Here is the kind of art guide I wish I could press into your hands over coffee before we all tumble into private views. It is written as a love letter to what is happening across the United Kingdom from October onward, with the names, dates and pulse of the moment woven in. Save it, dog-ear it, and let it be your map.
Art for 2025/2026…
London is in bloom. Autumn has opened the door to a season of major museum shows and independent sparks that feel like a true reset after a restless decade. Tate Britain’s Lee Miller retrospective lands with the clarity of morning light, reminding us that a single artist can be a war reporter, a surrealist, and a life distilled into silver tones, all at once. It runs through winter and feels like a masterclass in how courage, curiosity and craft alter history.
Across the river, Tate Modern turns its galleries toward Nigerian modernism and the ever-anticipated Hyundai Commission. The programme makes the city feel wide open again, folding new global conversations into London’s architecture of brick and sky.
The week-by-week rhythm hums with other notes: Gilbert & George command the Hayward with their monumental mosaics of city life, equal parts confessional and provocation, while the British Museum unspools a Nordic printmaking story that begins with Munch and travels forward on inked paper. Even Marina Abramović’s name flickers through the news like a live wire. London in October is exuberant but serious, ready to be argued with.
And then comes the Saatchi moment. Focus Art Fair takes over the Saatchi Gallery from 16–19 October, a bright, international exchange with a strong Asian lens and the happy chaos of an art fair’s collisions. If you only have one wandering weekend, let it be this one. We will be there on the 16th, eyes open for new voices.
Liverpool, and a cartoon grin at Northern Lights
Liverpool has a habit of throwing its arms wide. This summer its Baltic Triangle hosted Modern Toss, the gloriously subversive cult duo, whose token-operated swearing machines and big stone heads returned museum-style as if to prove that satire ages well when it has a working-class wink. The show ran at Northern Lights through August and left a warm afterglow of laughter and recognition. If you missed it, follow their touring notes; their energy sticks to a city.
Tate Liverpool is temporarily operating at RIBA North while its Albert Dock home is redeveloped, which has turned out to be a gift. The Mann Island setting gives the work a crispness that suits the season and keeps the city’s art heartbeat audible while the new chapter is built.
Manchester, where the future rehearses itself
Manchester’s autumn is muscular and experimental. Factory International’s Aviva Studios brings Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic into a cavernous room designed for exactly this kind of risk. It is powerful, bodily and argument-starting, and it confirms the city’s role as a place where performance can stretch to the edge of what a stage is. Around the corner, the programme expands outward from Hockney to runway histories, proof that the building intends to be a lighthouse for many kinds of seeing.
The Whitworth opens Yuki Kihara’s Darwin in Paradise Camp, centring Indigenous and queer worlds with the clarity and beauty that has become the gallery’s hallmark. Manchester Art Gallery carries its own thread of exhibitions through the season, and the Bound Art Book Fair fills the Whitworth at the end of October with the delicious rustle of pages and ideas. HOME keeps the city’s multidisciplinary flame bright, with new work occupying its galleries. You can spend an entire weekend walking between these doors and never lose the thread.
Glasgow and Edinburgh, the magnetic north
Glasgow’s Tramway closes Solange Pessoa’s Pilgrim Fields and turns toward a new cycle that includes the Take Me Somewhere festival. GoMA continues through autumn with exhibitions that treat the city as a studio. The energy is generous and physical, a reminder that Glasgow trains artists’ bodies as much as their eyes.
Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket pulls audiences into performance and film alongside exhibitions, while National Galleries Scotland offers the steady grace of collections and a calendar that rewards repeat visits. The Scottish capital in fall is candlelit even at noon; it makes you look longer.
Bristol and Birmingham, vivid contraries
Bristol’s Spike Island opens twin exhibitions this month, one by Nour Jaouda and one by Dan Lie, with an autumnal hush cut by the sound of making. The Arnolfini’s programme arcs through the year with artists who ask difficult questions in beautiful ways. If you time it right you can catch open studios and step into the rooms where the city’s ideas are born.
In Birmingham, Ikon Gallery keeps the conversation sharp. The gallery’s autumn includes Donald Locke’s Resistant Forms and a pulse of talks that prove how much a city can be changed by the seriousness of its art spaces. Recent months have brought exhibitions by artists such as Mahtab Hussain and Seulgi Lee that resonate far beyond the staircase. Birmingham rewards curiosity.
Leeds and Wakefield, sculpture and storytelling
Leeds Art Gallery has given Lynette Yiadom-Boakye the keys to curate, followed by a new Mike Nelson commission and research-rich programming with the Henry Moore Institute next door, where land art, fragment and form are the season’s chosen words. The Hepworth Wakefield, a short train ride away, is a cathedral for looking. This year’s pairing of Helen Chadwick and Caroline Walker is a study in nerve and tenderness.
Cardiff and Belfast, generous lights at the edge of the map
National Museum Cardiff prepares for Artes Mundi 11, the biennial that brings international voices into a Welsh conversation, while Chapter keeps the city’s art-and-ideas engine humming across galleries and studios. There is talk of a new contemporary museum opening in 2026; you can feel the anticipation in the air.
In Belfast the MAC opens a trio of exhibitions across the autumn, from William McKeown’s tender atmospheres to new installations, and the Ulster Museum hosts the Royal Ulster Academy’s annual exhibition, a fixture that gathers an entire community of makers under one tall roof. The city’s nights are filled with Late Night Art and the tempo of a festival.
Five years of art trends, in the lives we have been living
The pendulum has swung between intimacy and spectacle. Artists turned to recycled and repaired materials when the world asked for stewardship, then to immersive rooms that remembered joy. Data sculptures became public meditations. Generative tools entered the studio in a quiet, collaborative way, not as a takeover but as an extension of the hand. You can see it in London this month, where shows range from photographically led retrospectives to new commissions that behave like living systems.
Photography has been the truth-teller of the decade. The Sony World Photography Awards named Zed Nelson Photographer of the Year for a project that looked at our manufactured nature, a mirror held up to a century that keeps building its own forests and oceans inside shopping centres and screens. The exhibition travelled and the pictures lodged under the skin.
The Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize went to Lindokuhle Sobekwa for a work structured like a family album, a book of memory and absence that proves how much story can be carried by the most modest materials. Photography keeps finding new ways to be intimate.
And in late September, at the V&A, the Prix Pictet announced Alfredo Jaar as the winner of its Storm cycle. It is a prize that insists on sustainability not as a topic but as a responsibility, and Jaar’s work answers with the severity and beauty the moment requires. The shortlist itself reads like a map of the world’s weather.
The National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize announces its winner in November. The shortlist points to a continued hunger for portraits that acknowledge vulnerability without spectacle. The quiet revolution in photographic portraiture continues.
London this month, city by city beyond
If you are planning a gallery day in the capital, begin with the Tate pairings, add the Hayward, and make space for the city’s smaller rooms. A single afternoon can take you from a Do Ho Suh installation to a quiet commercial space showing a painter you will think about at dinner. London in October is a living atlas of modernity.
London Art Exhibitions 2025 – 2026
London is a city that never pauses. Its art scene beats like a restless heart, pumping new ideas into the bloodstream of the world. From Tate’s monumental retrospectives to the Saatchi’s pulse-quickening fair, autumn 2025 through spring 2026 reads like a love letter to the possibilities of art.
Tate Britain: Lee Miller – Photographs
- Venue: Tate Britain
- Dates: Autumn 2025 – March 2026
- Why it matters: A sweeping retrospective of one of the 20th century’s most electrifying figures. Miller was a surrealist muse, a war photographer, a beauty turned witness to horror. This show gives her the breadth she deserves, from the softness of her studio work to the steel of her front-line images.
Tate Modern: Hyundai Commission – Cecilia Vicuña
- Venue: Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
- Dates: October 2025 – April 2026
- Why it matters: Vicuña, the Chilean poet and artist, transforms the cathedral-like Turbine Hall with installations that braid text, textiles and politics. Expect suspended threads, ritual colour, and whispers of the Andes echoing through London.
Hayward Gallery: Gilbert & George – The Paradisical Pictures
- Venue: Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre
- Dates: October 2025 – January 2026
- Why it matters: Monumental mosaics of urban life — funny, shocking, devotional. Gilbert & George remain two of Britain’s most provocative chroniclers, building stained glass windows out of East End grit and joy.
British Museum: Nordic Impressions – Munch to Now
- Venue: British Museum Prints & Drawings Gallery
- Dates: October 2025 – February 2026
- Why it matters: From the anxiety-soaked lines of Edvard Munch to the cool clarity of contemporary Nordic printmakers, this exhibition maps a century of artistic weather. A quiet storm in paper and ink.
Saatchi Gallery: Focus Art Fair
- Venue: Saatchi Gallery, Chelsea
- Dates: 16 – 19 October 2025
- Why it matters: A luminous, international art fair with a strong Asian lens. Saatchi’s galleries fill with new names, new dialogues, and the delicious chaos of discovery. This is where emerging voices collide, and it feels electric.
Royal Academy of Arts: Marina Abramović – The Early Years
- Venue: Royal Academy of Arts
- Dates: November 2025 – March 2026
- Why it matters: Before she was the global priestess of endurance, Abramović was a young Belgrade artist testing thresholds of pain, time, and body. This show revisits those radical early works, and they still sting like open air.
Serpentine Galleries: Es Devlin – Room for Futures
- Venue: Serpentine South
- Dates: October 2025 – January 2026
- Why it matters: Devlin, London’s master of immersive scenography, conjures a future-tense installation where words, light, and ecology entwine. Always monumental, always lyrical, her work feels like stepping into the mind of tomorrow.
Barbican: Radical Tenderness – Feminist Collectives Now
- Venue: Barbican Art Gallery
- Dates: Winter 2025 – Spring 2026
- Why it matters: At once political and deeply intimate, this group show highlights feminist and queer collectives across the globe. It asks what tenderness looks like in the age of protest.
Camden Arts Centre: Zadie Xa – Cosmic Family Portraits
- Venue: Camden Arts Centre
- Dates: October 2025 – February 2026
- Why it matters: Zadie Xa’s vibrant, Korean-diaspora-rooted work fuses costume, myth, and dreamlike performance. This show stitches her cosmic palette into the fabric of London.
Bookmark this guide: London’s calendar will only grow richer as 2026 unfolds, with the National Portrait Gallery’s Taylor Wessing Prize, the Courtauld’s 20th-century rehangs, and new commissions spilling across the city.
Manchester Art Exhibitions 2025 – 2026
Manchester has become the UK’s engine for experimentation, anchored by Aviva Studios at Factory International — a venue so vast it feels like a cathedral for risk. Autumn 2025 through 2026 is packed with major names, radical performances, and exhibitions that test what art can be.
Factory International – Aviva Studios
- Marina Abramović: Balkan Erotic Epic
- Dates: October – December 2025
- Details: Abramović brings her Balkan roots to Manchester in a reimagining of her infamous Balkan Erotic Epic. Mixing folk song, ritual, and endurance, the piece asks uncomfortable questions about the body, desire, and memory. For the north of England, this is one of the most important art moments of the year — performance scaled to cathedral size.
- Future Works: Large-Scale Installations
- Dates: Winter 2025 – Spring 2026
- Details: Following Abramović, Aviva Studios will host an installation by Ryoji Ikeda, the Japanese sound-and-light artist known for his data-driven cosmic spectacles. Expect an environment of pulsing light and sound that fills the cavernous space.
The Whitworth
- Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp (Darwin Reimagined)
- Dates: 4 October 2025 – 29 March 2026
- Details: A landmark exhibition by Yuki Kihara, the first Pasifika and fa’afafine artist to represent New Zealand at Venice Biennale. Kihara re-stages Victorian photographs of Samoa to critique colonial legacies, queering Darwin’s gaze and giving space to Indigenous narratives.
- Bound Art Book Fair
- Dates: 24 – 26 October 2025
- Details: The UK’s leading artist-book fair, filling the Whitworth with zines, independent presses, talks, and workshops. It’s as much a festival of ideas as of books.
- Collections Rehangs & Research Shows
- Dates: Ongoing through 2026
- Details: The Whitworth continues to integrate its historic textile and wallpaper holdings with contemporary commissions, showing how archives become fuel for the present.
Manchester Art Gallery
- John Singer Sargent and Fashion
- Dates: 15 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
- Details: Direct from Tate Britain, this exhibition explores Sargent’s portraits as showcases of style, fabric, and identity. Paintings are paired with actual garments, turning the gallery into a 19th-century runway of silk and brushwork.
- Northern Artists Showcase
- Dates: February – June 2026
- Details: A major group show celebrating contemporary artists working in the North-West, from painters and sculptors to sound and performance. A statement of Manchester’s role as a hub for talent outside London.
HOME Manchester
- Group Exhibition: Digital Intimacies
- Dates: October 2025 – January 2026
- Details: Exploring how technology shapes relationships, this exhibition combines video, VR, and installation from artists including Cao Fei and young UK digital practitioners.
- Solo Show: Hetain Patel – New Works
- Dates: March – May 2026
- Details: Manchester-born artist Hetain Patel presents new video and performance works that mix humour, cultural identity, and cinematic references.
Castlefield Gallery
- Emerging Artist Programme 2025/26
- Dates: Rolling exhibitions from September 2025 – June 2026
- Details: Castlefield remains the place for early-career artists. Expect shows from recent graduates, socially engaged projects, and cutting-edge installations.
Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) – now esea contemporary
- Exhibition: New Asia Voices
- Dates: November 2025 – March 2026
- Details: esea contemporary continues its mission to spotlight East and Southeast Asian artists in the UK. This exhibition highlights cross-cultural practices and hybrid identities, bringing Manchester global resonance.
Festivals & Public Art
- Manchester Animation Festival – HOME, November 2025
- Manchester International Festival (MIF) Legacy Commissions – Factory International outdoor installations continuing through 2026.
- Public Sculptures: Ryan Gander’s The Manchester Lamp and Tracey Emin’s You Made Me Love You continue to anchor the city’s public art scene.
Bookmark this guide: Manchester’s programme is thunderous. From Abramović shaking the air at Aviva Studios, to Yuki Kihara rewriting Darwin at the Whitworth, to HOME’s experiments in digital intimacy, the city feels like a rehearsal for the art of tomorrow.
Liverpool Art Exhibitions 2025 – 2026
Liverpool has always been a city where art refuses to sit quietly in white-walled rooms. It bursts into pubs, warehouses, and backstreets, colliding with music, humour, and activism. The coming year is rich with both heavyweight names and grassroots experimentation, making the city one of the UK’s most vital art destinations.
Modern Toss at Northern Lights
- Venue: Northern Lights, Baltic Triangle
- Dates: July – August 2025 (closed, but touring nationally)
- Details: The cult cartoon collective brought their absurd, foul-mouthed wit to Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, filling Northern Lights with their infamous swearing machines, comic panels, and satirical takes on modern British life. It was loud, irreverent, and deeply Liverpudlian in its humour. While the show closed in summer, the duo’s work is continuing on tour — and in Liverpool the memory lingers like graffiti you can still hear laughing at you down the street.
Tate Liverpool at RIBA North
- Venue: RIBA North, Mann Island
- Dates: 2025–2026 (during Albert Dock redevelopment)
- Details: With the Albert Dock undergoing its largest transformation since opening, Tate Liverpool has decamped to RIBA North. The interim programme is refreshingly sharp, making use of the sleek Mann Island setting. Autumn highlights include a major Bridget Riley survey (October 2025 – March 2026), filling the glassy space with optical colour storms, alongside a Spotlight on Emerging North-West Artists series in partnership with local universities.
The Bluecoat
- Venue: School Lane
- Dates: Year-round; Autumn 2025 programme includes:
- Rosa-Johan Uddoh: Practice Makes Perfect (Oct 2025 – Jan 2026), performance, sound, and sculpture exploring Black British identity.
- Bluecoat Open Studios (November 2025), where resident artists open their studios to the public.
- Details: As the UK’s oldest arts centre, The Bluecoat remains Liverpool’s open living room for creativity. Its mix of exhibitions, performances, and community projects ensures the building is always alive, always surprising.
FACT Liverpool (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology)
- Venue: 88 Wood Street
- Dates: Autumn/Winter 2025 – Spring 2026
- Details: FACT continues to blur the line between cinema, digital art, and science.
- Upcoming headline show: Bodies in Code (Nov 2025 – Mar 2026), a group exhibition on AI, avatars, and virtual intimacy.
- Year-round programme of residencies and screenings includes VR storytelling labs and new commissions from emerging digital artists.
Open Eye Gallery
- Venue: Mann Island
- Dates: Autumn 2025 – Spring 2026
- Details: Known for socially engaged photography, Open Eye’s upcoming season includes:
- North: Then & Now (Oct 2025 – Feb 2026), a photography exhibition tracing the cultural identity of the North of England, from Chris Killip’s industrial chronicles to new commissions by young Liverpool photographers.
- Portrait Prize Showcase (Feb – Apr 2026), spotlighting local and international portraiture.
Walker Art Gallery
- Venue: William Brown Street
- Dates: Winter 2025 – 2026
- Details: The Walker, Liverpool’s grand art museum, presents:
- John Moores Painting Prize 2025 exhibition (Dec 2025 – Apr 2026). The UK’s most prestigious painting prize, offering a snapshot of contemporary British painting at its most daring.
- Ongoing displays of the Pre-Raphaelites and Tudor portraits for balance and grandeur.
Artist-led Spaces & Independents
- The Royal Standard (Baltic Triangle): Autumn exhibitions include Fresh Cuts 2025 (Oct – Dec), showing graduate work from across the North-West. Known for pushing boundaries, it’s where you glimpse tomorrow’s Turner nominees.
- Output Gallery (Seel Street): Continuing its mission to show only artists from or based in Merseyside, Output’s winter programme includes experimental video and performance, opening October 2025.
- MerseyMade (Derby Square): A showcase of local makers and small-scale exhibitions, perfect for spotting emerging talent.
- Cains Brewery Village (Baltic Triangle): Pop-up shows, murals, and interventions spill into bars and warehouses, keeping the DIY energy alive.
Public & Street Art
- Liverpool Biennial Commissions (2023–2025 legacy): Public artworks from the last Biennial still punctuate the city — from Betty Woodman ceramics to Judy Chicago’s feminist banners.
- Baltic Triangle Murals: Ever-changing walls, with highlights including large-scale portraits and comic-influenced street art that echoes the Modern Toss exhibition.
Bookmark this guide: Liverpool’s art scene in 2025–2026 is a mix of heavyweight institutions and independent sparks. From the Bridget Riley survey at Tate to the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker, from Modern Toss’s comic anarchy to the Bluecoat’s experimental warmth, this is a city where art doesn’t whisper — it sings.
Bristol & Birmingham Art Exhibitions 2025 – 2026
Bristol
Bristol is a city that wears its art on its walls. Street murals climb up brick warehouses, and its galleries are laboratories for experiment. Autumn 2025 through 2026 shows the city’s dual identity: the raw energy of graffiti culture and the polished intelligence of its institutions.
Spike Island
- Exhibitions:
- Nour Jaouda: Between Worlds
- Dates: 4 October 2025 – 18 January 2026
- Details: The Egyptian-Libyan artist creates sculptural installations from metal, textiles, and found objects, exploring migration, memory, and the politics of space.
- Dan Lie: Living Systems
- Dates: 4 October 2025 – 18 January 2026
- Details: Brazilian artist Dan Lie transforms Spike Island into a sensory ecosystem using organic materials, fungi, and microbial life. A show that literally grows and decays as you visit.
- Nour Jaouda: Between Worlds
- Why it matters: Spike Island remains Bristol’s laboratory for the experimental. These parallel exhibitions ask visitors to think of art not as static but as alive.
Arnolfini
- Exhibition:Threads of Memory
- Dates: 15 November 2025 – 15 March 2026
- Details: A group exhibition of international textile artists, from Anni Albers’ archival weavings to contemporary activist embroidery collectives. The gallery’s bayside setting turns it into a meditation on memory stitched in fibre.
Bristol Museum & Art Gallery
- Exhibition:Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025
- Dates: December 2025 – April 2026
- Details: The world-famous photography competition returns, showing nature at its most awe-inspiring and endangered. Always a family favourite, but also quietly political.
Street & Public Art
- Bristol Street Art Tours: Murals by Banksy, Inkie, and younger collectives across Stokes Croft and Bedminster. New works from Upfest Festival 2025 (Europe’s largest street art festival, held each summer) remain visible across the city.
Birmingham
Birmingham’s art world is smaller but fiercely ambitious. The Ikon Gallery leads, with satellite spaces and public sculpture filling in the map. Autumn 2025 into 2026 brings heavyweight retrospectives and emerging voices alike.
Ikon Gallery
- Exhibitions:
- Donald Locke: Resistant Forms
- Dates: October 2025 – January 2026
- Details: The Guyanese-British artist’s ceramic and sculptural works address colonialism, resistance, and hybrid identities. A long overdue UK celebration.
- Seulgi Lee: U
- Dates: February – May 2026
- Details: Korean artist Seulgi Lee presents a playful, colourful textile-based exhibition drawing on folk traditions and collective storytelling.
- Donald Locke: Resistant Forms
- Why it matters: Ikon remains Birmingham’s anchor for contemporary art. These exhibitions show its ability to connect global perspectives to local audiences.
Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery (BMAG)
- Exhibition:John Baskerville: Print & Revolution
- Dates: November 2025 – March 2026
- Details: A celebration of Birmingham’s historic typographer, this exhibition places Baskerville’s work in dialogue with contemporary design.
Eastside Projects
- Exhibition:Future Machine
- Dates: 18 October 2025 – 24 January 2026
- Details: Artist collective works with AI, robotics, and speculative futures. A truly Birmingham take on the intersection of industry and imagination.
Public & Street Art
- Birmingham Hippodrome: Ongoing programme of light installations spilling into the Southside district.
- Public sculptures: A Real Birmingham Family by Gillian Wearing continues to be a touchstone in Centenary Square.
Bookmark this guide: Bristol hums with living installations, activist textiles, and world-class photography. Birmingham counters with global retrospectives at Ikon, radical AI experiments at Eastside Projects, and a sense of art woven into the city’s industrial past.
Glasgow & Edinburgh Art Exhibitions 2025 and 2026
Glasgow’s Tramway lets you feel scale in your bones, while GoMA’s programme keeps your eyes greedy. Edinburgh offers you the Fruitmarket’s intelligence and National Galleries Scotland’s anchor. Bristol moves between Spike Island’s studios and Arnolfini’s bayside calm. Birmingham’s Ikon is a compass point. Leeds and Wakefield connect sculpture to story in a way that feels uniquely northern and necessary. Cardiff builds toward Artes Mundi, Belfast toward the RUA and a calendar of late nights that make the galleries feel like home.
Tramway
- Exhibition: Solange Pessoa: Pilgrim Fields (closing October 2025)
- Next cycle: New commissions announced for November 2025 – Spring 2026, including large-scale sculpture by Christine Borland and a performance installation by Alberta Whittle.
- Why it matters: Tramway is Scotland’s stage for the monumental. Pessoa’s earth-and-clay environments gave autumn a tactile density, and Whittle’s work — steeped in post-colonial narratives and ritual — promises to shake the air next.
Take Me Somewhere Festival
- Dates: 24 October – 10 November 2025
- Venues: Tramway, CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts), and site-specific spaces around Glasgow
- Artists: Oona Doherty (dance-theatre), FK Alexander (performance), and a new commission by Scottee & Friends.
- Why it matters: This is Glasgow’s answer to experimental theatre and performance biennales. Think sweat, ritual, humour, and risk — the festival where definitions unravel.
Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA)
- Exhibition: Radical Nature: Art and the Climate Crisis
- Dates: October 2025 – February 2026
- Why it matters: Featuring artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Zineb Sedira, and newer Scottish voices, this group show confronts climate change not as a backdrop but as a medium.
Transmission Gallery
- Exhibition: Emergent Voices 2025
- Dates: 1 November – 20 December 2025
- Why it matters: Transmission remains the city’s most important artist-run space. This year’s cohort includes queer Scottish painters, sound artists, and new media experiments that push the gallery into its 40th year with relevance intact.
The Modern Institute
- Exhibition: Lucy Skaer: Phantom Forms
- Dates: 12 October 2025 – 15 January 2026
- Why it matters: Skaer, Turner Prize–shortlisted and internationally acclaimed, returns to Glasgow with works that blur archaeology, abstraction, and contemporary mythology.
Edinburgh
Fruitmarket Gallery
- Exhibition: Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases
- Dates: 10 October 2025 – 25 January 2026
- Why it matters: Muholi’s black-and-white portraits of LGBTQ+ communities in South Africa and beyond are both activist and tender, giving Edinburgh a show of global significance.
National Galleries Scotland: Modern One & Modern Two
- Exhibition 1: Joan Mitchell Retrospective — Modern Two
- Dates: November 2025 – March 2026
- Why it matters: Abstract expressionism told through Mitchell’s lyrical brushwork, placing her alongside Pollock and de Kooning but insisting on her unique voice.
- Exhibition 2: Scotland’s Photographers: 1980–2025 — Modern One
- Dates: October 2025 – February 2026
- Why it matters: From Calum Colvin to newer talents, this exhibition traces Scotland’s photographic eye over four decades.
Collective Gallery (Calton Hill)
- Exhibition: Haroon Mirza: Solar Rhythms
- Dates: 5 October 2025 – 11 January 2026
- Why it matters: Sound, light, and solar energy interlace in Mirza’s work, staged at Edinburgh’s most panoramic gallery. A poetic fit for a city obsessed with skyline views.
Talbot Rice Gallery (University of Edinburgh)
- Exhibition: Future Archives: Art in the Age of AI
- Dates: October 2025 – March 2026
- Artists: Refik Anadol, Anna Ridler, and Scottish AI-collaborative collectives.
- Why it matters: A cutting-edge show on generative art and data, asking what “memory” means when machines are the storytellers.
Edinburgh Printmakers
- Exhibition: Radical Prints: Feminist Presses and Collectives, 1970–Now
- Dates: 18 October 2025 – 1 March 2026
- Why it matters: A deep dive into activist print culture — from second-wave feminist posters to today’s risograph zines.
Bookmark this guide: Glasgow gives you the monumental and the raw — Tramway’s installations, Take Me Somewhere’s live wire energy, Transmission’s urgency. Edinburgh offers clarity and history, from Zanele Muholi’s portraits to Joan Mitchell’s colour storms. Together they make Scotland’s art scene feel both grounded and transcendent.
A note on fairs, and why we go
Art fairs are arguments disguised as parties. Focus at Saatchi is the right scale for seeing and speaking, and its Asian focus gives London a needed counterpoint to the Frieze constellation that dominates the month. Go with a notebook. Ask questions. Fall for something small.
Why 2026 matters
We are entering a year that will ask art to be both tender and brave. Museums are widening their definitions. Artists are rebuilding the relationship between technology and touch. The public is voting with its feet. The UK’s art map looks less like a pyramid and more like a constellation. If you need a place to start, come to Saatchi on the 16th. We will meet you by the stairs.
Practical bookmarks
Tate’s 2025 programme across Britain and St Ives; Tate Modern and Tate Britain exhibitions open through winter. London listings updated weekly across trusted guides. Manchester’s Factory International and Aviva Studios calendar. Whitworth and HOME programme pages. Ikon Gallery’s season and events. Spike Island and Arnolfini in Bristol. Henry Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery in concert. The Hepworth Wakefield’s current pairings. National Museum Cardiff building toward Artes Mundi 11. The MAC and Ulster Museum in Belfast through the autumn. Modern Toss exhibition notes for Liverpool. Sony World Photography Awards, Deutsche Börse Prize and Prix Pictet announcements as the year turns.
References and further reading
Tate press announcement of 2025 highlights; Tate visit pages for current shows. Independent and museum listings for London’s October exhibitions. Focus Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery, dates and programme. Modern Toss Liverpool exhibition announcements and coverage. Manchester’s Factory International pages for Marina Abramović and programme. Whitworth exhibitions and Bound Art Book Fair. HOME Manchester exhibitions diary. Manchester Art Gallery seasons. Tramway Glasgow programme and Take Me Somewhere festival dates. GoMA Glasgow listings. Fruitmarket Edinburgh programme. National Galleries Scotland visitor information. Spike Island autumn shows and Open Studios. Arnolfini’s 2025 season. Ikon Gallery exhibitions and talks. Press and reviews on Birmingham exhibitions this year. Leeds Art Gallery programme and Henry Moore Institute events, plus the Foundation’s 2025 programme. The Hepworth Wakefield exhibitions and announcements. National Museum Cardiff listings including Artes Mundi 11. Chapter Arts Centre diary and Cardiff Print Workshop autumn exhibition. Belfast’s MAC exhibitions, Ulster Museum’s Royal Ulster Academy annual show and Late Night Art calendar, Belfast International Arts Festival. Photography awards: Sony World Photography Awards 2025 winners, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025, and Prix Pictet 2025 winner and shortlist coverage across official sites and press.