Art shows to leave the house for in July 2025

The inaugural Sky High Farm Biennial brings together more than 50 artists from around the world, including Anne Imhof, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Tschabalala Self, to explore themes connected to Sky High Farm’s work at the intersection of climate, agriculture, food access and education. 

This site-specific exhibition in the Hudson River Valley demonstrates what’s possible when art, agriculture and activism align.

Sky High Farm Biennialopens on June 28, 2025 and runs until June 29 - Fall 2025

You’ve probably encountered Yoshitomo Nara’s charismatic, mischievous figures, even if you weren’t aware of the artist’s name. Notable for their heavy fringes and furious, intense expressions, the kawaii appearance of this distinctive cast of characters is offset by their knife-wielding, cigarette-smoking or arsonist tendencies.

The beloved Japanese artist’s major show at the Hayward Gallery brings together over 150 works from his oeuvre, making it one of the most comprehensive shows of his work to appear in London. 

And When the Seeds Fell is a profoundly personal work by British Indian artist Vivek Vadoliya, examining themes of identity, masculinity and cultural heritage through portraits of his own family. Crafted across the UK and India, the project highlights the dynamic between tradition and individual self-discovery within the British Gujarati diaspora. Using photography and installation, Vadoliya creates an intimate environment rooted in memory, family ties and the continuous journey of self-formation.

And When The Seeds Fell runs from 7 July – 8 August 2025 at 10 14, London, UK. The PV will be held on 4 July, 630 – 9pm

Dick Jewell’s first major retrospective brings together over 70 works spanning five decades – collage, photography, film, digital montage – that chart his wry, incisive take on image culture. From salvaged photobooth snaps to internet-era Photoshop mashups, Jewell’s work skewers the absurdities of media, celebrity, and visual obsession. Drawing on everything from news footage to mail-order family photos, he reshapes the everyday into social critique: funny, relentless, and deeply observant.

Dick Jewell: Retrospective runs from 20 June – 1 August 2025 at Grace Mews, London, UK

Spanning two decades, Communautés surveys Mohamed Bourouissa’s powerful, socially engaged practice across photography, video, installation, and drawing. From suburban Paris in Périphérique to the urban cowboys of Horse Day, Bourouissa stages and reframes realities often misrepresented in mainstream media. His newest work, HANDS, uses plexiglass and steel to explore control, gesture, and constraint. Each project highlights structures of inequality while affirming collective identity, resistance, and care. Politically urgent and visually arresting, the exhibition asks how images shape our understanding of community and power.

Communautés runs from 23 May – 28 September 2025 at Fondazione MAST, Bologna, Italy

Harley Weir’s The Garden brings together new and archival works that blend intimate imagery with a subversive, melancholic edge. Across two floors, Weir explores the garden as both utopia and personal metaphor – tracing themes of growth, memory, love and womanhood. Downstairs reflects on care, time, and the body; upstairs recalls adolescence through 28 new works made from handmade paper embedded with personal mementoes. Merging past and present, ideal and real, Weir offers a tender, charged portrait of becoming.

The Garden runs from 20 June – 2 August 2025 at Hannah Barry Gallery, London, UK

Bringing together the chaotic glamour of Isaac Mizrahi’s fashion studio and the kinetic pulse of NYC’s 90s club scene, Nick Waplington’s new exhibition captures a moment of creative excess and cultural intensity. Introduced by Richard Avedon, Waplington spent three years photographing Mizrahi’s downtown atelier, where supermodels like Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington prepped for runway shows – before turning his lens by night to clubs like The Sound Factory and Save The Robots. Together, these images form a charged portrait of a city alive with freedom, artistry, and sweat-soaked possibility.

We Dance in Mysteries runs from 27 June – 23 September 2025 at Hamiltons Gallery, London, UK

This summer, the Barbican unveils Feel the Sound, a groundbreaking immersive exhibition that invites audiences to experience sound beyond hearing. Spanning the entire Centre – from the Curve and Lakeside to a transformed underground car park – the exhibition features 11 interactive installations, using cutting-edge technology and newly commissioned works. Highlights include Miyu Hosoi’s global soundscape Observatory Station, the AI-powered Forever Frequencies and Joyride, a sonic tribute to Y2K car culture.

Feel the Sound runs from 22 May – 31 August 2025 at the Barbican Centre, London

In her first UK solo exhibition, Chilean photographer Paz Errázuriz presents over 170 images spanning five decades – intimate portraits of those living at the margins of society. Working closely with people over months or years, Errázuriz has documented psychiatric patients, trans communities, sex workers, boxers, circus performers, indigenous peoples and protestors. Many of these series began under the shadow of Pinochet’s dictatorship, in defiance of state-imposed restrictions. Dare to Look is a powerful invitation to witness what is often unseen – and an attempt to recognise photography as a space of resistance, care and human connection.

Dare to Look runs from 19 July – 5 October 2025 at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK

Installed in Forma’s Peveril Gardens, Slow Crush marks Jala Wahid’s first public sculpture – an evocative, site-specific tribute to love, loss, and reclamation. The work reimagines the Hasanlu Lovers, two ancient skeletons unearthed in modern-day Iran, locked in an embrace at the moment of death. Cast in fleshy-pink fibreglass and embedded within Bermondsey’s wild green space, the sculpture explores diaspora, queer resilience, and the colonial violence of archaeology. Tender and politically charged, Slow Crush invites reflection on how stories are preserved, erased or reclaimed.

Slow Crush runs from 5 July 2025 – July 2026 at Peveril Gardens, FormaHQ, London, UK

In Panjereh (“window” or “passageway”), Iranian-American artist Sheida Soleimani presents over 40 meticulously staged photographs that fuse her parents’ flight from Iran with visceral ecological metaphors. Building on her Ghostwriter series, the exhibition features emotionally charged scenes using props, archival images, live birds, and macro portraits of injured migratory birds – echoing her work as a wildlife rehabilitator – alongside a site‑specific wall drawing. Through surreal tableaux, Soleimani explores migration, care, geopolitical memory, and vulnerability.

Panjereh runs from 19 June – 28 September 2025 at the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York, USA

In her first solo exhibition in her hometown of Wrexham, Anya Paintsil presents Allanol Always – an ambitious new body of work that confronts how Black artists are expected to depict identity, heritage, and the body. Combining rug-making, appliqué, hand embroidery, and afro hairstyling techniques, Paintsil’s bold textiles and new sculptural forms draw on Welsh mythology, West African craft traditions, and personal memory. With humour and grit, she disrupts Eurocentric art histories and stereotypes. Co-curated with Lewis Dalton Gilbert, the show marks her return to North Wales and offers a rich, critical meditation on outsiderhood and belonging.

Allanol Always runs from 11 July – 25 October 2025 at Tŷ Pawb, Wrexham, UK

Known for cinematic classics like Paris, Texas and Perfect Days, filmmaker and artist Wim Wenders brings his lyrical sensibility to landscapes in China and Germany, capturing fleeting encounters and the silence between moments in New Photographs. In vast plains, city streets, and shadowy forests, light becomes a narrator – pulling meaning from the everyday. As a prelude to his 80th birthday retrospective at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, this show affirms Wenders’ mastery of stillness as a form of storytelling.

New Photographs runs from 26 April 2025 at Galerie Bastian, Berlin, Germany

This two-part exhibition traces Derek Jarman’s most significant painting series, with Part I focusing on works made between 1984 and 1987. Created alongside his films and writing, these richly layered black paintings blur personal memory, political commentary, and literary reference. Featuring recurring motifs and fragments from Shakespeare, Middle English texts, and Jarman’s own life, the works echo the experimental textures of films like The Angelic Conversation. By collapsing timelines and weaving together theatre, history and activism, Jarman conjures a poetic and urgent vision of 1980s Britain.

The Black Paintings – A Chronology, Part I (1984–1987)  runs from 6 June – 11 July 2025 at Amanda Wilkinson, London

Salman Toor’s Wish Maker is a two-part exhibition across the gallery’s Chelsea and Tribeca spaces. Bringing together new paintings and, for the first time, a body of works on paper, the show expands Toor’s richly intimate world of queer South Asian figures caught between public life and private reverie. Rendered in his signature palette of moody greens and jewel tones, his scenes fuse art historical references with tender glimpses of modern-day friendship, longing, and fantasy. 

Wish Maker runs until 25 July 2025 at Luhring Augustine, New York, USA

Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson are in striking conversation with the Norfolk coastline in Sea State. Co-curated by Simon Oldfield and Gemma Rolls-Bentley, the exhibition explores our deep and shifting relationship with the sea – both personal and planetary. Hambling’s emotive paintings, including the Wall of Water series and a tribute to her late partner, meet Robertson’s queer, bodily sculptures and works on paper, made in close proximity to the elements. Together, their works channel the sea as metaphor, mirror, and force of transformation.

Sea State runs 11 June – 7 December 2025 at Wolterton Hall, Norfolk, UK