Art exhibitions opening in London in January 2026
As the new year begins, London’s galleries and museums open 2026 with renewed energy and ambition. January brings the return of established platforms such as New Contemporaries, showcasing the best of emerging artists working in the UK, alongside the much-anticipated return of Condo London. Taking place across 23 venues and featuring 50 galleries, Condo sees London galleries hosting international counterparts, creating a city-wide network of collaborative exhibitions. The month also includes major presentations such as Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, offering an intimate and powerful photographic chronicle of relationships, identity and community. Alongside these large-scale initiatives are significant firsts, including debut solo exhibitions by artists such as Julia Phillips, as well as other major institutional and commercial shows that set the tone for the year ahead. Here is our guide to the art exhibitions to see in London in January 2026.
Julia Phillips: Inside, Before They Speak
Julia Phillips, Mediator (detail), 2020, Collection of The Art Institute of Chicago. © Julia Phillips, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
#FLODown: Inside, Before They Speak is the first UK institutional solo exhibition by German-American artist Julia Phillips, presented as a new commission for The Curve at the Barbican. Bringing together newly created sculptures and drawings, the exhibition explores the human body, conception and emotional connection through surreal, materially charged forms. Working primarily with cast ceramics combined with industrial metal elements, Phillips transforms bodily impressions and biological processes into sculptural assemblages that feel both anatomical and machine-like. Responding to The Curve’s distinctive architecture, the works unfold gradually along the gallery’s sweeping length, creating a dynamic dialogue between smooth ceramic surfaces and the Barbican’s Brutalist concrete. The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on intimacy, vulnerability and the complex intersections between the body, technology and lived experience.
Date: 30 January – 19 April 2026. Location: The Curve, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: Free. barbican.org.uk
Condo London 2026
Condo London returns from 17 January – 14 February 2026.
#FLODown: Condo London returns in January 2026 as a city-wide, collaborative exhibition programme that rethinks how contemporary art is shown and shared. Neither a traditional art fair nor a festival, Condo operates as a month-long network of exhibitions in which London galleries host international peers, sharing space, audiences and ideas. Running across 50 galleries in 23 venues throughout the city, from Soho and the West End to South and East London, the initiative foregrounds collaboration, dialogue and proximity over spectacle. In a global art landscape shaped by rising costs and increasing homogenisation, Condo London 2026 offers an alternative model rooted in exchange, density of voices and the productive friction that emerges when distinct artistic positions temporarily coexist.
Click here for our guide to 6 art exhibitions to see during Condo London 2026.
Date: 17 January – 14 February 2026. Location: multiple galleries across London. condocomplex.org
New Contemporaries 2026
River Yuhao Cao, The Glass Essays, 2024, still from moving image, 16 mins. 40 sec. 90s
#FLODown: The New Contemporaries exhibition returns for its 2026 edition at the South London Gallery, featuring 26 emerging and early-career UK artists selected by Pio Abad, Louise Giovanelli, and Grace Ndiritu. Showcasing painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and moving image, the works address themes from climate change and gentrification to memory and identity. Founded in 1949, New Contemporaries supports artists through residencies, bursaries, mentoring, and professional development, providing a platform for ambitious work across the UK. Following the London showcase, the exhibition will move to MIMA, Middlesbrough.
Date: 30 January – 12 April 2026 (South London Gallery), 8 May – 16 August 2026 (MIMA, Middlesbrough). Location: South London Gallery, Main Gallery & Fire Station Galleries, 65–67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH. Price: Free. southlondongallery.org
Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans
Mahiole hulu manu (feathered helmet) © The Trustees of the British Museum.
#FLODown: Hawaiʻi: a Kingdom Crossing Oceans is a landmark exhibition at the British Museum that explores the rich history, artistry and global journeys of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and its enduring relationship with the United Kingdom. Marking 200 years since King Liholiho (Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu visited London on a diplomatic mission, the exhibition tells a powerful story of movement, sovereignty and cultural exchange shaped from a Hawaiian perspective. Co-stewarded with Native Hawaiian knowledge-bearers, the exhibition brings together around 150 exceptional historical and contemporary works, many shown in the UK for the first time, including royal regalia, sacred objects and contemporary responses. By foregrounding Hawaiian voices, language and lived experience, the exhibition reconsiders shared histories across oceans and highlights how these connections continue to resonate today.
Date: 15 January – 25 May 2026. Location: The Joseph Hotung Exhibition Gallery, British Museum, Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DG. Price: from £14; under-16s free when accompanied by a paying adult. britishmuseum.org
Nat Faulkner: Strong water
Nat Faulkner, 'Darkroom', 2024, Hand printed Chromogenic on plywood, Optium acrylic. Image courtesy of Brunette Coleman, London. Photography by Jack Elliot Edwards.
#FLODown: Strong water opening at Camden Art Centre marks the first major UK institutional exhibition by London-based artist Nat Faulkner, recipient of the 2025 Emerging Artist Award. The show explores Faulkner’s studio through new copper frottage reliefs made from rubbings of walls and floors and electroplated with recycled silver, which subtly change over time with light and moisture. A large-scale, multi-panel photographic installation uses analogue silver gelatin processes to investigate alchemical transformation, chance, and the materiality of image-making.
Date: 16 January - 22 March 2026. Location: Camden Art Centre, Arkwright Road, NW3 6DG. Price: Free. camdenartcentre.org
Amy Poliero: What Does an Atom Look Like?
New Art Projects to present What Does an Atom Look Like?, the first solo exhibition by Amy Poliero. Image courtesy of New Art Projects and the artist.
#FLODown: What Does an Atom Look Like? is the first solo exhibition by American multimedia artist Amy Poliero, presenting a body of work that translates ideas from cosmology, chemistry and quantum physics into refined visual forms. Spanning delicately constructed mixed-media works on canvas and large welded metal sculptures, the exhibition explores uncertainty, scale and human perception through speculative geometry and pared-down material precision. Poliero’s practice invites viewers into a timeless, scaleless realm where organic abstraction meets scientific exactitude, reflecting on how the limits of atomic particles shape our understanding of reality and the future. In an age increasingly defined by automation and artificial intelligence, the exhibition offers a poetic, visual response to what remains distinctly human: our conscious experience of time and meaning.
Date: 9 January – 28 February 2026. Location: New Art Projects, Ground Floor, 357 City Road,London, EC1V 1LR. Price: Free. newartprojects.com
Mughal Banaras: Forgotten Histories in a Troubled Present
Local Hindu women making offerings and prayers at the Chunar Dargah, a Sufi shrine near Varanasi. Image credit Jateen Lad
#FLODown: SOAS Gallery will present Mughal Banaras: Forgotten Histories in a Troubled Present, a photographic and archival exhibition uncovering the city’s overlooked Mughal heritage. Moving beyond Banaras’ reputation as a Hindu pilgrimage site, the show highlights hidden neighbourhoods, imperial mosques, gardens, cemeteries, and devotional sites associated with Mughal descendants, particularly Crown Prince Jahandar Shah (1749–1788) and his family. Drawing on the work of historian Malavika Kasturi and architect-photographer Jateen Lad, the exhibition captures everyday life and fragile monuments in a politically charged context, reflecting on the enduring significance and vulnerability of these sites.
Date: 15 January – 21 March 2026. Location: SOAS Gallery, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG. Price: Free. soas.ac.uk
Jane Hayes Greenwood: Weird Weather
Weird-Weather, 2025. Jane Hayes Greenwood, Oil on linen, 110 x 140 cm
#FLODown: Weird Weather is a solo exhibition by Jane Hayes Greenwood, jointly presented by Ione & Mann and Castor, bringing together a new body of paintings and drawings made during a period of profound personal transition. Rooted in landscapes of the artist’s West Yorkshire childhood, the works merge external weather systems with inner emotional states, transforming skies, clouds and hills into charged, anthropomorphic forms. Swelling clouds, straining valleys and corporeal rainbows become carriers of memory, grief, wonder and loss, exploring how emotional and meteorological weather shape human experience. Set against a broader context of climate instability, the exhibition situates Hayes Greenwood’s practice within a lineage of artists drawn to the sublime power of the elements, presenting weather as a living, transformative force that mirrors the complexity of inner life.
Date: 23 January – 7 March 2026. Location: Ione & Mann (in collaboration with Castor), 1st Floor, 6 Conduit Street, London W1S 2XE. ioneandmann.com
Umi Ishihara: Nocturnal Melody
Umi Ishihara, Nocturnal Melody, production image
#FLODown: Nocturnal Melody, a new moving-image work by Umi Ishihara, will open at Gasworks. Ishihara’s practice blends documentary and fiction, with a focus on community, alienation, and marginalised experiences. For this exhibition, she follows the lives of women working in Tokyo’s nightlife, documenting dancers Eri and Catalina as they navigate labour, performance, and everyday life. The experimental film interweaves interviews, reportage, dream-like sequences, and personal memories to explore how social, political, and generational forces shape these experiences.
Date: 22 January – 22 March 2026. Location: Gasworks, 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 5RH. Price: Free. gasworks.org.uk
Joseph Beuys: Bathtub for a Heroine
Thaddaeus Ropac Joseph Beuys Badewanne für eine Heldin [Bathtub for a Heroine], 1950/1951/1984
#FLODown: Thaddaeus Ropac London will present Bathtub for a Heroine, exploring the evolution of Joseph Beuys’ monumental Bathtub (1961–87) and related sculptures and drawings. The exhibition highlights Beuys’ concept of social sculpture, where art generates warmth, connection, and social transformation. Key works include Mammoth Tooth, Framed (1961) and Lead Woman (1949), alongside representations of the heroine figure, embodying agency and transformative energy. Together, the works demonstrate Beuys’ vision of art as an evolving, participatory force across material, social, and temporal spaces.
Date: 13 January – 21 March 2026. Location: Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, London W1S 4NJ. Price: Free. ropac.net
