Art shows to leave the house for in June 2025

Direct from London’s Barbican, this major retrospective of Noah Davis offers a powerful overview of the late artist’s extraordinary body of work. With over 50 paintings spanning eight years, the exhibition captures his singular ability to fuse realism and abstraction, intimacy and social critique. Davis depicted everyday Black life with depth and dreamlike grace, often drawing from personal archives and vernacular imagery. Though his career was cut short, his impact remains significant, not only as a painter but as the visionary behind the now-closed Underground Museum in Los Angeles.

Noah Davis runs from 8 June – 31 August 2025 at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA

Anna Boghiguian turns to the sea as both symbol of and witness to colonial trade, environmental crisis and political tension. Using her signature blend of cut-outs, sound, sculpture, and painting, she creates an immersive world where history, myth and urgency collide. This sprawling work reflects on how oceans connect labour, migration, and memory, drawing links between the past and present. Boghiguian’s practice is poetic yet pointed, offering viewers a layered meditation on the sea’s role in shaping global power and resistance.

The Sunken Boat runs from 14 June – 26 October 2025 at Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK

This new documentary follows celebrated photographer Misan Harriman as he reflects on image-making, protest, and social change. With rare access to his process and personal reflections, the film examines how photography can bear witness, amplify voices and influence public discourse. Directed by Andy Mundy-Castle, this portrait of a contemporary image-maker explores the ethical and emotional stakes of visual activism in a world increasingly shaped by media.

Shoot The People screens on 6 June 2025 at Rich Mix, London, UK

A celebration of three artists who redefined what sculpture could be in 1960s New York. Working with unconventional materials like latex, foam, and string, Bourgeois, Hesse and Adams created abstract forms that were visceral, humorous, and deeply personal. The show explores how their work anticipated feminist ideas through the body and materiality. 

Abstract Erotic opens summer 2025 at The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK

Korean artist Mire Lee presents a haunting new installation where soft machinery meets emotional weight. Her kinetic sculptures – oozing, pulsing, stretching – merge the mechanical with the bodily in eerie, immersive environments. Drawing from literature, psychology and horror, Lee’s work evokes emotional states through the physicality of materials like silicone, steel and oil. Titled after Julia Kristeva’s reflections on melancholy, the exhibition captures a liminal space between living organism and machine, confronting the viewer with both vulnerability and unease. Expect a deeply affective experience.

Black Sun runs from 29 June – 17 September 2025 at the New Museum, New York, USA

Massoud Hayoun transforms familial memory into an act of cultural resistance. Drawing on his Egyptian-Tunisian roots, Hayoun paints vibrant blue portraits of loved ones and icons from Arab heritage, honouring histories of displacement, joy, and survival. These intimate yet mythic canvases reclaim visibility in the face of systemic erasure, celebrating the intergenerational strength of those who endure.

Stateless runs from 6 – 27 June 2025 at Larkin Durey, London, UK

A celebration of three artists who redefined what sculpture could be in 1960s New York. Working with unconventional materials like latex, foam, and string, Bourgeois, Hesse, and Adams created abstract forms that were visceral, humorous, and deeply personal. The show explores how their work anticipated feminist ideas through the body and materiality. 

Abstract Erotic opens summer 2025 at The Courtauld Gallery, London, UK

Korean artist Mire Lee presents a haunting new installation where soft machinery meets emotional weight. Her kinetic sculptures – oozing, pulsing, stretching – merge the mechanical with the bodily in eerie, immersive environments. Drawing from literature, psychology, and horror, Lee’s work evokes emotional states through the physicality of materials like silicone, steel, and oil. Titled after Julia Kristeva’s reflections on melancholy, the exhibition captures a liminal space between living organism and machine, confronting the viewer with both vulnerability and unease. Expect a deeply affective experience.

Black Sun runs from 29 June – 17 September 2025 at the New Museum, New York, USA

Peter Doyle turns to the pub as a site of memory, identity, and social connection. Reimagining Irish and British pub culture through acrylic paintings, Doyle captures both the everyday and the uncanny with mark-making and emotional immediacy. These works reflect on the pub as a vital “third place” – a communal space between home and work – underscoring its cultural importance and anchor-like importance amidst changing social landscapes.

Public House runs from 6 – 28 June 2025 at RHODES Project Room, London, UK

Recasting the 19th-century Aesthetic Movement through a contemporary lens, Lady Lilith gathers artists who explore fantasy, sensuality, and symbolism in times of uncertainty. Featuring works by Alexander Ekholm, Leonor Fini, Tristan Pigott, Anna Sampson, Katie Surridge, and Atalanta Xanthe, the exhibition spans media from painting to video. It examines how the pursuit of beauty – once framed as apolitical – remains deeply entangled with questions of power, gender, and identity today.

Lady Lilith runs from 13 June – 13 July 2025 at Alice Black, London, UK

Shyama Golden brings together painting, folklore, and artificial intelligence in a dreamlike journey through imagined past lives. The show is structured in acts, with each sequence revealing a richly rendered world shaped by culture, class, migration, and myth. A video installation animates her paintings through AI, creating a surreal interplay between tradition and technology. Golden draws on personal and ancestral memories to ask questions about agency, destiny, and inheritance. While her lush, symbolic canvases brim with recurring motifs – fruit, masks, and spirits – that blur the lines between the mystical and the everyday.

Too Bad, So Sad, Maybe Next Birth runs from 23 May – 1 July 2025 at PM/AM, London, UK

Artist and writer Georgina Johnson creates a dreamlike, reverent space where Black British life, memory, and materiality converge. Blending family archives, discarded objects, and historical fragments, Johnson’s textured prints and collages pulse with slow, deliberate time – marks, scratches and layered materials resisting capitalist speed and colonial erasure. Her fluid, boundary-defying forms offer a multigenerational, spiritual framework for how we relate to history and the future. Rooted in care, refusal, and liberation, Johnson’s practice honours the sacred in what we inherit, transform and choose to remember.

Our Spirits have Strong Hands and Long Memories runs at Cöödie, Peckham High St, SE15 5ED from 1 – 29 June 2025, London, UK

This immersive exhibition explores states of ecstasy and transformation. Borrowing its title from a foundational alchemical text, the show navigates the blurred line between the visible and invisible, the real and the mystical. Leckey draws from personal encounters – bridges, bus shelters, dancefloors, streetlamps – transforming everyday scenes into portals of heightened perception. Echoing medieval animism, he probes how technology re-enchants the objects around us, repositioning the banal as a gateway to the sublime.

As Above So Below runs from 2 April – 20 July 2025 at Lafayette Applications, Paris, France

Pussy Riot founder Nadya Tolokonnikova presents a raw, immersive installation interrogating systems of surveillance, state violence, and psychological control. Set within a confined cell, the durational performance fuses noise, lullabies, and protest into a visceral theatre of defiance. The cell becomes both prison and refuge – an emblem of resistance forged in the crucible of captivity. Evoking the architecture of a panopticon, Tolokonnikova stages a confrontation with power that is as cathartic as it is haunting.

POLICE STATEopens at WAREHOUSE at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA from 5 – 14 June 2025, Los Angeles, USA