The UK art exhibitions worth seeing this summer 2026

Galleries, museums, sculpture parks and historic houses across the UK are showing exhibitions worth making time for this summer. Alongside major presentations by established artists, there are shows that bring lesser-seen perspectives and histories into focus. From Lynn Chadwick’s sculptures at Houghton Hall to contemporary Indigenous North American art at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Ana Mendieta’s work at Tate Modern, here is our pick of art exhibitions to see across the UK this summer.

Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall

Lynn Chadwick at Houghton Hall, 2 May - 4 October 2026. Courtesy of the artist's estate/Pangolin London. Photo: Steve Russell Studios.

#FLODown: Houghton Hall is presenting the largest UK showcase of the celebrated British sculptor Lynn Chadwick in more than two decades. Featuring more than 30 sculptures dating from the 1950s to the 1990s, the exhibition includes rarely seen works alongside Chadwick’s iconic angular figures and expressive forms. Curated by Pangolin London, the sculptures are displayed throughout the historic house and its surrounding grounds, offering an opportunity to experience Chadwick’s distinctive post-war sculpture while exploring the impressive setting of Houghton Hall. A trip well worth making this summer.

Click here for our interview with Polly Bielecka, gallery director at Pangolin London.

Date: 2 May – 4 October 2026. Location: Houghton Hall, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, PE31 6UE. Price: £22 online / £24 at the gate; under 18s free, students £10. Book now.

Ten.8 afterimage

Heather Agyepong, Survival '26, 2026, commissioned by The New Art Gallery Walsall and International Curators Forum. Ten.8 afterimage exhibition installation shot, The New Art Gallerv Walsall in partnership with International Curators Forum (ICF). 2026. Photo: David Rowan.

#FLODown: Ten.8 afterimage looks at the influence of the photography journal Ten.8, founded in Handsworth in 1979 during a period of major social and political change in Britain. Featuring photographs from the 1980s and 1990s alongside more recent work, the exhibition considers the role of photography in shaping ideas about visibility, power and representation. Works by artists including Ajamu X, Vanley Burke, Ingrid Pollard, Sunil Gupta, Carrie Mae Weems and Heather Agyepong touch on Black British identity, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, colonialism and state violence. Curated by Pelumi Odubanjo, the exhibition places the concerns that shaped Ten.8 alongside questions that remain relevant to photography and society today.

Date: 1 May – 13 September 2026. Location: The New Art Gallery Walsall, Gallery Square
Walsall, West Midlands, WS2 8LG. Price: Free. thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk

Catherine Goodman: In the House of Tapestries

Installation view, 'Catherine Goodman. In the House of Tapestries, Boughton House, Kettering, United Kingdom, 2026. Artworks ® Catherine Goodman. Photo Damian Griffiths. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Boughton House

#FLODown: In the House of Tapestries is Boughton House’s first contemporary art exhibition, featuring more than 11 newly created works by British artist Catherine Goodman CBE. The exhibition brings together paintings, large-scale tapestries, expressive pastel drawings and abstract works inspired by the house’s historic tapestry collection, architecture and interiors. Displayed throughout the magnificent state rooms, Goodman’s work creates a dialogue between contemporary art and the history, colour and craftsmanship of one of Britain’s finest stately homes.

Date: 1 August – 2 September 2026. Location: Boughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire, NN14 1BJ. Price: £14 per adult; included with standard Boughton House admission. Book now.

Hold to This Earth

Hold to This Earth, 2026,Courtesy of Tia Collection.  © India Hobson. Image courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

#FLODown: At Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Hold to This Earth brings together 67 works by 38 artists from more than 35 Tribal Nations, offering a major survey of contemporary Indigenous North American art from the Tia Collection. Sculpture, ceramics, fibre art, photography, painting and film highlight both longstanding cultural traditions and new perspectives on contemporary Indigenous experience. A central theme of the exhibition is the relationship between land, people and memory, with artists exploring ancestral knowledge, colonisation, displacement, land rights, sovereignty and environmental concerns including resource extraction and climate change.

Click here for our interview with the curator of Hold to This Earth, Sarah Coulson.

Date: 13 June 2026 – 18 April 2027. Location: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield, WF4 4JX. Price: Included with admission to the Park from £12; concessions available. Book now.

Hulda Guzmán: Please awake – asked Nature kindly

Hulda Guzmán, I’m for the birds, 2025, acrylic gouache on linen, 94 × 152.4 cm. Private Collection. © Hulda Guzmán. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY. Photo by Eduardo Ortega.

#FLODown: The first European institutional exhibition of Dominican artist Hulda Guzmán is now on show at Turner Contemporary in Margate. The exhibition, Please Awake – Ask Nature Kindly, brings together a decade of her work alongside new paintings. Guzmán creates vivid, dreamlike landscapes shaped by mysticism, ecology and Caribbean identity, drawing on Mexican muralism, Caribbean vernacular traditions and Western art history. Her paintings bring humans, animals and mythical beings into close relationship with nature, reflecting her life in the rainforest mountains of Samaná and inviting visitors to see nature as an active and living force.

Date: 23 May – 13 September 2026. Location: Turner Contemporary, Rendezvous, Margate, Kent, CT9 1HG. Price: Free. Book now.

Michaela Yearwood-Dan: The Practice of Liberation

Image credit: Michaela Yearwood-Dan, Passio (2026) © Michaela Yearwood-Dan Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Marianne Boesky Gallery Photographer: Deniz Guzel. 

#FLODown: Michaela Yearwood-Dan’s The Practice of Liberation at the Whitworth in Manchester explores identity, memory, religion, colonialism and the pursuit of liberation through painting, ceramics and sound. Featuring 14 new paintings and six ceramic vessels, accompanied by a bespoke musical score by composer Alex Gruz, the exhibition draws on the visual language and symbolism of the Catholic Church to examine the complex relationship between institutional religion and colonial histories. Through her own memory and experience, Yearwood-Dan considers liberation as an ongoing process of personal and collective transformation.

Date: 17 April – 18 October 2026. Location: The Whitworth, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER. Price: Free. whitworth.manchester.ac.uk

LR Vandy: Rise

Installation view Rise LR Vandy, Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Image credit India Hibson

#FLODown: Rise by LR Vandy is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, featuring a series of large-scale rope sculptures made partly on site. The exhibition explores Britain’s textile and industrial history, examining the relationship between labour, materials and patterns. A large rope maypole draws on the traditional maypole as a place for gathering and shared movement.

Date: 14 March – 13 September 2026. Location: The Weston Gallery, The Weston, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, WF4 4LG. Price: Included with admission to the Park from £12; concessions available. ysp.org.uk.

The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design

The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design at Compton Verney, installation view, 2026. Courtesy of Compton Verney. Photography by Jamie Woodley

#FLODown: The Pattern of Life is the first major exhibition dedicated to artist and designer Enid Marx (1902–1998), examining her contribution to modern British design and her influence on everyday life. Best known for designing fabrics for London Underground seats, Marx also worked across textiles, prints, illustrations and wood engravings. The exhibition brings together her work with that of artists and designers including Paul Nash, Dorothy Larcher, Phyllis Barron and Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, focusing on modernism, women’s creative networks, queer identity and Britain’s imperial past. It also draws on the Marx–Lambert Collection of English Popular Art, which Marx created with her life partner, Margaret Lambert.

Date: 18 July 2026 – 3 January 2027. Location: Compton Verney Art Gallery and Park, Warwickshire, CV35 9HZ. Price: £17.94 when booked in advance, or £19.54 on the day. Book now.

Joy Like Time

Marina Abramovic, Blue and Red Period, Install view 3 at Saatchi Yates, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Saatchi Yates

#FLODown: Joy Like Time is an exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre featuring Marina Abramović, Kalliopi Lemos and Gillian Wearing. It considers how memory, ritual, renewal and repetition shape our experience of time, and how these artists use their practices to reflect on the meaning of life. The exhibition looks at everyday experiences of time, from routines and commutes to lifespans, harvests and histories, while asking what gives life meaning.

Date: 20 June – 15 November 2026. Location: Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ. Price: Pay If and What You Can. Book now.

Catherine Opie: To Be Seen

Pig Pen, 1993 © Catherine Opie, courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, London, and Seoul; Thomas Dane Gallery

#FLODown: To Be Seen, an exhibition by Catherine Opie, which was shown at the National Portrait Gallery in London earlier this year, is now on show at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. If you missed it in London, this is a chance to see the exhibition in Scotland, with nearly 80 portraits drawn from 30 years of Opie’s career. The exhibition considers identity, intimacy, family, politics and power, and asks who gets to be seen.

Date: 8 August 2026 - 1 November 2026. Location: Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD. Price: from £14. Book now.

Ana Mendieta

Ana Mendieta Imágen de Yágul, Mexico 1973 © The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC. Licensed by DACS

#FLODown: Tate Modern revisits the work of Ana Mendieta in an exhibition bringing together films, sculptures, photographs, and early paintings from across her career. The presentation explores the Silueta Series, in which Mendieta used natural materials such as earth, fire, and water to imprint the human form onto the landscape. It also includes newly restored films and rarely shown works, offering a fuller understanding of her practice and its engagement with themes of displacement, identity, and belonging. Mendieta’s career was tragically cut short in 1985 when she died at the age of 36 after falling from the window of her New York apartment. Her death, and the controversy surrounding the circumstances, has continued to shape discussions of her life, work, and legacy.

Date: 9 July 2026 - 10 January 2027. Location:  Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Price: £18. Concessions available.  £5 for Tate Collective (16–25). Book now

Click here to discover more exhibitions to see in London this summer.

Nicola Turner: Time’s Scythe

Installation view, Time’s Scythe, Nicola Turner. Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Image credit Mark Reeves.   

#FLODown: Time’s Scythe by Nicola Turner is a site-responsive installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park Chapel. Using materials including wool and horsehair, Turner creates flowing sculptural forms that move through the 18th-century Chapel, from its bell tower and windows into the nave, allowing visitors to walk among the work. The installation reflects on the passage of time, decay and memory, connecting rural and industrial histories with the relationship between human and non-human life.

Date: 28 March - 27 September 2026. Location: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield, WF4 4LGL. Price: Included with admission to the Park from £12; concessions available. Book now.