UK Art Exhibitions

Spring 2026

This season’s UK exhibitions ask a question most of us feel but rarely put into words: how do the things we make and the images we encounter shape the way we remember, see ourselves, and understand the world? The works gathered here don’t offer easy answers. Instead, they use painting, sculpture, film, and performance to open that question up, making it visible and felt.

Painters such as Cecily Brown and Katarina Grosse push the medium beyond its traditional limits, dissolving boundaries between surface, gesture, and space. This expansion is echoed in the sculptural and installation-based practices of Veronica Ryan and Delcy Morelos, where material becomes inseparable from histories of displacement, labour, and memory carried in the body and in the things we make. In parallel, Hurvin Anderson constructs spaces shaped by absence and migration, where architecture holds instability rather than resolves it.

Moving image and narrative further complicate this terrain. Zineb Sedira stages filmic environments that foreground the fractures of history and representation, while Tracey Emin approaches personal experience as something materially and emotionally inscribed. Across these works, form does not simply depict experience but actively reshapes how it is remembered and transmitted.

At the same time, a cross-disciplinary dialogue extends these concerns beyond the conventional boundaries of art. Es Devlin constructs immersive environments that operate between sculpture, performance, and architecture, while the dialogue between Francis Picabia and Elsa Schiaparelli reveals the persistence of surrealist logic across painting and the dressed body. Here, distortion, symbolism, and transformation migrate between media, unsettling distinctions between image, object, and performance.

What connects all of it is a refusal to let things stay fixed. These artists resist settled meanings and tidy conclusions. They insist that how something is made, and what it’s made of, is itself a kind of language, one capable of carrying what words alone cannot hold.