London’s must-see art exhibitions opening in May 2026
With May marking the start of summer, a strong season of exhibitions unfolds across the city, bringing together major retrospectives and contemporary shows across art, design, history and culture. Delcy Morelos’ Origo at the Barbican transforms the Sculpture Court with earth, clay and scent, while the Design Museum stages a major survey of NIGO’s influence on global streetwear and design. Francisco de Zurbarán receives a landmark presentation at the National Gallery, and Tate Britain turns to James McNeill Whistler for a major retrospective of his work. Contemporary exhibitions at South London Gallery, the ICA and Wellcome Collection explore themes of spirituality, class, inequality and environmental connection, while Kew Gardens and the Natural History Museum extend the season outdoors and into deep time with sculpture and prehistoric marine life. Here is our guide to art exhibitions opening in May in London that should be on your radar.
Delcy Morelos: Origo
Delcy Morelos, El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023. © Delcy Morelos. Photo: Don Stahl, courtesy Dia Art Foundation
#FLODown: A new large-scale installation will take over the Sculpture Court at the Barbican Centre during its summer season as Colombian artist Delcy Morelos presents Origo. Morelos transforms the Brutalist setting into a sensory environment made from earth, clay, hay, seeds, and aromatic spices such as cinnamon and cloves, inviting visitors to move through soil-lined tunnels and enclosed chambers that encourage a direct physical and contemplative relationship with the natural world. Rooted in her Andean cosmology, the work reflects her view of the earth as a living presence and draws on her experiences of environmental and social fragility, using organic materials and shifting scents to explore ideas of body, land, and memory. The installation creates a dialogue between ancestral ecological knowledge and modern architectural form.
Date: 15 May – 31 July 2026.Location: Barbican Sculpture Court, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: Free. barbican.org.uk
NIGO: From Japan with Love
NIGO photographed at the Design Museum. Photo credit Elliot James Kennedy
#FLODown: A major retrospective celebrating Japanese designer and creative director NIGO will open at the Design Museum. NIGO: From Japan with Love will trace his 30-year career as a pioneering figure who bridged streetwear and luxury fashion while working across music, design, and wider contemporary culture. The exhibition brings together over 700 objects from his personal archive and creative output, including vintage clothing, ceramics he has hand-crafted, a recreation of his teenage bedroom, and large-scale installations such as a life-size glass tea house. It follows his journey from Tokyo’s Harajuku street scene and the founding of A Bathing Ape in the 1990s to his current role at KENZO, highlighting how his work draws on influences including hip-hop, vintage Americana, traditional Japanese craft, and 1980s Tokyo subculture, revealing the breadth of his global cultural impact.
Date: 1 May–4 October 2026. Location: Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High Street, London W8 6AG. Price: from £19. Concessions available. Book now
Francisco de Zurbarán
Francisco de Zurbarán, 'Agnus Dei', 1635–40 Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado
#FLODown: The National Gallery will present the first UK exhibition devoted to Spanish Baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán in the Sainsbury Wing. Celebrated for his paintings from 17th-century Seville, Zurbarán combines vivid naturalism with profound spiritual intensity, portraying everything from small still lifes to monumental altarpieces. Known for his exceptional depiction of fabrics, he captures both opulent clothing and the austere robes of monks, while everyday objects, a ceramic vessel, a wicker basket, a rose, bring his subjects closer to life. The exhibition spans his entire career, including large religious commissions, intimate domestic works, and rare still lifes by his son, Juan de Zurbarán, bringing together masterpieces from collections across the world.
Date: 2 May – 23 August 2026. Location: National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing, Trafalgar Square, London, WC2N 5DN. Price: £20 (off-peak, Sun–Thu), £22 (Fri–Sat), members free. Book now
Paulo Nimer Pjota: Encantados
Paulo Nimer Pjota, Duplo, 2025. © Paulo Nimer Pjota. Courtesy Maureen Paley, London and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo. Photo by Gui Gomes
#FLODown: South London Gallery will open the first UK public gallery exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nimer Pjota in May 2026. Encantados features a new series of paintings alongside a large mural painted directly onto the gallery walls, creating a fantastical world populated by mythical creatures, dragons, monkeys, and imaginary beasts. Recurring motifs such as the sun, stars, moon, hybrid plants, and musical instruments bring together elements of art history, folklore, and popular culture, reflecting Pjota’s imaginative practice. Drawing on his graffiti and Brazilian hip-hop background, he challenges cultural hierarchies, merging past, present, and imaginary worlds. The exhibition’s title, meaning “enchanted” in Portuguese, captures both delight and bewitchment, leaving viewers to interpret the magical and sometimes ambiguous scenes.
Date: 1 May – 23 August 2026. Location: South London Gallery, Main Building, 65–67 Peckham Road, London, SE5 8UH. Price: Free. southlondongallery.org
Winston Churchill: A Life in Painting
Sir Winston Churchill, Cap d’Ail, Alpes-Maritimes C489, 1952. Royal Academy of Arts, London. © Churchill Heritage Ltd. Photo: ©Royal Academy of Arts, London; photographer: John Hammond.
#FLODown: Winston Churchill: The Painter will explore the artistic life of Sir Winston Churchill, best known as Britain’s Prime Minister during the Second World War, revealing how painting became a personal refuge from political pressures and a lasting source of enjoyment. The display brings together more than 50 of his works, many from private collections rarely seen by the public, including wartime scenes, bright Mediterranean landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and views of his home at Chartwell. While a few pieces were exhibited or given as gifts during his lifetime, most were created purely for the pleasure of painting, showing a more reflective and intimate side of Churchill, and the exhibition highlights how creativity shaped his sense of peace, resilience, and personal expression beyond his public role.
Date: 23 May – 29 November 2026. Location: The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN. Price: from £18. Concessions available. Book now
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler Wapping 1860-1864 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982
#FLODown: Tate Britain will open a major retrospective of James McNeill Whistler, celebrating the artist’s innovative and influential career. The exhibition brings together his most famous works alongside rarely seen paintings, portraits, drawings, prints and designs, tracing his artistic journey from his early years in St Petersburg to his later self-portraits. It highlights Whistler’s experimental approach and his role in reshaping 19th- and early 20th-century art through modern, atmospheric depictions of life and a bold challenge to Victorian conventions.
Date: 21 May – 27 September 2026. Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. Price: £24. Concessions available. Book now
Ranti Bam: Sacred Groves
Ranti Bam, In Hearthlands, 2022. Video Still from Performance in Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, Osogbo, Nigeria. Courtesy Ranti Bam and James Cohan, New York
#FLODown: Running alongside Pjota’s exhibition, South London Gallery will present British Nigerian artist Ranti Bam’s first solo institutional exhibition, Sacred Groves, in the Fire Station Galleries. Working with sculpture, performance, film, and photography, Bam explores our relationship with the environment through touch, spirituality, and healing. The show includes two series of sculptures, the Ifas and Abstract Vessels, and debuts a new film produced at Ọṣun-Ọṣogbo, a sacred Yoruba site, examining the river’s path and human impact on the landscape. Sacred Groves invites viewers to experience the spiritual and tactile connections between humans and nature, highlighting both ritual and environmental awareness.
Date: 1 May – 23 August 2026. Location: South London Gallery, Fire Station Galleries, 82 Peckham Road, London, SE15 5LQ. Price: Free. southlondongallery.org
Tenderness and Rage: Stories of HIV and AIDS
John lying on a hospital bed, chatting. Source: Wellcome Collection. © Gideon Mendel.
#FLODown: Tenderness and Rage examines the history and ongoing impact of HIV and AIDS, tracing stories of protest, care, and resilience from the height of the UK epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s to global experiences today. Through photography, film, and archival material, it highlights the connection between everyday acts of compassion and the activism that fought for dignity, rights, and access to treatment. It includes two photographic projects: The Ward by Gideon Mendel, documenting patients in AIDS wards at Middlesex Hospital in London, and Through Positive Eyes, which shares the perspectives of HIV activists worldwide. The exhibition gives voice to often overlooked experiences, particularly focusing on women living with HIV, and presents a powerful exploration of humanity, resistance, and care.
Date: 29 May 2026 – 30 May 2027. Location: Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. Price: Free. Book now
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Henry Moore, 'Large Two Forms' 1969 (LH 556). Photo: Jonty Wilde.
#FLODown: An outdoor sculpture exhibition opening at Kew Gardens presents the largest display ever staged of Henry Moore’s work, set across the garden landscape. It features more than 100 pieces, including 30 monumental sculptures installed throughout the grounds, alongside drawings, models, and smaller works shown in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. The exhibition explores how nature shaped Moore’s artistic vision, drawing on the forms of bones, stones, and natural landscapes to reveal his creative process and lifelong connection to the natural world. It forms part of a wider celebration of his work, highlighting both his monumental sculpture and his enduring influence on contemporary interpretations of art in nature.
Date: 9 May 2026 – 31 January 2027. Location: Kew Gardens, London, England. Price: from £25. Concessions available. Book now
PATRICK HERON: Early works, 1950 - 1954
Patrick Heron, Christmas Eve: 1951, 1951, oil on canvas, 71 x 120 inches. Private collection
#FLODown: Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert will open a solo exhibition of Patrick Heron’s early works from 1950 to 1954, highlighting a pivotal period when he worked between figuration and abstraction. Featuring paintings from his estate, including several never before exhibited, alongside loans from museums and private collections, the show will explore Heron’s engagement with the School of Paris masters, Braque, Matisse, and Bonnard, and his emerging visual language. Key works such as Christmas Eve: 1951 and Black Fish on Blue Table will demonstrate his experimentation with gestural lines, interlocking planes, and how he created depth and structure through colour and compositional arrangement, reflecting his pursuit of a “purely sensuous apprehension of colour, space and shape.”
Date: 7 May – 10 July 2026. Location: 38 Bury Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6BB. Price: Free. hh-h.com
Genuine Fake Premium Economy: Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison & Jasmine Gregory
Still from: Jenna Bliss, True Entertainment, 2023 – 24, HD video, 31:59 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and FELIX GAUDLITZ.
#FLODown: A group exhibition opening at the ICA brings together the work of Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison, and Jasmine Gregory, three US-born artists whose practices examine class, inheritance, and perceived value through representational media. Emerging into adulthood in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, their work reflects on how this period reshaped ideas of fairness, progress, and success within capitalism. Across moving image, photography, painting, and assemblage, they address rising wealth inequality, art as an asset class, and contemporary commodity culture, often through strategies of staging, appropriation, and satire that blur reality and representation. The exhibition presents a shared generational perspective on living and working within a destabilised global economy.
Date: 1 May – 5 July 2026. Location: Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH. Price: from £6. Concessions available. Book now
Nengi Omuku: We Were Like Those Who Dreamed
Nengi Omuku, A quiet nation, 2026, oil on sanyan, 117 x 77 cm, 46 x 30 ¼ in
#FLODown: Nengi Omuku’s We Were Like Those Who Dreamed, opening at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, presents new paintings that transform scenes of urban life in Lagos into lush, imagined gardens, using nature as a symbol of refuge, equality, and resistance to social and environmental inequality. Drawing on images of everyday hardship, such as fuel queues and urban congestion, Omuku reworks these moments into vibrant, dreamlike landscapes filled with dense foliage, expansive skies, and expressive colour. The works are painted on sanyan, a traditional Yoruba handwoven textile, linking contemporary painting with West African heritage and engaging with themes of colonial legacy, cultural memory, and renewal through collaboration with local artisans who help revive the material’s production.
Date: 1–30 May 2026. Location: Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 6 Heddon Street, London W1B 4BT. Price: Free. houldsworth.co.uk
Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep
Image courtesy of Natural History Museum
#FLODown: An interactive exhibition opening in London takes visitors back to Earth’s ancient oceans, exploring the incredible marine reptiles that dominated the Jurassic seas. It brings together fossils, scientific research, and hands-on experiences to introduce creatures such as the powerful pliosaur, the fast and dolphin-like ichthyosaur, and the enormous mosasaur often described as the “T. rex of the sea.” The display includes sensory elements alongside rare fossil material and interactive scientific content, revealing how these prehistoric predators evolved, survived, and competed in ancient marine ecosystems. It combines education and discovery to recreate the lost world of the Jurassic seas in a vivid and engaging way.
Date: 22 May 2026 – 3 January 2027. Location: Natural History Museum, Waterhouse Gallery, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD. Price: from £15. Concessions available. Book now
T. Venkanna: New Paintings
T. Venkanna, On His Back, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery Maskara, Mumbai.
#FLODown: A major exhibition of new paintings by T. Venkanna presents his first institutional solo show, bringing together a series of works created in egg tempera and natural pigments on board. Inspired by his recent travels in Europe, the paintings draw on Early Renaissance devotional panels while marking a shift in scale and form, with some works spanning multiple panels. His practice examines sexual imagination and its relationship to social norms, freedom, and power, using symbolic landscapes filled with human, animal, and mythological figures. Recurring motifs such as Adam and Eve appear throughout, connecting private desire with wider social and political tensions, while combining influences from Western and South Asian art traditions.
Date: 17 May – 23 August 2026. Location: Studio Voltaire, 1A Nelsons Row, London SW4 7JR. Price: Free. studiovoltaire.org
Click here to discover more exhibitions openings in London in this summer.
