Art exhibitions opening in London in November 2025
After a bustling October in London, marked by the excitement of Frieze Week and a host of outstanding art exhibitions, November offers even more reasons to explore the city’s galleries. This month sees the opening of several remarkable duo exhibitions, from a showcase celebrating two of Britain’s most celebrated landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, at Tate Britain, to a show examining the long-standing friendship and artistic dialogue between British artists Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects. Here is our guide to art exhibitions opening in London in November 2025.
You can also see the exhibitions that opened in London in October here and check out our top picks from Frieze Week.
Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals
John Constable, The White Horse, 1819. © The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joseph Coscia Jr.
#FLODown: Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals brings together over 170 works to explore the intertwined careers, contrasts, and legacies of Britain’s most celebrated landscape painters, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Marking the 250th anniversaries of their births, the exhibition reveals how their rivalry and differing visions, with Turner’s luminous, experimental depictions of light and nature and Constable’s emotionally charged portrayals of the English countryside, transformed the course of landscape art. Featuring rare loans such as Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1834–1835) and Constable’s The White Horse (1819), it shows how their innovations shaped landscape painting and inspired generations that followed.
Date: 27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026. Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. Price: from £24. Concessions available. Book now
Wright of Derby: From the Shadows
William Pether, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, 1768, Mezzotint, 00 Derby Museum and Art Gallery (1954-219/9) © Derby Museums
#FLODown: The first UK exhibition dedicated to Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797) will open at the National Gallery, focusing on his celebrated ‘candlelight’ series. The exhibition brings together masterpieces including Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight (1765), A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery in Which a Lamp is Put in Place of the Sun (c. 1766), An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), and An Academy by Lamplight (1769) from the Yale Center for British Art. For the first time in 35 years, these works will be displayed together in the UK. The exhibition showcases Wright’s dramatic use of light and shadow, linking him to Renaissance traditions while exploring Enlightenment ideas about observation, education, and the sublime. Through these candlelit scenes, Wright emerges as an artist not only fascinated by light but also engaging with deeper themes of morality, melancholy, and discovery.
Date: 7 November 2025 – 10 May 2026. Location: Sunley Room, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN. Price: from £12. Concessions available. Book now.
Wes Anderson: The Archives
Wes Anderson. Copyright Searchlight Pictures. Image credit Charlie Gray.
#FLODown: The first major retrospective devoted to Wes Anderson’s work will open at the Design Museum, offerings an unprecedented look inside the filmmaker’s meticulously crafted cinematic worlds, featuring more than 600 objects drawn from his personal archives. Among the highlights are the monumental three-metre-wide model of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Oscar-winning costumes including Gwyneth Paltrow’s FENDI fur coat from The Royal Tenenbaums, original props, sketches, storyboards, and Anderson’s own handwritten notebooks. Visitors will also encounter the puppets and miniature sets from Fantastic Mr Fox and Isle of Dogs, as well as a full screening of his 1993 short Bottle Rocket. Co-curated by Lucia Savi and Johanna Agerman Ross in collaboration with la Cinémathèque française and Anderson himself, the exhibition expands on its Paris debut with more than 100 new items and a special focus on the collaborative craftsmanship behind his distinctive visual style.
Date: 21 November 2025 – 26 July 2026. Location: Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG. Price: Adults from £19.69 | Concessions £14.77 | Children (6–15) £9.84 | Under-6s free.Book now
Anna Ancher: Painting Light
Anna Ancher, A Field Sermon, 1903. Courtesy of Skagens Museum.
W#FLODown: Painting Light at Dulwich Picture Gallery is the first major UK exhibition devoted to Anna Ancher (1859–1935), one of Denmark’s most important and innovative artists. Bringing together over 40 paintings and newly discovered studies from her home, the exhibition traces her remarkable career and pioneering exploration of light and colour. A leading figure in the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’ movement and the only Skagen Painter born in the remote fishing village of Skagen, Ancher captured everyday life with intimacy and authenticity, portraying locals and interiors suffused with natural light. Her work, influenced by Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, reveals a profound fascination with atmosphere and spirituality, from Sunlight in the Blue Room (1891) to A Field Sermon (1903). The exhibition also highlights Ancher’s success in overcoming gender barriers to achieve international acclaim and includes works by her female contemporaries, lent by Sandi Toksvig, to celebrate Danish women artists of the era.
Date: 4 November 2025 – 8 March 2026. Location: Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, Dulwich, London, SE21 7AD. Price: from £18. Concessions available. Book now
Edwin Austin Abbey: By the Dawn’s Early Light
Edwin Austin Abbey. Figure study for "The Spirit of Vulcan, Genius of the Workers in Iron and Steel" lunette in the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol at Harrisburg, about 1902–08. Oil on canvas, 76.2 × 101.6 cm. Yale University Art Gallery, Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Collection. Image courtesy the Yale University Art Gallery
#FLODown: The National Gallery will present the first UK exhibition in over a century dedicated to the Philadelphia-born artist Edwin Austin Abbey (1852–1911). Focusing on his magnificent 12-foot, half-scale design for The Hours (1909–1911), created for the ceiling of the Pennsylvania State Capitol’s House of Representatives, the exhibition explores Abbey’s final and most ambitious project, produced between 1902 and 1911. Featuring preparatory studies for The Apotheosis of Pennsylvania (1908–1911) and other allegorical works, it highlights Abbey’s exceptional ability to combine European Symbolism with American Renaissance ideals. Once celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, and a friend to figures such as John Singer Sargent and Henry James, Abbey is reintroduced to modern audiences through works on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, the largest repository of his art. The display captures Abbey’s grand vision of history, humanism, and the spirit of civic art.
Date: 20 November 2025 – 15 February 2026. Location: Room 1, The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN. Price: Free. nationalgallery.org.uk
The Long Now
Conrad Shawcross, Golden Lotus (Inverted). Installation view 2019
#FLODown: The Long Now at Saatchi Gallery celebrates four decades of contemporary art, bringing together iconic and emerging artists across multiple floors and exhibition areas. Featuring new commissions, painting, sculpture, and installations, the exhibition includes Richard Wilson’s 20:50 (1987), a mirrored environment created with recycled engine oil that reflects on environmental fragility. Themes of experimentation, human form, technology, and climate change run throughout, with works by Jenny Saville, Alice Anderson, Olafur Eliasson, Gavin Turk, and many others. Curated by Philippa Adams, the show presents historic and new works, presenting ambitious ideas while encouraging long-term thinking and reflection on the present and future.
Date: 5 November 2025 – 1 March 2026, Location: Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, London SW3 4RY. Price: from £10. Concessions available. Family (2 adults + 2 children) £34, Children under 6 free; advance booking recommended. Book now
Aziza Kadyri: Play Nice
Don't Miss the Cue, Aziza Kadyri and Qizlar Collective. Image credit Ivan Erofeev
#FLODown: Multidisciplinary artist Aziza Kadyri presents Play Nice, a newly commissioned immersive and interactive installation at Somerset House. Developed as part of the Creative Technologies Fellowship in collaboration with the UAL Creative Computing Institute, the work continues Kadyri’s ongoing worldbuilding series, exploring a trickster figure, her alter ego, and inviting viewers into a fragmented childhood memory where reality and dream converge. Using scenography, tactile interventions, sound, and open-ended storytelling, the installation creates a dynamic interaction between performer and audience, memory and invention. Kadyri, a resident at Somerset House Studios, integrates responsive textiles and interactive elements to explore speculative narratives and feminist technology, while also challenging dominant cultural stories and highlighting voices and traditions that have been historically overlooked or suppressed.
Date: 21 November 2025 - 15 March 2026. Location: G31 New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA. Price: Free. somersethouse.org.uk
Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
Image credit: Maggi Hambling, Photograph: Axel Hesslenberg; Sarah Lucas, Photograph: Katie Morrison
#FLODown: Maggi Hambling & Sarah Lucas: A Shared Brutal Wit is a two-gallery exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, celebrating the long-standing friendship and artistic dialogue between British artists Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas. Their work, marked by irreverent humour, life-affirming vulgarity, and explorations of love, death, and the everyday, reflects how they have inspired and provoked each other over decades. Hambling is renowned for her intimate portraits and large-scale works on war, climate, and nature, while Lucas is celebrated for her sculpture, photography, and installations using readymade objects to explore the body and the everyday. The exhibition highlights their ongoing creative vitality and mutual influence, presenting a conversation between two of Britain’s most distinctive contemporary artists.
Date: 20 November 2025 – January 2026. Location: 8 & 38 Bury Street, London SW1Y. Price: Free. Sadie Coles HQ
