Art exhibitions ending in London this May 2026
May will see the end of several impactful exhibitions that opened in London since the start of 2026, from a landmark survey of modern Nigerian art at Tate Modern to the British Museum’s Samurai, which reconsiders Japan’s warrior culture through armour, objects and popular culture. At the Barbican, two of its exhibitions will also come to a close, alongside experimental shows such as LA Timpa’s sound-led installation at Cell Project Space and Katharina Grosse’s return to White Cube after 20 years. Here is our guide to art exhibitions ending in London in May 2026.
Katharina Grosse: I Set Out, I Walked Fast
Installation view. Katharina Grosse, Untitled, 2026. Image courtesy of White Cube.
#FLODown: Katharina Grosse return to London with her first show at WHeite cube in over 20 years. The presentation at their Bermondsey gallery brings together new works made in her New Zealand studio, large-scale spray-painted installations applied directly across the gallery’s walls and floors, sculptural works, and canvases from her archive, reflecting her approach to painting as something that moves freely between canvas, objects, and space itself rather than staying within a fixed format. In her usual fashion, bold, bright installations take over the building, with colour spilling across surfaces and structures, shifting the environment into a field of moving colour rather than a static display.
Date: 22 April – 31 May 2026. Location: 144–152 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 3TQ. Price: Free. whitecube.com
LA Timpa: Come Back
LA Timpa, Exhibition view, Come Back, Cell Project Space, 2026
#FLODown: Come Back is the first UK solo exhibition by artist and musician LA Timpa, bringing together installation, moving image, and sound to explore how memory is shaped through recording and playback. Using lo-fi and obsolete technologies, he creates audio-visual environments where fragments of narrative, domestic life, and found sound are distorted, interrupted, and reworked, while a shifting soundscape fills the space. The exhibition reflects on how personal and collective histories are carried, fractured, and reassembled through material media.
Date: 27 February 2026 – 3 May 2026. Location: Cell Project Space, 258 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9DA. Price: Free. cellprojects.org
Catherine Opie: To Be Seen
Angela (boots), 1992 © Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery
#FLODown: To Be Seen is the first major UK museum exhibition of American artist Catherine Opie’s photographic portraits, on show at the National Portrait Gallery. The exhibition presents over 30 years of work and redefines who is seen, represented, and valued in art. From her early series Being and Having (1991) to later portraits, it explores home, intimacy, identity, and power on both personal and political levels.
Date: 5 March – 31 May 2026. Location: National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London, WC2H 0HE. Price: £19.50 / £21.50 with donation. Book now
Encounters: Giacometti x Lynda Benglis
Encounters : Giacometti x Lynda’s Benglis at Barbican Centre. © Jonathan Pow
#FLODown: The third exhibition in the Barbican’s Encounters series, brings together works by contemporary American artist Lynda Benglis and 20th-century Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti for the first time. Benglis presents a new body of previously unseen works alongside her own selection of Giacometti’s sculptures, creating a dialogue across generations. Since the 1960s, Benglis has been celebrated for her playful yet visceral forms that are simultaneously organic and abstract, while Giacometti is renowned for his elongated figures and existential approach to the human form. The exhibition highlights the connections between their practices, offering a conversation between past and present sculptural languages.
Date: 12 February – 31 May 2026. Location: Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: From £8. Concessions available. Book now
Nigerian Modernism
Installation view, Nigerian Modernism, Tate Modern, London, 2025–2026. © Tate Photography. Courtesy Tate Modern. Image credit Jai Monaghan.
#FLODown: Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern is the first major UK exhibition tracing the evolution of modern art in Nigeria. Featuring over 250 works by more than 50 artists, it explores how Nigerian artists respond to colonialism, independence, and globalisation through traditional Nigerian artistic styles and modernist approaches. From early figures such as Aina Onabolu and Ben Enwonwu to key movements like the Zaria Arts Society and the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, it reveals a cultural renaissance shaped by national identity and pan-African ideas. Highlights include the pioneering ceramics of Ladi Kwali, the expressive forms of the Oshogbo and Nsukka schools, and Uzo Egonu’s Stateless People series, which captures the complexities of diaspora. Nigerian Modernism offers a vital reappraisal of a movement that reshapes global understandings of modern art.
Date: 8 October 2025 – 10 May 2026. Location: Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Price: from £18. Concessions available. Book now
Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life & Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart
During Sleep, 2026. installation view, Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life. Image credit Mark Blower. Courtesy of the Hayward Gallery. © DACS, London, 2026 and Chiharu Shiota.
#FLODown: Last chance to see both Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen’s Heart to Heart at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre. Shiota’s exhibition transforms the space into immersive webs of woollen thread enveloping everyday objects to explore memory, the body and the fragility of existence, alongside sculptures, drawings and performance elements. Running in parallel, Yin Xiuzhen’s work uses unconventional materials to reflect on memory, migration and lived experience. Together, the exhibitions are complemented by a related panel discussion exploring shared themes of memory, materiality and storytelling.
Date : 17 February – 3 May 2026. Location: Hayward Gallery & Purcell Room, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XX. Price: £19. Concessions available.
Samurai
Image courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum
#FLODown: Samurai at the British Museum is a major exhibition exploring the reality behind a millennium of myth surrounding Japan’s legendary warriors. It traces the evolution of the samurai from medieval battlefield fighters to elite political, cultural and artistic figures, including the often overlooked role of women. Through armour, luxury objects and global pop culture references, from historic gifts to modern fashion and video games, the show reveals how the modern mythology of the samurai is shaped and why its legacy continues to resonate worldwide.
Date: 3 February – 4 May 2026. Location: British Museum, Room 30 (Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery). Price: Adults from £23; Members and under-16s free. Book now
The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea
Georges Seurat, 1859-1891, Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy, 1888, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
#FLODown: Seurat’s Seascapes at the Courtauld Gallery is the first exhibition dedicated to Georges Seurat’s coastal works, as well as the first UK show focused on the artist in nearly 30 years. Featuring around 25 works, including paintings, oil sketches, and drawings, it explores how Seurat developed his pioneering Neo-Impressionist technique during five summers on the northern coast of France between 1885 and 1890. Best known for his precise use of tiny dots of pure colour to create light and form, Seurat died aged just 31, leaving behind a small but highly influential body of work that helped redefine modern painting.
Date: 13 February – 17 May 2026. Location: Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3, The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN. Price: £18. Concessions available. Book now
Click here for our review of Seurat and the Sea.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting
Portrait of a Young Man, 1944 (black crayon & white chalk on paper) © The Lucian Freud Archive. All Rights Reserved 2025 / Bridgeman Images. Private Collection.
#FLODown: The National Portrait Gallery is the UK’s first museum exhibition dedicated to Lucian Freud’s works on paper, exploring his lifelong focus on the human face and figure across drawing media such as pencil, ink, charcoal and etching. The exhibition also includes key paintings that reveal the relationship between his drawings and finished canvases.
Date: 12 February - 4 May 2026. Location: National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HE. Price: from £23-25 / £25.50-27.50 with donation. Free for members. Book now
Beatriz González
Beatriz González, Los papagayos (The Parrots), 1987 © Beatriz González. Photo: Oriol Tarridas.
#FLODown: A major retrospective of Beatriz González at the Barbican Centre presents the pioneering Colombian artist’s first UK solo show and largest European exhibition to date, covering over six decades of work. Featuring more than 150 pieces, it showcases her distinctive practice of transforming found imagery, from classical paintings to press photographs of political violence, into powerful works across painting, sculpture and installation. Known as ‘la maestra’ in Colombia, González’s work examines themes of power, grief, memory and colonial legacy, revealing how images shape collective understanding of conflict and remembrance.
Date: 25 February – 10 May 2026. Location: Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: from £19. Concessions available. Book now
Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse
George Stubbs, 'Scrub, a bay horse belonging to the Marquess of Rockingham', about 1762. Private Collection © Private Collection. Photo The National Gallery, London
#FLODown: Stubbs: Portrait of a Horse celebrates the pioneering work of the British painter George Stubbs, renowned for his masterful depictions of horses. Centred on his 1762 portrait, Scrub, which presents a rearing racehorse without a rider, the exhibition explores Stubbs’s groundbreaking anatomical studies undertaken in Lincolnshire during the 1750s, and the extraordinary accuracy and vitality that define his equine paintings. The display also references Whistlejacket, his other celebrated life-size horse portrait, highlighting how these works transformed the tradition of equine art in Britain.
Date: 12 March – 31 May 2026. Location: National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2N 5DN. Price: Free. Book now
