London’s art scene unfurls into winter with a season defined by narrative depth, formal inventiveness, and immersive experience. Across the city’s galleries, artists both established and emergent invite viewers into realms where history converses with memory, ecology meets identity, and time dissolves into layers of visual poetry. From Joseph Beuys’s elemental sculptures to Isaac Julien’s cinematic installation, these 10 Must-See London Exhibitions reveal art’s capacity to transform the colder months—not as a period of hibernation, but of revelation.
Isaac Julien, “All That Changes You. Metamorphosis”
Victoria Miro
Islington
Isaac Julien, “Satellite (All That Changes You. Metamorphosis),” 2025
Inkjet Print on Ilford Gold Fibre Gloss mounted on aluminium, 110 x 147 cm, © Isaac Julien, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
Premiering in London as a five-screen installation at Victoria Miro, Isaac Julien’s “All That Changes You. Metamorphosis” unfolds as a richly layered visual poem about transformation—biological, philosophical, and social. Moving between Renaissance interiors, speculative architectures, and fragile natural environments, the work draws on posthuman thought and ecological philosophy to question humanity’s place within a shared world. Julien’s use of mirrored space and overlapping screens encourages viewers to drift rather than follow a fixed narrative, making perception itself part of the work’s evolving logic.
What we love: A cinematic experience that feels both monumental and intimate, asking us to inhabit change rather than resolve it.
Isaac Julien at Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, Islington / Regent’s Canal
February 13 – March 21, 2026
Joseph Beuys, “Bathtub for a Heroine”
Thaddaeus Ropac
Mayfair
Installation view of “Joseph Beuys: Bathtub for a Heroine,” at Thaddaeus Ropac London, January 2026. Courtesy Thaddaeus Ropac gallery, London · Paris · Salzburg · Milan · Seoul. Photo: Eva Herzog.
This Thaddaeus Ropac exhibition traces the decades-long evolution of Joseph Beuys’s “Bathtub for a Heroine,” bringing into focus his radical idea of “social sculpture”—the belief that art is inseparable from life, warmth, and collective transformation. Through bronze, lead, and drawing, Beuys treats material not as static matter but as an energetic force shaped by circulation, heat, and human agency. The bathtub, at once domestic and mythic, becomes a site where private space expands into social imagination.
What we love: Sculpture understood as process and potential—where form, energy, and ethics quietly converge, making it one of the 10 Must-See London Exhibitions this winter.
Joseph Beuys at Thaddaeus Ropac, Dover Street, Mayfair
January 13 – March 21, 2026
Howardena Pindell, “Off the Grid”
White Cube Bermondsey
Bermondsey
Howardena Pindell, “Off the Grid,” White Cube Bermondsey, London – 2025, courtesy of White Cube.
Spanning six decades of work, “Off the Grid” at White Cube reveals how Howardena Pindell has persistently reworked abstraction as both a formal and political language. Across paintings, wall works, and video, the grid appears not as a neutral modernist device but as a structure shaped by systems of power, segregation, and labour. Pindell’s meticulous surfaces—built through accumulation, repetition, and disruption—balance visual pleasure with historical weight, holding personal memory and collective trauma in productive tension.
What we love: Abstraction that remains deeply human—rigorous, sensuous, and insistently political.
Howardena Pindell at White Cube, Bermondsey Street, Bermondsey
Until January 18, 2026
Richard Avedon, “Facing West”
Gagosian
Mayfair
Photograph(s) by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation.
Featuring rare prints from “Facing West,” drawn from In the American West (1979–84), this Gagosian exhibition revisits Richard Avedon’s defining portrait series with renewed clarity. Photographed against stark white backdrops, Avedon’s subjects—ranchers, labourers, drifters—are stripped of context yet rendered with profound specificity. The series resists romanticisation, instead foregrounding vulnerability, endurance, and presence, while quietly challenging ideas of authorship, truth, and representation in photography, making it one of the 10 Must-See London Exhibitions this winter.
What we love: Portraiture that confronts us directly, refusing spectacle in favour of empathy and attention.
Richard Avedon at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, Mayfair
January 15 – March 14, 2026
“Monument to the Unimportant”
Pace Gallery
Mayfair
Installation view, “Monument to the Unimportant,” November 26, 2025-February 14, 2026, Pace Gallery, London, Photography by Damian Griffiths, courtesy Pace Gallery.
This expansive group exhibition at Pace reframes the everyday as a site of artistic and philosophical inquiry. Bringing together works that transform domestic objects, food, infrastructure, and bodily surrogates, “Monument to the Unimportant” explores how scale, repetition, and material shifts can upend hierarchies of value. The exhibition moves fluidly between humour and seriousness, revealing how the overlooked often carries the deepest cultural resonance.
What we love: A sharp yet playful reminder that meaning is often hidden in plain sight.
“Monument to the Unimportant” at Pace Gallery, Savile Row, Mayfair
November 26, 2025 – February 14, 2026
Lucy Raven | Richard Long | John Latham, “Lisson Street”
Lisson Gallery
Marylebone
Exhibition views of “Lisson Street: Lucy Raven | Richard Long | John Latham” at Lisson Gallery, London, 6 December 2025 – 31 January 2026 © The Artists, Courtesy Lisson Gallery.
At Lisson Street, three generations of practice converge around landscape, time, and material transformation. Lucy Raven’s translucent panels register sediment, pressure, and controlled rupture, while Richard Long’s elemental gestures and John Latham’s conceptual investigations extend the exhibition into geological and cosmic time. Together, the works dissolve boundaries between performance, process, and object, treating landscape as both subject and collaborator.
What we love: A quietly powerful dialogue between art, earth, and duration.
Lucy Raven | Richard Long | John Latham at Lisson Gallery, Bell Street, Marylebone
December 6, 2025 – January 31, 2026
KV Duong, “Where Wound Becomes Water”
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Mayfair
KV Duong’s first solo exhibition with the gallery brings together latex paintings and installation to explore memory, displacement, and inherited history. From bomb-pond landscapes formed by the Vietnam War to intimate family portraits staged within a reconstructed domestic interior, “Where Wound Becomes Water” navigates the porous boundary between personal narrative and collective trauma. Duong’s use of latex—sensual, reflective, and unstable—becomes both material metaphor and emotional surface.
What we love: A practice that holds fragility and resilience in careful, tactile balance, making it one of the 10 Must-See London Exhibitions this winter.
KV Duong at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Heddon Street, Mayfair
January 30 – March 14, 2026
Georg Wilson, “Against Nature”
Pilar Corrias
Mayfair
Georg Wilson, “Darkness Came Over,” 2025, Oil on panel, 25.5 x 20.5 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Pilar Corrias Gallery Eva Herzog, © Georg Wilson.
Georg Wilson, “The Dream (Henbane),” 2025, Oil on linen, 220 x 180 cm, Image credit Eva Herzog, © Georg Wilson Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London
In “Against Nature” at Pilar Corrias, Georg Wilson presents a para-pastoral vision of the British countryside shaped by poisonous plants, folklore, and winter’s encroaching darkness. Drawing on historic texts and lost botanical knowledge, Wilson renders flora as both seductive and threatening, asking viewers to look slowly and attentively. Reduced contrast and shadowed detail invite prolonged viewing, mirroring the exhibition’s concern with forgetting, erosion, and the limits of human control over nature.
What we love: A haunting reimagining of landscape where beauty and danger quietly coexist.
Georg Wilson at Pilar Corrias, Savile Row, Mayfair
January 30 – March 7, 2026
Stacey Gillian Abe, “Garden of Blue Whispers”
UNIT
Mayfair
Installation View of “Stacey Gillian Abe, Garden of Blue Whispers,” Unit, 2025, courtesy of the artist and UNIT.
Stacey Gillian Abe’s “Garden of Blue Whispers” at UNIT unfolds as an imagined garden shaped by memory, ancestry, and sensory recall. Drawing on experiences of seasonal change in her home village, Abe weaves embroidery directly into painted surfaces, transforming a traditionally domestic craft into a meditative painterly language. Indigo—historically tied to labour and exploitation—is reclaimed as a site of healing, belonging, and self-definition.
What we love: A tender yet assured practice where memory is stitched, not illustrated.
Stacey Gillian Abe at UNIT, Hanover Square, Mayfair
December 3, 2025 – January 31, 2026
Jessica Rankin
White Cube Mason’s Yard
St James’s
Jessica Rankin, “When Sweet and Bitter Mingled Together, “2025, acrylic and embroidery on linen, 182.9 x 243.8 cm, © Jessica Rankin.
Jessica Rankin’s embroidered paintings and works on paper unfold as lyrical constellations—maps of memory shaped by text, colour, and gesture. Drawing on poetry, politics, and personal experience, Rankin’s compositions hover between abstraction and inscription, where stitched lines act as both mark and meaning. The works invite close viewing, rewarding attention with quiet emotional and intellectual depth.
What we love: Intimacy scaled into expansiveness—where small gestures carry lasting resonance, making it one of the 10 Must-See London Exhibitions this winter.
Jessica Rankin at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, St James’s
January 28 – February 28, 2026
