Best London Shows this March: Arpita Singh, Mickalene Thomas, and More

London’s art scene is at its finest this march, with unmissable exhibitions that span bold contemporary visions, historic retrospectives, and deeply personal explorations. From a first institutional solo show by Arpita Singh in the UK at Serpentine North to Mickalene Thomas’s compelling explorations of Black womanhood at Hayward Gallery, each exhibition offers a profound engagement with memory, cultural heritage, and creative expression. Here Whitewall presents a curated guide to the most essential shows in London—art that challenges, captivates, and endures.

Arpita Singh: Remembering

Serpentine North Gallery

Hyde Park

Arpita Singh’s “Remembering” marks a historic moment as the first solo institutional exhibition of the renowned Indian artist beyond her homeland. Spanning over six decades, the show at Serpentine North offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant reflection on memory, femininity, and emotional landscapes, drawing from Bengali folk art, Indian miniature painting, and Surrealism. Featuring large-scale oil paintings, delicate watercolors, and intricate ink drawings, the exhibition highlights Singh’s evolving focus since the 1990s on motherhood, aging, vulnerability, and female sensuality, weaving personal narratives with historical complexities. Her cityscapes blur reality and dream, where moments of intimacy coexist with echoes of conflict, making “Remembering”a powerful tribute to a lifetime of visual storytelling.

What we love: Singh’s ability to merge the personal with the political. Her brushstrokes carry both tenderness and urgency, weaving together past and present in a tapestry of color, form, and emotion.

Arpita Singh at Serpentine North Gallery
March 20 – July 27, 2025

Alia Ahmad: Fields

White Cube Mason’s Yard

Mayfair

Rooted in the desert landscape of Riyadh, Alia Ahmad’s “Fields/ ميادين” at White Cube Mason’s Yard offers a deeply personal exploration of place, memory, and cultural identity. Through vibrant, gestural paintings and intricate monochromatic drawings, Ahmad captures the stark contrasts of her native Saudi Arabia, where shifting climate, terrain, and human presence create an evolving dialogue. The exhibition’s title positions the canvas as a site of flux, where expressive marks map the rhythms of nature, movement, and identity. Inspired by the organic networks and topography of her homeland, Ahmad’s works evoke everything from the cooling shade of trees to the turbulent motion of sand, forming a powerful portrait of an ever-changing landscape.

What we love: Ahmad distills the shifting landscapes of Saudi Arabia into fluid, expressive compositions, where the rhythms of wind, sand, and human presence merge into a deeply personal yet universally resonant meditation on place and memory.

Alia Ahmad at White Cube Maison’s Yard
February 28 – April 5, 2025

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love

Hayward Gallery

South Bank

Mickalene Thomas’s “All About Love” is a landmark exhibition spanning two decades of her pioneering work and marking her first solo presentation in a UK public art gallery. Renowned for her vibrant, large-scale portraits, Thomas celebrates Black women’s beauty, strength, and individuality, depicting friends, family, lovers, and models in states of rest and empowerment to challenge traditional art historical narratives. Featuring paintings, photographs, collages, and installations, the exhibition showcases her signature use of vivid patterns and rhinestones, adding glamour and depth. Drawing from 19th-century European masters and 1970s American fashion and interior design, Thomas creates a unique visual language that explores love, identity, and cultural memory.

What we love: Thomas’s work reclaims space for Black women in art history while immersing viewers in a world of radical repose, self-assuredness, and love in its many forms—self, familial, and communal—offering a powerful commentary on representation and agency.

Mickalene Thomas at Hayward Gallery
February 11 – May 5, 2025

John Chamberlain

Timothy Taylor

Mayfair

Timothy Taylor presents a compelling survey of John Chamberlain’s six-decade career, featuring sculptures from the 1960s to the 2000s that embody his signature balance, rhythm, and velocity. Rising to prominence in the late 1950s, Chamberlain transformed salvaged automobile parts into expressive assemblages, bringing gestural Abstract Expressionism into three dimensions through his instinctive “fit” approach. The exhibition includes key works such as Untitled (1962), a striking wall relief of painted steel and paper collage, and Splendid Actor (1989), where crimped strips of steel drape over a central vertical structure. Showcasing his mastery of industrial materials, the exhibition highlights the rugged yet lyrical energy that continues to shape contemporary sculpture.

What we love: Chamberlain’s ability to wrest raw, salvaged metal into sculptures of unexpected grace and dynamism, where industrial debris becomes a symphony of color, texture, and movement.

John Chamberlain at Timothy Taylor
March 13 – April 12, 2025

Mike Kelley: Vice Anglais

Hauser & Wirth London

Mayfair

Hauser & Wirth London showcases Mike Kelley’s “Vice Anglais,” an exhibition centered on one of the artist’s final works from his “Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (EAPR)” series. The show features the video Vice Anglais (2011) alongside related pieces, including never-before-exhibited character paintings, a lenticular lightbox, and sculptures crafted from video props. A companion video, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #36B (Made in England) (2011), is also on display. Kelley’s work delves into the dynamics between establishment culture and counterculture, shedding light on social rituals and subcultures while parodying institutionalized power. This exhibition coincides with the major retrospective Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit at Tate Modern, on view until March 9, 2025.

What we love: Kelley’s “Vice Anglais” distorts the boundaries between authority and rebellion, using satire, surrealism, and subcultural tropes to expose the absurdities of institutional power and collective memory.

Mike Kelley at Hauser & Wirth London
February 4 – April 17, 2025

Inka Essenhigh: The Greenhouse

Victoria Miro

Hoxton

Victoria Miro presents “The Greenhouse,” Inka Essenhigh’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, unveiling a new body of work that immerses viewers in her fluid, dreamlike world of botanical, landscape, and figurative motifs. Essenhigh’s paintings are simultaneously grounded in nature and imbued with an interior energy, where the unseen forces of life animate every element. Working in enamel on canvas, the artist creates luminous, otherworldly compositions where flowers take on sentient forms, architecture pulses with organic movement, and perception slows to a heightened state of awareness. Accompanied by a special publication featuring an essay by George Saunders, the exhibition highlights Essenhigh’s remarkable ability to blend past, present, and future into a singular, evocative vision.

What we love: Essenhigh transforms the familiar into the fantastical, using radiant color and flowing lines to dissolve boundaries between the tangible and the ethereal, creating a world both primordial and futuristic.

Inka Essenhigh at Victoria Miro
March 14 – April 17, 2025

Noah Davis

Barbican Art Gallery

Barbican

Noah Davis’s retrospective at Barbican Art Gallery offers a poignant glimpse into the brief yet prolific career of a visionary painter. In just eight years, Davis transformed everyday moments into poetic, dreamlike narratives, blending realism, abstraction, and surrealism to capture the nuances of Black life in America. Drawing from sources as varied as Egyptian mythology and reality television, his paintings—whether of a man riding a unicorn through the promised but undelivered “40 acres” or ballerinas in an LA housing project—are rich with cultural and autobiographical depth. The exhibition also honors his legacy beyond painting, highlighting his role as the founder of the Underground Museum, which revolutionized access to contemporary art in Los Angeles.

What we love: Davis’s balance of social commentary and painterly experimentation. His work is both intimate and expansive, offering an open-ended exploration of history, identity, and the passage of time.

Noah Davis at Barbican Art Gallery
February 6 – May 11, 2025

Alvaro Barrington: Back Home / I Am… I Said

Sadie Coles HQ

Soho

Following his acclaimed “Grace” exhibition at Tate Britain, Alvaro Barrington returns with “Back Home / I Am… I Said,” a two-part exploration of memory, migration, and artistic lineage. “Back Home” revisits his Caribbean roots through rhythmic sunset paintings inspired by J.M.W. Turner, Mark Rothko, and Etel Adnan, where repeated light and color transform the mundane into quiet beauty. “I Am… I Said” is an immersive shack installation with a soundscape curated by Tiffany Calver, Naima Nefertari, and Friendly Pressure. Surrounding it, paintings from Barrington’s “Banana Fall on You” series incorporate John Jones’ lyrics, addressing displacement, identity, and longing. The exhibition also features large-scale burlap works inspired by Lee Krasner, stitched from trade sacks used for cocoa and coffee, materials tied to histories of labor and commerce.

What we love: Barrington masterfully weaves painting, music, and sculpture into a deeply personal meditation on belonging. The interplay of material and memory transforms the gallery into a space for reflection, where the rhythms of migration and homecoming take center stage.

Alvaro Barrington at Sadie Coles HQ
March 5 – April 26, 2025