Art Movements

A sweeping cultural reawakening in Europe that placed humankind at the centre of art and thought. Artists studied ancient Greek and Roman works, mastering perspective, anatomy, and the portrayal of emotion. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael defined an ideal of beauty that would shape Western art for centuries.

National Gallery

Van Eyck: The Portraits

Starting Nov 21

A sophisticated, self-conscious reaction to the harmony of the High Renaissance. Mannerist artists deliberately distorted scale, exaggerated poses, and used unnatural colour to create a sense of tension and intellectual complexity. It flourished in Italy and Spain, reflecting the spiritual crisis of the Reformation era.

A style of intense drama, movement, and emotional power that swept across Catholic Europe in the 17th century. Artists including Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer used extreme contrasts of light and dark to draw viewers into scenes of religious fervour and intimate humanity. It was art as theatre, deployed by the Church and monarchies to inspire awe.

National Gallery

Zurbarán

Until Aug 23

An ornate, playful refinement of the Baroque that flourished in 18th-century French aristocratic society. Watteau, Fragonard, and Boucher filled their canvases with pastel-hued idylls, flirtatious scenes, and decorative excess. Rococo embodied the luxurious, escapist spirit of pre-Revolutionary court life.

A return to the sobriety and civic ideals of ancient Greece and Rome, inspired by the Enlightenment's faith in reason. Painters such as Jacques-Louis David used sharp lines, austere compositions, and heroic subjects to call for moral duty over pleasure. It was the art of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.

A passionate revolt against Enlightenment rationalism, celebrating feeling, imagination, and the overwhelming power of nature. Turner, Delacroix, Goya, and Caspar David Friedrich turned to storms, ruins, and exotic subjects to explore the sublime — the beautiful terror of the world. It was art as raw personal vision rather than classical ideal.

Burgh House

Constable in Hampstead

Until Sep 20

Christchurch Mansion

The Hay Wain: Walking Constable's Landscape

Until Oct 4

Pallant House Gallery

British Landscapes: A Sense of Place

Until Nov 1

A deliberate turn away from idealism to the unvarnished truth of everyday life. Courbet, Millet, and Daumier painted peasants, workers, and the poor with the same gravity traditionally reserved for gods and kings. In doing so they challenged the social hierarchies embedded in centuries of Western art.

A radical break from the studio tradition, taking painting outdoors to capture the flickering, transient qualities of light and atmosphere. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Degas rejected the smooth finish of academic painting, building images from loose, broken brushstrokes. The name came from a critic's mockery of Monet's Impression, Sunrise — and it stuck.

Tate Britain

James McNeill Whistler

Until Sep 27

National Gallery

Renoir and Love

Starting Oct 3

A total design movement that sought to dissolve the boundary between fine and applied art. Inspired by organic forms — flowing plant stems, curving lines, the sinuous silhouette of the female figure — it transformed architecture, furniture, jewellery, and posters into unified artworks. Mucha, Gaudí, and Klimt each gave it a distinct national inflection.

Not a single movement but a cluster of individual responses to Impressionism, each pushing beyond its limits. Cézanne sought underlying structure, Gauguin fled to colour and symbol, Van Gogh channelled raw emotional energy into furious brushwork, and Seurat reduced everything to dots of pure pigment. They laid the groundwork for virtually every modern art movement that followed.

Garden Museum

Benton End: A Paradise of Pollen and Paint

Until Sep 20

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Gwen John | Strange Beauties

Starting Aug 1

The first truly modern movement, in which colour was liberated from description and used purely as emotional force. Matisse, Derain, and Vlaminck painted with unmixed pigments straight from the tube, creating landscapes and figures that shocked the Paris Salon. A critic called them fauves — wild beasts — and the name stuck.

An art of inner states rather than outward appearances, distorting the visible world to convey psychological anguish, ecstasy, or dread. The German groups Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, alongside Norwegian pioneer Munch, created jagged, colour-saturated images that mirrored a fractured modern consciousness. It found its most urgent expression in response to the trauma of the First World War.

White Cube Bermondsey

Georg Baselitz: Back Again

Until Aug 30

Houghton Hall

Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall

Until Oct 4

White Cube Mason's Yard

Emma Reyes

Starting Sep 4

The Hepworth Wakefield

Marc Chagall: The Circus

Starting Nov 21

Picasso and Braque shattered the single viewpoint that had governed Western painting since the Renaissance, depicting objects simultaneously from multiple angles. The fragmented, geometric planes of Cubism rejected the illusion of three-dimensional space in favour of a new pictorial logic. It was the most radical visual revolution of the 20th century and the foundation of modern abstraction.

Born in wartime Zurich as a deliberate assault on reason, art, and bourgeois values. Duchamp declared that a urinal was art; Hannah Höch cut up newspapers into surreal photomontages; Tzara wrote poetry by pulling words from a hat. Dada asked whether art had any meaning in a world that had just produced industrialised slaughter — and refused to answer.

A Dutch movement seeking to reduce art to its irreducible elements: the straight line, the right angle, and the three primary colours plus black, white, and grey. Mondrian, van Doesburg, and Rietveld believed that pure abstraction could express a universal harmony beyond individual expression. Their influence on graphic design, architecture, and typography continues to this day.

André Breton's movement harnessed Freud's theories of the unconscious to create art that bypassed rational thought. Dalí painted burning giraffes and melting clocks; Magritte placed a pipe under the words "this is not a pipe"; Ernst made images from chance and collage. Surrealism sought to reunite the waking world with the logic of dreams.

The first American art movement to achieve global influence, centred on New York in the years after the Second World War. Pollock poured and dripped paint directly onto canvas; Rothko dissolved colour into luminous, hovering fields; de Kooning attacked the figure with violent brushwork. The scale was monumental, the gesture raw, the ambition existential.

Pallant House Gallery

Haroun Hayward: Path through Trees

Until Nov 1

Kew Gardens

Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

Until Jan 31, 2027

Lisson Gallery Bell Street

Ha Chong-Hyun

Starting Sep 24

A raucous embrace of consumerism, celebrity, and mass media as raw material for high art. Warhol silk-screened soup cans and Marilyn Monroe; Lichtenstein magnified comic-strip dots; Hockney painted the swimming pools of sunny California. Pop dissolved the boundary between art and commercial culture — and asked whether the distinction had ever really existed.

Gagosian Davies Street

Alex Israel: Upside Down

Until Sep 5

Pallant House Gallery

Pop and the Figure

Until Nov 3

Frith Street Gallery

Colin Self: Unseen

Starting Sep 18

A reaction against the emotional excess of Abstract Expressionism, stripping art to pure, industrially fabricated geometric forms. Donald Judd's stacks of metal boxes, Carl Andre's floor bricks, and Dan Flavin's fluorescent light arrangements refused metaphor, narrative, or expression. The work simply was what it was, in the space it occupied.

Barbican Art Gallery

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

Starting Oct 8

A movement in which abstract geometric patterns were engineered to create powerful visual effects — the illusion of movement, vibration, warping, and depth in flat works. Vasarely, Riley, and Albers exploited the perceptual limits of the human eye to produce work that seemed to pulse or shimmer. Op Art declared that sensation itself could be the subject of a painting.

Somerset House

M.C. Escher. The Exhibition

Until Sep 6

Tate Modern

Julio Le Parc

Until May 3, 2027

The idea is the work. Sol LeWitt declared that the execution of an artwork is merely its administration; Joseph Kosuth placed a chair alongside a photograph and a dictionary definition to ask what art actually is. Conceptualism liberated art from material, authorship, and the commodity market — and continues to define the terms of contemporary practice.

Gagosian Grosvenor Hill

Christo: Air

Until Aug 21

Lisson Gallery London

Lisson Street: Daniel Buren – Pages in situ

Until Aug 22

John Hansard Gallery

Farewell Sweet Innocence

Until Aug 29

Aviva Studios

Ai Weiwei: Button Up!

Until Sep 6

Tate Modern

Ana Mendieta

Until Jan 17, 2027

White Cube Bermondsey

Gabriel Orozco

Starting Sep 18

Not a style but a condition: the pluralist, globally dispersed world of art after the end of ideological modernism. It encompasses painting, performance, video, installation, social practice, and digital media, often engaging directly with politics, identity, ecology, and technology. To be contemporary is to be unresolved — still in the process of becoming.

Lisson Gallery Bell Street

Ken Price

Until Jul 25

Arnolfini

Out of Many: The Diverse Artists Network Exhibition

Until Jul 26

Saatchi Gallery

Inflorescence

Until Jul 26

Victoria Miro London

NS Harsha: Camel and the tent times

Until Jul 31

Victoria Miro London

Shahzia Sikander: High Seas; Closed Skies

Until Jul 31

David Zwirner London

Steven Shearer: My Moody Muse

Until Jul 31

Thaddaeus Ropac London

Mandy El-Sayegh: Jewel Tones

Until Jul 31

Thaddaeus Ropac London

The Sky in the Cave

Until Jul 31

Barbican Art Gallery

Delcy Morelos: origo

Until Jul 31

Pace Gallery London

Kenjiro Okazaki: Never could be any other way — anagnorisis

Until Aug 7

Somerset House

Holy Pop!

Until Aug 9

White Cube Mason's Yard

TARWUK

Until Aug 15

Lisson Gallery London

Lisson Street: Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska – Zanzibar

Until Aug 22

Sadie Coles HQ Kingly Street

Yu Nishimura: Dislocation

Until Aug 22

Sadie Coles HQ Bury Street

Ugo Rondinone: more light

Until Aug 22

Tate Britain

Hurvin Anderson

Until Aug 23

Serpentine North Gallery

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts About Painting

Until Aug 23

Camden Art Centre

Donald Locke: Resistant Forms

Until Aug 30

Carl Freedman Gallery

Where You End And I Begin

Until Aug 30

Tate Modern

Tracey Emin: A Second Life

Until Aug 31

Serpentine South Gallery

Cecily Brown: Picture Making

Until Sep 6

The Bluecoat

Debjani Banerjee: Jalsaghar

Until Sep 6

Saatchi Gallery

The Sun and The Moon: Art Inspired by the Celestial

Until Sep 8

Sadie Coles HQ Savile Row

Helen Marten - This Weather

Until Sep 12

Sadie Coles HQ Savile Row

John Currin: Opening Credits

Until Sep 12

Newport Street Gallery

THESE THOUGHTS MAY DISAPPEAR

Until Sep 13

Turner Contemporary

Hulda Guzmán: Please awake – asked Nature kindly

Until Sep 13

The Photographers' Gallery

Sayuri Ichida: Playing the Piano Upstairs

Until Sep 13

Arnolfini

Jonathan Baldock: Held

Until Sep 27

Arnolfini

Polly Braden: Against the Tide

Until Sep 27

The Photographers' Gallery

Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now

Until Sep 27

Hayward Gallery

Anish Kapoor

Until Oct 18

Japan House London

Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji x Iwane Ai

Until Oct 18

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens

The Art and Life of Henry Moore

Until Oct 25

Ashmolean Museum

ASHMOLEAN NOW: SOMA SUROVI JANNAT

Until Nov 1

Goodwood Art Foundation

Nancy Holt: MoonSunStarEarthSkyWater

Until Nov 1

Tate Modern

Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon

Until Jan 3, 2027

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

Chitra Ganesh: Journey to the Great Below

Until Jan 17, 2027

National Museum Cardiff

Ffasiwn

Until Apr 4, 2027

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art

Tish Murtha & Kuba Ryniewicz Close to Home

Until Apr 4, 2027

White Cube Mason's Yard

Firenze Lai

Starting Oct 13

White Cube Mason's Yard

Louise Giovanelli

Starting Nov 20

Kettle's Yard

Sunil Gupta: Life with a Camera, 1970 – Now

Starting Sep 19

The Photographers' Gallery

Sanlé Sory: Colour Years

Starting Oct 14

The Photographers' Gallery

William Eggleston

Starting Oct 14