From museum blockbusters to intimate gallery shows, London’s winter exhibition programme is rich with global perspectives, artistic experimentation and cultural history. Whether you’re drawn to modernist revolutions, Titans of art from Picasso and Pistoletto to Hockney and Hambling, contemporary feminist voices or immersive dialogues between art and perception, this curated selection highlights six exhibitions not to miss this season.
Here are Six Culturalee Picks of the best exhibitions to see in London this winter.
David Hockney: Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris at Annely Juda Fine Art
David Hockney’s Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris inaugurates Annely Juda Fine Art new Hanover Square space with a major presentation of fresh work by one of Britain’s most influential living artists. The exhibition also marks the first full UK presentation of The Moon Room, a luminous series of iPad works created in Normandy.
Hockney’s fourteenth exhibition with the gallery follows his acclaimed Fondation Louis Vuitton show in Paris and features paintings completed in his London studio over the past six months. These works reaffirm his lifelong commitment to painting and his restless experimentation with how we see the world.
Central to the exhibition is Hockney’s evolving exploration of “reverse perspective.” Rejecting the constraints of linear perspective, he constructs interiors that unfold across multiple vanishing points, echoing the fluid, mobile nature of human vision. The result is not a distortion of reality, but an expansion of it—images that feel lived in, experiential and alive.
The Moon Room complements these canvases with 15 iPad paintings of moonlit night skies. Created outdoors over the changing seasons, the works glow with immediacy and joy, capturing fleeting light with a speed made possible by digital technology. Subtle echoes of Van Gogh surface, but the confident line and colour are unmistakably Hockney’s.
Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern
Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern is a landmark exhibition celebrating the artists who reshaped modern art in Nigeria before and after independence in 1960. Set against a backdrop of cultural and political transformation, the show charts a period of extraordinary creativity and intellectual exchange.
Spanning cities including Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu—as well as London, Munich and Paris—the exhibition foregrounds the networks and collectives that drove artistic innovation, such as the Zaria Art Society and the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club. Artists fused Nigerian and African traditions with European modernism to create vibrant, multilayered works that challenged colonial narratives.
Featuring paintings, sculpture, textiles and poetry by over 50 artists—including Uzo Egonu, El Anatsui, Ladi Kwali and Ben Enwonwu MBE—the exhibition offers a richly textured account of modernism as a global, interconnected movement.
Hawaiʻi: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans at the British Museum
Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans is a dazzling celebration of the artistry and history of Hawaiʻi.The exhibition brings together remarkable objects – from feathered cloaks worn by chiefs and finely carved deities, to powerful shark-toothed weapons and bold contemporary works by Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) artists.
In 1824, the young King Liholiho and Queen Kamāmalu travelled across vast oceans on a journey that would mark a turning point in the history of their kingdom, Hawaiʻi. The exhibition commemorates over 200 years since this ill-fated royal visit and sheds light on Hawaiʻi’s history and culture through an exploration of the complex and enduring relationship between the Hawaiian and British nations.
Building on years of collaboration with Native Hawaiian artists, practitioners and scholars, the show centres on indigenous knowledge, shining new light on exceptional objects and extraordinary stories. Shaped together with Hawaiian knowledge-bearers, the exhibition showcases seldom-seen international loans alongside the remarkable collections at the British Museum – one of the largest in the world outside of Hawaiʻi.
Sarah Lucas & Maggi Hambling: OO LA LA at Sadie Coles HQ & Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert
OO LA LA is a rare and lively dialogue between two of Britain’s most formidable artists. Presented by Frankie Rossi Art and Sadie Coles HQ, the exhibition brings together painting and sculpture by Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas across two neighbouring spaces on Bury Street.
Friends since meeting on their shared birthday in 2000 at Soho’s Colony Room Club, Hambling and Lucas have maintained a close creative bond for over three decades. Living near one another in rural Suffolk, they have repeatedly returned to each other as subjects, collaborators and confidantes.
The exhibition highlights both contrasts and continuities in their practices: Lucas’s irreverent sculptural assemblages sit alongside Hambling’s expressive, emotionally charged paintings. Together, the works assert the power of immediacy, authenticity and the transformation of everyday materials into art that feels urgently present.
OO LA LA is at Sadie Coles HQ & Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Picasso / Pistoletto at Nahmad Projects
Nahmad Projects stages a compelling encounter between Pablo Picasso and Michelangelo Pistoletto, pairing Cubist masterpieces with new works from Pistoletto’s iconic Mirror Paintings series. Shown together for the first time, the exhibition explores how both artists radically redefined perspective and perception.
Picasso’s invention of Cubism dismantled single-point perspective, fragmenting form to present multiple viewpoints at once. His paintings collapsed illusionistic depth, pressing objects toward the viewer and transforming pictorial space into something tactile and immediate.
Pistoletto extends this revolution into a fourth dimension. His reflective stainless-steel surfaces merge silkscreened figures with the live presence of viewers, turning each encounter into a constantly evolving composition. Time, space and participation converge, making the viewer a co-author of the work.
Rather than positioning the artists in opposition, Picasso / Pistoletto reveals a lineage of visual thought—one that transforms perspective from a fixed system into a shared, living experience.
Nahmad Projects, 2 Cork Street, London W1S 3SB
FORM – Primal Rhythm at CMJZ Arts
CMJZ Arts opens 2026 with FORM – Primal Rhythm, an all-women exhibition curated by co-founder Christina Zahra at Cramer St Gallery in Marylebone. The exhibition explores form as a visceral, instinctive language, foregrounding rhythm, materiality and embodied expression.
Bringing together diverse practices under a shared conceptual pulse, FORM – Primal Rhythm celebrates the power of abstraction and the physical act of making, positioning women artists at the centre of contemporary discourse.
The exhibition brings together some brilliant female artists including Lauren Baker, Nettie Wakefield, Gaby Jonna, Tori Pounds, Grace Gershinson, Paola Estrella and Lydia Smith. Together, their works explore the female form, intuition and humanity’s primal connection to nature at a time when digital saturation and individualism increasingly shape everyday life.
First presented in 2024 at Principal Tower in collaboration with Concord London, FORM was conceived as a response to the contemporary moment, one that re-centred softness not simply as a visual language, but as a quiet strength. Where the first iteration examined curvature, allure and gentle femininity, Primal Rhythmmoves deeper, listening for something older and less visible. It is an exhibition attuned to instinct, origin and the unseen energetic exchanges that bind people to one another and to the earth itself.
Cramer St Gallery, Marylebone, London
