thanks to an increase in travel — made possible by five new highways linking the city of Edo (modern-day Tokyo) with the rest of the country — Japan’s ukiyo-e artists depicted an unprecedented number of landscapes in the 19th century. The best-known examples are those in Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Created between 1830 and 1833, the series is now being presented in its entirety for the first time in the UK. It captures the sacred Japanese peak of Mount Fuji from different viewpoints in different seasons, and includes one of the most popular images in art history: Under the Wave off Kanagawa, more commonly known as The Great Wave.

The exhibition will demonstrate Hokusai’s innovative approach to composition, perspective and colour (including his use of the newly introduced pigment of Prussian blue), while at the same time exploring the spiritual and cultural significance of Mount Fuji. The works come from the Iuchi Collection, and are usually found at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.

Landing at the V&A South Kensington this November is Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires, the first exhibition in the UK to explore the extraordinary artistic legacy of a city that served as the capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

Spanning some 1,600 years, the exhibition brings together more than 200 works of art, design and architecture to examine how successive cultures shaped one of the world’s most influential centres of creativity, commerce and political power.

The exhibition opens with Constantinople’s founding in 330 A.D. as the capital of a unified Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, and concludes with the influence of Byzantine and Ottoman art on 19th-century Europe, highlighting prints, textiles and mosaic examples from the V&A’s collection. In between, visitors will encounter some of the city’s best-known landmarks, from the Hippodrome and Hagia Sophia to Topkapi Palace and the Galata Tower, as well as rarely seen objects, many on display in the UK for the first time.

The exhibition will feature everything from illuminated manuscripts, carved ivories and sumptuous textiles to ceramics, metalwork and architectural fragments. Highlights include a portrait of Sultan Mehmed II painted in 1479 by the Venetian artist Gentile Bellini, and an 11th-century miniaturised triptych designed to be worn around the neck, intricately worked in cloisonné enamel. Another standout exhibit is the Lincoln Typikon, a lavishly illustrated 14th-century manuscript of the Convent of the Virgin of Sure Hope, which will be on display to the public for the first time in 60 years. As for textiles, there is a jewelled belt of ivory from the tomb of Sultan Selim II, a velvet and silver-thread horse cover from around 1600, and fine examples of 18th- and 19th-century high-status Ottoman dress in silk.

‘By combining the stories of these two empires and the amazing art they both produced, we have been able to release the stories of Constantinople and Istanbul from their separate boxes and let them enjoy the limelight together,’ says the exhibition’s curator, Tim Stanley.

Intricately detailed and ablaze with brilliant colour, the mesmerising paintings of 15th-century Flemish master Jan van Eyck are among the most important works in the history of Western art. His extraordinary handling of oil paint allowed him to express the acuteness of his observations as no one had before. In the last 20 years of his life, Van Eyck painted many religious commissions as well as portraits of courtiers, nobles, clergymen and influential merchants. Today, however, only around 20 authenticated Van Eyck works survive, all of which reside in public institutions worldwide.

Bringing together all nine of Van Eyck’s known painted portraits for the first time, this exhibition explores how the artist not only changed the genre of portraiture, but also redefined who was portrayed. Van Eyck didn’t paint kings, queens and aristocrats, but the men and women he spent his life around. In a world first, the National Gallery’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434) will be hung alongside a panel believed to show the same sitter, on loan from the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. Also on display will be Van Eyck’s recently conserved Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) from 1433, and the portrait of his wife, Margaret — the earliest known portrait of a non-aristocratic woman.

This exhibition marks the first and only time these works have been brought together, making this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

By 1938, Peggy Guggenheim had spent nearly two decades immersed in Europe’s bohemian circles, living vivaciously on her portion of her family’s mining fortune, which she had inherited after her father Benjamin died on board the Titanic in 1912.

In January of that year, she decided to open a commercial art gallery at 30 Cork Street in Mayfair, London, called Guggenheim Jeune. Over the following 18 months, she held no fewer than 20 exhibitions, including the first British solo shows of Wassily Kandinsky, Jean Cocteau and Yves Tanguy. She championed the radical: abstraction and Surrealism, printmaking and collage, and female artists. But despite the fact that she bought many of the artworks for herself, the gallery ‘proved to be too expensive for what it was’, and in June 1939 she shuttered it for good. Instead, she hatched plans for a museum — first in London, then in Paris, before finally settling on Venice.

The Making of a Collector — on show at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice until 19 October, before transferring to the Royal Academy — celebrates the extraordinary legacy of this fleeting gallery, bringing together more than 80 works by Salvador Dalí, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Piet Mondrian, Lucian Freud and many others to explore its impact on the capital’s art scene and the establishment of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern art.

Main image, clockwise from top left: at the Courtauld Gallery, René Magritte (1898-1967), L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend), 1958. Oil on canvas. 72.6 x 64.9 cm. Reuben Collection. © 2026 ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London. At the British Museum, a Bodhisattva triad with a single halo, gilt bronze, Korea, Three Kingdoms period, 500-600 A.D. National Museum of Korea. Photo: © National Museum of Korea. At the National Gallery, Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Dance at Bougival, 1883. Oil on canvas. 181.9 x 98.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photo: © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. At the National Gallery, Jan van Eyck (1390-1441), Portrait of Baudoin de Lannoy, circa 1435-40. Oil on wood. 26.6 x 19.5 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Photo: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Christoph Schmidt. At Tate Britain, Juergen Teller (b. 1964), Young Pink Kate London, 1998. © Juergen Teller, All Rights Reserved