London Art Fair returns for its 37th edition with an increased presence of international galleries and 2025 museum partner Sainsbury Centre. London Art Fair 2025 highlights a selection of the best galleries from the UK and beyond, offering a diverse range of modern and contemporary art alongside curated displays and an inspiring programme of talks and panel discussions. The Fair’s Prints & Editions section returns after its launch in 2024 and Becca Pelly-Fry curates the Platform section this year.
More than 130 galleries from around the world are exhibiting at London Art Fair, including 18 international galleries from the Czech Republic, Ireland, France, Iran, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, and more. New exhibitors such as Henry Miller Fine Art, Annka Kultys Gallery, The Tagli, Middlemarch Fine Art, Oriel Fine Art, Narrative Gallery, and Oxford Ceramics join returning names including Osborne Samuel Gallery, Elizabeth Xi Bauer, The Redfern Gallery, Christopher Kingzett and Galerie Olivier Waltman. The Fair features works by some of the world’s most renowned artists across various media, including sculpture, prints, paintings, photography, textiles, and ceramics, by artists including Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Bridget Riley, and Barbara Hepworth.
Culturalee highlights are London Art Fair 2025 Museum partner Sainsbury Centre, the Platform and Encounters sections, Caroline Fisher Projects, The Art Station and Columbia Road Gallery.
Sainsbury Centre
London Art Fair has partnered with the Sainsbury Centre for its annual Museum Partnership. For over 40 years, Sir Robert and Lady Lisa Sainsbury collected works of art which ranged across time and place. They sought work from major European artists, as well as art and antiquities from different periods and cultures around the world. The Sainsbury Centre was first conceived after the couple generously gave their art collection to the University of East Anglia in 1973.
As the world’s first museum to recognize artworks as living entities, the Sainsbury Centre invites visitors to engage with art in a unique way. At London Art Fair, Sainsbury Centre presents the critically acclaimed Living Art experience, encouraging visitors to step inside an exhibition case and become an artwork themselves. This is an example of how the Sainsbury Centre animates visitors to encounter the works not as inanimate objects, but as they would another person, prompting a reconsideration of their relationship with art. Observed by iconic pieces from the Sainsbury collection, created by artists including Francis Bacon, Elisabeth Frink, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and Yinka Shonibare, this inversion of the traditional viewer-artwork relationship seeks to reveal the profound connection that can emerge between individuals and art, offering a path to self-discovery.
Platform
Becca Pelly-Fry is the curator of Platform, London Art Fair’s 2024 curated section. Pelly-Fry chose to exhibit artists examining the relationship between humans and the natural world through the theme Today for you, tomorrow for me. Seventeen artists are featured whose artistic practice focuses on themes including interconnectivity, the natural world within technological settings and patterns between nature and the cosmos. Culturalee highlights include Abigail Norris’s ‘Scrying’ series presented by Julian Page, Anne Souter’s presentation of Anne Berg, an artist who was part of the ecofeminist movement in the 1970s, and Soho Revue’s exhibition of British artist Tuesday Riddell, who is interested in the interconnectivity with nature and uses a lacquering technique called japanning, which is inspired by traditional East Asian lacquers that are made through the sap of trees.
Other highlights are Metamorphika Studio’s presentation of a trio of artists exploring human relationships with the more-than-human. Natalia Janula’s “monsters” or hybrid creatures challenge our human imposition of order on the natural world; Paola Estrella creates imposing scenes where human-animal hybrids inhabit grand interiors, gradually being overtaken by abundant plant-life and Keiron Coffey envisions a future where objects are no longer designed purely for human use and consumption, but rather in collaboration with plants and animals for future innovations. Meanwhile, 99 Projects shows works by Poppy Lennox, whose work with wood, paint, and thread explores structures within the cosmos and nature’s intricate systems and patterns, making visible the interconnectivity of life.
Encounters
London Art Fair established Encounters in 2005 to support emerging and international galleries. Encounters provides a unique platform for galleries to test the market before transitioning to the main Fair—an achievement reached by Saul Hay Fine Art and Wizard Gallery this year. Participation in the section is subsidised by London Art Fair, reinforcing its commitment to fostering new talent, showcasing unexpected meetings, and championing international collaborations. This year’s Encounters returns with dynamic projects from the UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and Iran, making it the most internationally diverse mix of galleries in the contemporary curated section of the Fair in recent years.
New additions include Tehran-based Sohrab Gallery and Prague-based The Chemistry Gallery, alongside Galeri/Miz from Istanbul, presenting an all-Turkish stand. Seoul-based Mookji Gallery exhibit artworks that encourage viewers to slow down, while Tokyo-based Gallery KITAI showcase a solo booth of Mikako Nakagami’s works that combine elements of ink painting and calligraphy. Other notable solo presentations include Daniel Preece at Kittoe Contemporary.
Caroline Fisher Projects
Caroline Fisher Projects presents three artists whose work gives a sense of place: Anna Brass, Connor Coulston and Beatrice Galletley. The places suggested in their work range from Oldham to Venice, from Essex to the artist’s subconscious, and the work shown connects places and objects through narrative.
Connor Coulston’s practice articulates the relationship between self-deprecating humour as a means of enquiry, the mutability of clay, and the wild imaginary. His work emerges from a fascination with the kitsch ceramic ornaments one might find in thrift stores, museums, or that might adorn a grandparent’s fireplace, connecting these objects to the contemporary struggles that he has personally experienced. SHIT MEALS MUM MADE (BEANS ON TOAST) is part of a series of vessels and bowls that explore the dreadful meals Coulston’s mother made during his childhood. Coulston’s sculptures, Deep Rooted Hate are part of a series of vessels that explore the experience of growing up in Oldham while struggling with internalised homophobia.
Anna Brass’s process of research is painterly. She continually absorbs and interprets images: illuminated manuscripts, Byzantine mosaics, cartoons, film posters and early playing cards. Hermit is a ‘flat image costume’ made for the film Haukebodde Hacoud Hacwod Aukud, recently acquired by Arts Council Collection. Brass makes the costumes for her films using reclaimed yarn, fabric offcuts and charity shop blankets. The image for Hermit comes from a mid-15th century pack of tarot cards known as the Visconti-Sforza Deck.
The Art Station
Art Station is a dynamic, ambitious, inclusive arts organisation, pioneering creative excellence, developing and supporting high quality and innovative contemporary art practice in rural East Suffolk; increasing discourse and acting as a catalyst for opportunities and collaborations. At London Art Fair Art Station are presenting a group show with the theme “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden” featuring sculpture, ceramics, paintings and installations by Abigail Lane, Rebecca Ries, Julie Cockburn, Andrew Omocling, Jane K Morter, Graham Crowley, Clare Palmier, Sian O’Keeffe, Jevan Watkins Jones and Alexander Costello. Culturalee’s highlights are Andrew Omocling’s sculpture ‘Lomee, Big Goat’ (2024) and Abigail Lane’s ‘ZigZag Country Life’ (2024).
Colombia Road Gallery
Colombia Road Gallery are exhibiting works by Sophi Bayntun, Emily Kirby, Hannah Ludnow, Abi Birkinshaw, Kate Boxer and Philip Maltman.
Culturalee’s favourites include Abi Birkinshaw’s ‘Woman, crying over spilled milk’, Kate Boxer’s eye-catching prints of humans and animals, and Emily Kirby’s evocative paintings.
Kirby’s semi-abstracted figures are often placed within scenes of nature. An exploration of colour and form has underpinned her practice. Having moved to and lived in different countries, Kirby’s works to exhibit a connectiveness and sensitive appreciation for places she knows well, and frequently returns to in her work. Born 1981, into a family of artists in Zambia, Kirby moved to and grew up in Sussex from an early age.She has been increasingly interested in painting women within landscapes. Using memories of moments in time that have shaped her experience. There is often a nostaligic quality to the work as she revisits atmospheres with unstated narratives.
London Art Fair is at the Business Design Centre in London until Sunday 26th January.
